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May 6, 2012 – 2 Timothy 3:10-17

May19
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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Being a guy, I’m not very good at following instructions.  Or at least, I feel free to disagree with them.  I’ve torn the tags off of my mattresses.  I’ve recorded ballgames without the express written consent of Major League Baseball.  I’ve gone swimming less than half an hour after a meal.  I’ve looked directly into the sun.

I will admit, however, that on occasion there have been instructions to which I should have paid more attention.  Like that sticker on the second to top rung of the ladder that says “not a step.”  That always seemed dumb to me – of course it’s a step.  It’s on a ladder.  What, did they skimp on material for the last two steps?  I can handle it.

Which I said about 30 seconds before I nearly broke all the ribs on the left side of my body.  Turns out that the last couple of steps on the ladder will hold your weight just fine; the trouble is that your center of gravity winds up out in space somewhere, and the slightest tilt brings the whole business crashing down, you included.

It’s important to have a solid footing, especially when you may have to lean way beyond what’s comfortable.  That, as it happens, is pretty much the point of this reading from the third chapter of Second Timothy.  Paul is writing here to Timothy, a young man who had been one of his closest companions as he traveled the world preaching the Gospel, but who was now out on his own, as pastor of a church in what today is Turkey.  They were dangerous times; Paul himself was sitting in a dungeon in Rome, and he wanted Timothy to be prepared for what he might have to face, from everyday temptation to false teachers and government persecution.

At the beginning of chapter three, Paul warns Timothy that “in the last days there will come times of difficulty.  Men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless…” The list just keeps going.  And Paul isn’t talking about the distant future here.  When he talks about “the last days,” he’s using the phrase the same way Peter did at Pentecost, when he announced that “in the last days” God would pour out his Spirit on his people.  In other words, Biblically speaking, these are the last days, everything from the resurrection of Jesus to his return in glory.  This is what Jesus’ disciples – what we – have to deal with.  Greed.  Disobedience.  False teaching.  False prophets.  You name it.  Don’t be caught off guard, Paul says.  Be ready.

“You, however,” Paul says in verse 10, “have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings… Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”  Don’t think this is going to be easy.  Don’t think it’s going to be fair.  Because it’s not – not in worldly terms, anyway.

“[All the] while evil people and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”  Scripture, Paul’s letters included, is really forthright about this.  Very often, in human terms, the good suffer and the wicked prosper.  It’s true.  You’d like to think that the guy who just cut you off on the interstate will go home to find that his dog has run away and his kid burned the garage down.  Karma, right?  But the truth is, the world doesn’t often work that way.  And the Word of God is very honest about it.  That’s not to say that there’s no justice in the world – far from it.  Every sin ever committed, whether against God or against another person, will be paid for in one of two ways: either by the blood of Jesus shed on the cross, or by the sinner himself in hell.  But in the short run, things can look… unfair.

That’s no reason, Paul says, to get all twisted up, or worse yet, to thrown in the towel.  Followers of Jesus, he says, are expected to stand firm in the face of the world: “As for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed…”

Sometimes that’s easier said than done.  So Paul goes on in the next few verses here to lay down a solid foundation, a firm footing for faith that’s as helpful to us as it was to Timothy.

First, he says, remember the example of your teachers:  “Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed,” Paul says in verse 14, “knowing from whom you learned it…”  Now, it’s easy to read that and imagine that Paul is talking about himself.  And in all honesty, he’s not shy about reminding people of their debt to him.  But in this case, I think Paul has somebody else in mind entirely: namely, Timothy’s mother and his grandmother.

Back in chapter one, Paul talked about Timothy’s faith, “a faith,” he said, in verse five, “that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice.”  You see, Timothy was a very rare specimen in the apostolic church: he had been raised as a Christian.  Here Paul points him back to the example of these women who led him to Jesus.

That, as it happens, is a pretty solid starting place when you’re uncertain, a decent first step when you’re in need of guidance: turn to the people who taught you the Gospel in the first place.  If they’re still here, great.  Seek their counsel.  If they’ve gone on to be with the Lord, remember their example.  Personally I even get a lot of encouragement from people I’ve never actually met – from the stories of missionaries and martyrs and pastors and the like who have served Jesus faithfully.  Likewise, when I start feeling sorry for myself I’m brought back to reality by brothers and sisters in Christ who are serving in much, much more difficult circumstances than I ever will.  A little perspective goes a long way.  Make sure you have a role model, or two, or a dozen.  You’re at no loss – the twelfth chapter of Hebrews says that we’re surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, men and women who have followed Jesus in every age.  Pay attention to their example, especially to the ones who have influenced you personally.

Second, Paul commands Timothy to remember what God has already done in his life. This is huge, too.  Human beings have such short memories.  Even Christians.  We go from praising God one day to whining like a ten-year-old the next, demanding to know why he never does anything for me! “Continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it,” Paul says, “and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.” Are there going to be rough patches, where you don’t feel God’s presence at all, where the Bible seems dry as dust, where prayers feel like they’re just flung into space?  Sure.  Absolutely.  Don’t be discouraged, Paul says.  Remember what God has done.  Remember those days when the Scriptures beat with life for you.

And finally, here in verses 16 and 17, Paul lays out the supreme foundation for an unshakable faith, a faith able to withstand any challenge:  Rely, he says, on the unbreakable Word of God.

“All Scripture is breathed out by God…”  The word translated there as “breathed out,” or in some versions, as “inspired,” is theopneustos.  Literally it means “God-breathed,” but with the sense that it’s by the work of his Spirit.  What it means for our purposes, as well as for Timothy’s, is that the Bible is the work of men guided by the Holy Spirit – not in the sense that they wrote in some kind of trance, but in the sense that the Holy Spirit ensured that every word written was what he wanted, where he wanted it, so that what we have in this book is, in a very real sense, the Word of God.

Now, I have to tell you, this is not a very popular idea at the moment.  Having been fed a steady diet of nineteenth-century literary criticism, dubiously historical shows on the History Channel concerning the so-called lost books of the Bible, and so on, your average person regards the Bible as a nice book, a special book even, but not quite authoritative.  They have this vague notion in their heads that there’s stuff in there that shouldn’t be believed – though they can’t give a good reason why – and feel free to pick and choose at their convenience what to believe.

You can do that if you want.  But there are just two problems you’re going to encounter.  The first is that you’re up against two thousand years of the the witness of the universal church, not to mention the disciplines of archaeology, epigraphy (that’s the study of writing) and history, all of which basically corroborate the Biblical record.  In short, you’re going to look dumb.  The second problem is that having discarded the authority of the Bible, you’re not going to have any basis to push back when things start moving faster than you want them to.  This is the plague afflicting the mainline protestant churches, including our own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA).  Having decided that the Bible is not, in fact, the infallible Word of God, you gain a little leeway for the moment.  You can justify whatever it is that you want to do – not in God’s eyes, of course, but in the eyes of man.  But sooner or later, along comes somebody who wants to push things farther.  And you’ve got no grounds to say no.

Don’t be fooled.  Life as a disciple of Jesus isn’t easy.  He never promised it would be.  Make sure that when the wind and waves of life kick up, you’ve got a solid place to stand.  When you’re in need of some encouragement and strength, remember those who came before you, who led you to Jesus.  Remember what the Lord has done in your life.  And remain firmly rooted in his infallible Word.  Amen.

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April 29, 2012 – Romans 8:31-39

May01
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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If God is for us, who can be against us?

If ever you’re looking for a rock to stand on, for some shred of truth to cling to in troubled times, I recommend the passage we just read from Romans.  The point Paul makes is a simple but incredibly profound one:  Without the certainty of God’s favor, it doesn’t matter how well organized you are, how financially secure, how many guns you’ve got stuffed under your pillow or how influential you are.  This world is going to be a fearful and uncertain place.  On the other hand, if God really is for you, there’s no trial, no difficulty, no hardship, no enemy you’ll ever encounter that’s able to tear you away from his care.

One of the great difficulties of reading Holy Scripture as slightly jaded, 21st-century types is that we tend to yank the teeth out of promises like this one by interpreting them sentimentally.  We read the psalmist’s assertion that “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble,” and we take it to mean that God will make us feel better about life’s rough patches.  Or we read Habbakuk’s defiant declaration that “though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation,” and we interpret it as a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, power-of-positive-thinking approach to everyday difficulties.

All that proves, though, is that we haven’t actually heard the word of God.  The Bible is a deadly serious, blood-and-guts book.  The 46th psalm is about God’s deliverance from death in war.  Habakkuk’s joy in the Lord comes in the face of a devastating famine.  And the dangers that Paul lists here in the eighth chapter of Romans are just as dramatic – persecution, famine, nakedness, the sword.  The promise of Scripture isn’t so much that God makes us feel better about hardship and evil.  It’s that he has triumphed over evil and defeated death on behalf of his people.  If God is for us, Paul insists, no one and nothing can be against us, because at the cross of Jesus Christ, all things have been placed under his feet.

That is, of course, if God is for us.  Absolutely everything we just read – the promises of God’s providence, his forgiveness, and the glorious reassurance that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ – hinges on whether God is, in fact, for us.  And the fact of the matter is that not everyone can answer that question in the affirmative.  Not everyone can say, legitimately, that God is on his or her side, if only because not everyone is on God’s side.

You see, if the words of the gospel are to be believed, the majority of humanity is set against God, in open rebellion against its maker.  If only we were honest with ourselves, we’d see it plainly in our own hearts.  By nature, I don’t love God.  I hate him.  I don’t seek his glory.  I seek my own.  I don’t obey his will.  I do what’s right in my own eyes.  By nature I am an object of God’s righteous wrath, set against him in a contest that I cannot possibly win.  But God is stronger even than human nature.  While we were still enemies of God, Paul said a couple of chapters earlier in Romans, we were reconciled to him – we were brought back to him – by the death of his Son.

Those who are without Christ are without God, and a stranger to his kingdom.  That’s the simple truth of the gospel.  But those who have laid down their arms, who have repented of their sins and thrown themselves at the feet of Christ, trusting in his mercy alone, receive that and infinitely more by his hand.  The old nature that sets them against God is done away with, and they’re clothed in the righteousness of Jesus himself – Immanuel, God with us.  And if God is with us – if God is for us – who can be against us?

None of this, of course, is to say that Christians live a blissful, uneventful, trouble-free life.  Nowhere in Holy Scripture will you find that promise.  Nor, for that matter, is Paul suggesting that Christians don’t still have enemies.  Of course they do.  In the eighth chapter of Romans alone, he identifies four great enemies who conspire constantly against the children of God, and will continue to do so right up to the end.  So who are they?  If, Praise be to God, we’ve been reconciled to him, who still stands against us?

Well, for starters, other people do.  It’s hard to overestimate the human capacity for cruelty and hatred.  No hurricane, no flood, no wild beast has been as terrible an enemy to humanity as humans themselves have.  Humans, not God, invented slavery, torture and war.  The instruments of terror and tyranny spring from the mind of man.  And Christians are no more immune to their effects than anyone else.  Paul himself was beaten repeatedly, whipped, stoned, shipwrecked, robbed, attacked by mobs, and opposed by false teachers.  In the end, he was killed.  But none of those things even came close to separating him from the God he served.  They couldn’t even prevent him from proclaiming the gospel.

Lest you think this is all ancient history, keep in mind that more people have been martyred for the gospel of Jesus Christ in the last hundred years than in the nineteen preceding centuries combined.  Literally millions of Christians around the world have died rather than renounce their Savior.  At this very moment, in Nigeria, in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in Indonesia, in the Sudan, in parts of China and other nations, to follow Jesus openly is to invite at least a beating, and very possibly death.  And yet those are precisely the places where the church is exploding.  Why on earth would anyone put themselves in that kind of position?  Because they serve a Savior who warned them not to fear those who can kill the body, but to fear the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell.  Like Paul, they know that God is for them; what can a mere human being possibly do to them?

The second enemy we find here in the eighth chapter of Romans is the world.  By that, Paul doesn’t mean the world as God created it.  He means the world as we see it now: fallen, tainted with sin and suffering and death.  The fall is one of those Christian doctrines that we tend to think too hard about.  To say that we live in a fallen world isn’t so much a grand theological proposition as it is a simple observation.  Something is deeply, profoundly wrong.   We feel uncomfortable here for a reason. Things aren’t as they should be.

That sense of somehow being out of place is a universal human experience.  It lies at the heart of human religion – almost every religion on the planet teaches its followers how to make peace with the world, or – as in Buddhism – how to ignore it entirely.  Christianity does neither.  Christians simply aren’t allowed to make peace with the world, because to accept it as we find it is to accept poverty and misery and hatred and immorality and a number of other things that are utterly opposed to the will of God.  To ignore the world is to leave the remainder of humanity in misery.  Instead, Christians are called to overcome the world, with its troubles and temptations.

The third enemy, and by far the most dangerous so far, is what Paul calls the “flesh.”  By that he simply means our own nature.  We are our own worst enemies.  A chapter earlier in Romans, Paul recounted his ongoing struggle with his own desires:  “I find it to be a law,” he said, “that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the Law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”  Who, he asks, will deliver him from this body of death?  His answer is simple: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

The last enemy is also our oldest: the devil.  He’s the “ruler” mentioned in verse 38.  Whether Satan is more dangerous to us than we are to ourselves is hard to say.  His temptations depend almost entirely on our weaknesses.  He never provokes us to do something strange and unpleasant.  How effective would that be, anyway?  No, the devil tempts you to do only what you secretly desire to do anyway.  He exploits your fears and plays on your insecurities.  His goal is to tear down your confidence, to make you doubt your own salvation and to despair that God could ever save a wretch like you.  He works to convince you that you wouldn’t want to be saved, anyway.  Martin Luther said that the devil seduces us by the allurements of sin in order to plunge us into despair.  Of course it’s all a lie.  Jesus promises that none who have been given to him by his Father can be snatched out of his hand.  The gates of hell, he said, will never prevail against his church.

This life holds its share of trials, temptations, difficulties, and heartache.  Make no mistake, the children of God have their fair share of enemies.  But for those in Christ Jesus there is no condemnation.  There is no curse.  There’s no reason to be afraid of anything in all creation, whether on earth, or in heaven, or even in the bowels of hell.  There is no enemy so strong as to destroy you.  “Behold,” says the Lord, “all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who war against you shall be as nothing at all, for I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand.  It is I who says to you, ‘Fear not.  I am the one who helps you.’”

The next time life rolls you up and spits you out; the next time you’re faced with what seems to be an insurmountable problem; grab hold of that promise with all your strength, and never let go.  After all, if God is for us, who can be against us?

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April 22, 2012 – Acts 13:1-12

Apr26
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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The book of Acts opens with Jesus’ last resurrection appearance to his disciples, forty days after he was raised from the dead.  Luke (the author) tells us that they watched as he ascended into a cloud, but not before he made one final promise: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)

The remainder of Acts – 28 chapters worth – is the tale of how that promise was fulfilled, as the Gospel is carried from a single room in Jerusalem to the corners of the known world over the course of about 30 years.  The church that you encounter in these pages isn’t a static institution.  It’s an organism in constant, relentless motion, out into the world, serving the poor, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and always, always, always proclaiming the love of God toward sinners in Jesus Christ.

Which only makes sense: Jesus described his own ministry as the “Son of Man [coming] to seek and save the lost.” (Luke 19:10)  This is why he was sent by the Father, “not to condemn the world” (John 3:17), but “[to deliver] us from the wrath to come.” (1 Thessalonians 1:10)  The mission of God is to call people to repentance and new life through the blood of his Son, so that they “might not perish, but have eternal life.”  (John 3:16)  This is why Jesus lay down his life on the cross.  This is why he called his disciples together as his church, his body.  And it’s why he sent them out into the world.

All of which is to say that the church exists for the mission of carrying the gospel beyond its walls in the same way that a flame exists for burning.  It’s not optional.  It’s an absolutely inseparable, indispensible part of who we are, and why we are.  Conversely, to the extent that the church fails to be about that mission, it fails to be his church.  It winds up yet another social club, and a pretty unpopular one at that, since as yet most churches don’t have a cash bar.

That’s always a temptation, for the church to withdraw from the world and serve its own.  And unfortunately, it does happen.  Which is why this book, Acts, is so valuable.  It’s an indictment of ecclesiastical stasis, or if you prefer in English, the church’s tendency to turtle up.  It’s hard to read Acts and not want to become a missionary to Mongolia, or to preach the Gospel in the town square.  It bears witness to the heart of God for mission, to his passion for reaching his people.

What we just read from chapter 13 is the beginning of one of those missionary journeys, in this case, the first one undertaken by Paul, in conjunction with Barnabas and John Mark.  On a purely historical level it’s actually a really interesting story, but for our purposes I want to point out a few basic principles of Gospel mission here that apply to the church here and now just as much as in the first century.

The first thing I hope you notice about this story is that mission isn’t so much something the church does, as it is the work of God, at his direction and his calling.

Look at how it begins: “Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers…”  For the record, the “prophets” here weren’t necessarily the Old Testament kind, who told the future and called down fire from heaven and so forth.  The title is used in the New Testament to refer to somebody who speaks the Word of God, and it’s often paired up with “teacher” to refer to somebody who reads and then interprets and applies the Word to the people.  In other words, these men were what we would think of as preachers.

And they were a pretty diverse bunch.  There was Joseph, a Levite from the island of Cyprus, whose nickname Barnabas meant “son of encouragement.”  With him was Simeon Niger, whose last name means “dark,” or “black.”  That may refer to the color of his skin, suggesting that he was an African, like the next man on the list, Lucius of Cyrene, from what’s now Libya.  On a really interesting side note, this Simeon may be the Simon of Cyrene who carried the cross of Jesus to Golgotha, but I can’t be positive.  And then there was Saul, also called Paul, who once persecuted Christians, but was now preaching the Gospel.

The important thing to pick up here isn’t so much who these men were, as what they were doing.  They were not gathered together to formulate a strategic plan to carry the Gospel to Asia Minor.  They weren’t conducting demographic studies to determine the best places to plant churches.  They were praying together, worshipping God and fasting.  The choice to send Barnabas and Saul off to Cyprus to preach the Gospel wasn’t theirs.  They were chosen and sent by the Holy Spirit.

Which, incidentally, suggests something to us, namely that mission isn’t something separate from the church’s life of prayer and corporate worship.  It flows from worship, at the direction of the Lord.  We pray; he sends.  Our job is to keep our eyes and ears and hearts open and to listen for where he’s sending us, whether it’s next door or down the street or around the world.  And not everybody is chosen to do everything.  Maybe Simeon and Lucius were called by the Lord to keep preaching right there in Antioch.  Maybe you’re called to share the Gospel on the border of India and Burma.  We can arrange that.  Maybe you’re called to share the Gospel in the cereal aisle at Giant Eagle.  I don’t know.  But wherever we’re sent, it’s by God’s choice, and by his direction.

The second thing to point out about the mission of the church here in Acts 13 is that in addition to being directed by God, it’s empowered by God.  He doesn’t just point us and wish us luck, he works through us, by his strength, for his purposes.

Look what happened when Paul and Barnabas and John Mark got to the city of Paphos, which was the provincial capital of Cyprus.  The Roman Proconsul – think governor – a man named Sergius Paulus, sent for them.  Why?  According to verse seven, Sergius Paulus “wanted to hear the Word of God.”  Now, if that doesn’t impress you, think about what kind of reception Paul and Barnabas might reasonably have expected to receive from the governor.  They might have expected to be arrested.  That had happened quite a lot in Jerusalem and in Syria.  More likely, though, they probably expected that the governor would take about as much notice of them as the Governor of Florida would of your next trip to Sea World.  In short, none whatsoever.  But instead, the governor not only called them, but asked them to tell him about Jesus.

You know the old saying that where there’s a will, there’s a way.  I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that where God wills something, he makes a way.  When he calls us to his mission – when it’s really at his direction, and not just our own whim or ambition – he causes his work to bear fruit.  Maybe not immediately.  Sometimes not even in our own lifetime.  But it does happen.

The third basic principle regarding missions that we see here in Acts 13 is less pleasant, but as true for us as it was for Paul.  And that is, that those who are engaged in the mission of Christ will always face opposition.  Why?  Because there’s a war on.  “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood,” Paul wrote a few years later, in the sixth chapter of Ephesians, “but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12)  That may be a hard message to accept, but it’s incredibly important.  We have an enemy, the Devil, who, it says in 1 Peter 5:8 “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”   He will work against the Gospel.

In Paul’s case the opposition came through this man Bariesou, Bar-Jesus, a Jew who had set himself up as a magician and prophet-for-hire in Paphos.  This actually seems to have been a lucrative line of work for unscrupulous types.  Jews had a reputation for prophecy in the ancient world, and the historian Josephus wrote about a similar man who was hired by the Roman governor of Judea, Felix, to declare the “word of the Lord” to his friend’s wife that she should leave her husband and shack up with him.

The trouble for Bar-Jesus was that once Sergius Paulus had experienced the real thing, he’d have no need for the services of a false prophet.  So he did his best, according to verse eight, “to turn the proconsul away from the faith.”  Until, of course, Paul rebuked him – not on his own initiative, it says in verse nine, but “filled with the Holy Spirit”: “You son of the devil,” said Paul, “you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?”  At which point Bar-Jesus was struck blind, just as Paul had said he would be.

And so we have the last lesson here about Gospel mission: that although the Devil will oppose it, Christ will be victorious.  Because for all the bluster of the world, for all the pride of Satan, for all the obstacles that are thrown up in the path, there really is no contest.  Read the end of the book: Jesus wins.  Easily.  The Devil is no more capable of thwarting his will than I am of holding back the tide.

Look at verse 12: “Then the proconsul believed, when he saw what had occurred, for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord.”  You remember when Jesus said that he had other sheep in other flocks, who would hear his voice and recognize it and be brought into his flock?  Sergius Paulus was one of them.  And there are others, everywhere.  The mission of the church, as the body of Christ, by word and by deed, is to carry to them the voice of their Shepherd.  There will be opposition.  Sometimes things look pretty dismal.  But Jesus will prevail.  That’s his promise.  So be ready to go where he calls you, when he calls you, and rely on his direction and his strength.  Amen.

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April 15, 2012 – Acts 9:1-9

Apr21
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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April 8, 2012 (11am) – John 20:19-31

Apr11
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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I’ve always felt kind of bad for Thomas.  He has this reputation as a doubter that isn’t quite fair.  What nobody remembers is that Thomas missed Easter.

Thomas wasn’t in the garden that morning with Peter and John to see the empty tomb, in which the linen shroud still lay, rumpled and cast off to the side, as if Jesus had simply gotten up and walked away.  Nor was Thomas there a little later, when Mary Magdalene saw Jesus himself, alive, and was commanded to go back and tell the others.

Thomas wasn’t with the two disciples who met Jesus that afternoon on the road to Emmaus, who walked and talked with him for miles, only to recognize him when he sat down with them to eat.  And Thomas wasn’t in the upper room in Jerusalem later that evening, when Jesus suddenly appeared to his disciples, despite the fact that the doors were locked for fear of the mob, and showed them the wounds in his hands and his side.

Neither John nor any of the other gospel writers tell us where Thomas was on Easter Sunday, but John makes it clear here in verse 24 that wherever he was, he didn’t see the risen Christ for himself.  To the others, Easter was the single greatest day of their lives.  To Thomas, it was just another, capped off with some fantastically hard-to-believe stories told by his friends, who as far as he could tell were all losing their grip on reality at the same time.

All of which is to say that yes, Thomas had doubts.  But he had doubts because somehow he had missed the resurrection.  And what he was hearing was simply too much.  “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails,” Thomas warned, “and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

It took a week, but eventually, of course, Thomas was taken up on his challenge.  Once again, on the following Sunday, the disciples were together, presumably still in the room where they had eaten the Last Supper.  Once again, the doors were locked out of fear.  And once again, Jesus somehow entered anyway.  But this time, Thomas was there.  Jesus invited him to do exactly what he had said: to touch his hands, his side, to see the wounds for himself.

“My Lord and my God!” Thomas exclaimed.  To which Jesus made a really surprising reply in verse 29: “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believed.”

Now, a lot of people understand that last bit to be sort of like a consolation prize: yes, Thomas got to see and touch the risen Christ, and you probably won’t, at least in this life, but good for you for believing anyway! Alternatively, they take it as a compliment: those who believe without seeing must have a superior faith.  But I actually think what Jesus is saying here is a good bit more radical than that.  In 2nd Corinthians the apostle Paul writes that “we walk by faith, not by sight.” The incredible claim that Jesus is making here in verse 29 is that walking by faith is actually a good deal better.

I have to tell you, in purely human terms, that’s pretty hard to accept.  I think if you gave most Christians the choice between living by faith in Christ, trusting in his word, and… you know, hanging out with him, having actually been there, it wouldn’t be much of a contest.  And yet Jesus says, “blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believed.”  This isn’t a one-off blessing, either.  On the night of his arrest, when he was preparing his disciples for what was about to happen, Jesus warned them that he had to leave them, and what’s more, that it was better for them if he did.

The key to understanding why, I think, is back in verse 22, with this sort of cryptic description of Jesus “breathing” on his disciples and telling them to “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  What they got there on Easter Sunday wasn’t the fullness of the gift of the Spirit.  That would have to wait for Pentecost.  But it was a foretaste, and I think it was a foretaste for a specific purpose.  The gift of the spirit that was given by Jesus to his disciples on Easter was the gift of faith.  When Jesus pronounced those blessed who have not seen, and yet believed in his resurrection, he wasn’t complimenting them on their powers of credulity.  They’re blessed because that faith is a gift of God, a work of the Holy Spirit in the heart, to open their eyes to the grace and mercy and love of their risen Savior.

And when we grasp that, we can begin to understand why the gospel puts such a premium on faith, and why Jesus can say that those who walk by faith are blessed even more than those who had hard proof of his resurrection.

For one thing, seeing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway.  I mean, it wasn’t even decisive for Jesus’ disciples.  In verse 9 of chapter 20, John says of the two who went to the tomb and found it empty, who saw where Jesus had lain, that “as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”  The other clue is that they didn’t run off to tell the world:  John says that they “went back to their homes.”  Something had happened; but they didn’t know just yet what to make of it.

Seeing wasn’t believing for Thomas, either: he needed to stick his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side before he was willing to believe.  And I’ve mentioned this to you before, but I think it’s pretty decisive: the Bible says that 500 men and women saw Jesus after his resurrection on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.  But only 120 actually obeyed his command to go to Jerusalem and wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Think about the math here: 380 people who saw the risen Christ, right in front of their faces, who heard him teach, decided that they weren’t so sure about this whole business about a trip to Jerusalem, and said no thank you.

The second problem with seeing in order to believe that Jesus is risen, is that unlike faith, our senses are limited by time and space and the failures of memory.  How long do you think it would have taken some of those folks who saw Jesus alive after his resurrection to convince themselves that they had imagined it?  Sure, you may feel pretty confident when Jesus is sitting in front of you, but what about three years later, when you’re sitting in jail, or when your child has died, or when you’re desperately ill, and he’s someplace else?  Faith isn’t subject to those limitations, because it’s less an experience than it is a change of heart.

But there’s an even deeper reason why Jesus pronounces those blessed who have not seen, and yet believed.  And that’s because we are not saved, lives are not changed, simply by knowing that Jesus did this, or said that, or even by knowing that Jesus rose from the grave, that he lives.  We’re saved by knowing that Jesus rose, and that Jesus lives, for us.

Martin Luther, the great preacher of the doctrine of sola fide, salvation by faith alone, put it this way:  “It is not sufficient,” he said, “simply to believe that Christ rose from the dead, for this produces neither peace nor joy, neither power nor authority; but you must believe that he rose for your benefit, and was not glorified for his own sake, but that he might help you and all who believe in him, and that through his resurrection sin, death and hell are vanquished, and victory given to you.”

Would it have been incredible to have to seen the empty tomb with your own eyes?  Sure.  Would it have been amazing to be there in the upper room with the disciples, to see Jesus with your own eyes, risen from the dead, to see the wounds in his hands and feet and side, to hear him speak?  Absolutely.  But seeing with the eyes is no substitute for seeing with the heart, and hearing with the ears is no substitute for having the Word of God implanted deep within.  Blessed are those, Jesus says, who have not seen and yet believed.  Amen.

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April 8, 2012 (Sunrise) – John 20:1-10

Apr11
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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Any good mystery novel or movie thriller has an epiphany, a moment of revelation that makes sense of all the little details that went before.  You figure out that one of the supposedly good characters was behind it all the whole time, or that the treasure was hidden in plain sight, or something like that, and everything suddenly makes sense.

That’s more or less what the discovery of the empty tomb did for Jesus’ disciples.  Not all at once.  But suddenly everything started to come together.  All of that talk about tearing down the temple and raising it up again in three days.  The stuff about the sign of Jonah.  And in all honesty, all that talk about the Son of Man, and about the forgiveness of sins, and about being offered up as a sacrifice.  The empty tomb kind of brought it all together and made sense of it.

The first news of anything out of the ordinary came from Mary Magdalene.  Early on the first morning of the week, John says, after the Sabbath, she came to the tomb in the garden where Jesus had been laid.  It had been kind of a rush job – Jesus had been crucified on the so-called “day of preparation,” the day before the Sabbath, which put his friends in a bind.  They couldn’t leave him on the cross over the Sabbath.  It would be disgraceful.  But they also didn’t have time to find a place to bury him.  Fortunately Joseph of Arimathea stepped in.  He was a wealthy man, influential, a member of the high court, but also – secretly – a disciple of Jesus. He offered his own grave, freshly cut from the rock of the hillside and located in a pleasant garden, for Jesus’ resting place.  Once Jesus was placed in the tomb, an enormous stone, weighing the better part of a ton, was rolled across the entrance to keep out robbers and wild animals.

What Mary saw there must have been more disturbing than inspiring.  The stone that guarded the tomb had been “taken away,” John says.  Was it grave robbers?  The high priests’ men?  The Romans?  Mary ran back into town to tell the others.

“They have taken the Lord out of the tomb,” she told them, “and we do not know where they have laid him.”  The news set off a mad rush.  Peter and John – he refuses to use his name, simply calling himself “the other disciple” – ran off to the tomb.  John, maybe because he was younger, won the race, sticking his head inside before the others arrived.  Verse five says that he saw the linen burial shroud, empty, but didn’t have the courage to enter the tomb.  Peter, who was right behind him, did.  He examined the burial shroud.  He saw the square of cloth that had been placed over Jesus’ face folded up neatly and set to one side.  There’s nothing here to suggest that everything was laid out in the shape of Jesus’ body, as if he had somehow passed through the burial shroud.  More like clothes that have been taken off and heaped in the corner.  Something had happened.  Something extraordinary.  Peter and John didn’t realize it at first, not until Jesus appeared to them, but when he did, the empty tomb explained everything.

You see, the fact that the tomb was empty – and not empty in the sense that it had been looted, but empty in that Jesus seemed to have simply sat up and walked away – meant in the first place that he was alive. That may sound obvious to you, but I guarantee you that it wasn’t to the disciples.  When he appeared to them in a locked room later that day, they quite reasonably might have concluded that he was a ghost or a phantasm of some sort.  But Mary and Peter and John knew better.  They had seen the tomb.  It was empty.  The man standing before them was Jesus, in the flesh, risen from the dead.

Which, incidentally, proves that he really was who he said he was all along.  You’d think the disciples would have know that.  I mean, they had been with him this far, hadn’t they?  But there must have been doubts.  Especially after he was arrested.  What kind of Messiah was this?  How could the Son of God be turned over to sinful men, tortured and killed?  It had to have bothered them.  But the empty tomb… Jesus had told them all along that the Son of Man would suffer, die and rise again after three days.  I’m not sure what they made of it at the time.  Maybe they wrote it off as crazy prophet-talk.  But all of a sudden it made perfect, literal sense.  Likewise, Jesus’ remark in Matthew 12, when he says that the only sign that would be given to his faithless generation was the sign of Jonah, who was buried in the belly of a great fish three days.  That was mysterious at the time.  But with the empty tomb before them, it was pretty clear.

The fact that Jesus was alive, in turn, proved that the curse of death and hell was broken. Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t an isolated event; it was a foretaste of things to come. In the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians, the apostle Paul says that Christ has been raised from the dead, the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.  For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.  For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”  This was by no means a foregone conclusion – the simple fact is that the death rate, then as well as now, was 100 percent.  Furthermore, the Bible is very clear as to why: death, it says, is the wage of sin, the power of the curse under which human beings have labored since the fall.  But the empty tomb – the fact that Jesus is alive – means that the curse is broken, not just for him, but for all those who are in him, to use Paul’s phrase.

Because the tomb is empty, we know that Jesus is alive; because Jesus is alive, we know that the curse of sin and death is broken; and because the curse is broken, we know that the burden of sin is wiped away.

Again, this may not have been obvious to the disciples, at least not at first. Peter, clearly, suffered from a fair bit of guilt over his repeated denials of Christ on the night of his arrest.  As do a lot of us.  I have no idea what burden you carry.  I have no idea what sins you drag around behind you secretly, like a spiritual ball-and-chain.  But I can tell you this:  if you have trusted in Jesus, and I mean really, truly trusted in him, given yourself to him, thrown yourself on the mercy of the cross, you are forgiven.  The tomb is empty.  Jesus is alive.  He’s defeated sin and death.  He’s broken the curse, and taken away the record that stood against you, according to Scripture.

The fact of the empty tomb means that Jesus is alive.  The fact of Jesus’ resurrection means that the old curse of sin and death is broken.  The breaking of the curse means that the sins of Christ’s people are wiped away, for the sake of his blood.  And the fact that our sins are wiped away leads to the most incredible, glorious, amazing conclusion of all: that we, despite our sin, are reconciled to God.  That we’re able to approach the maker of the universe without fear, as his beloved sons and daughters, adopted, as it says in the first chapter of John’s gospel, through faith in the risen Christ.

You see, that’s what it all comes down to.  God’s righteousness, and our sin.  And by that I don’t mean anything particularly dramatically evil that we’ve done.  I mean the thousand ways on any given day that we fall short of the holy standard of the almighty.  Pride.  Arrogance.  Despondency.  Despair.  Lust.  Greed.  Jealousy.  You name it, we’ve done it.  And that sin separates us from God.  It brings us under his judgment.  Rightly so.  We have nothing to plead.

That is, we have nothing to plead but Christ.  And that’s the key. Because it’s by the righteousness of Christ, not our own, that we’re able to stand before God the Father.  It’s only in Christ that the chasm is bridged that separates us from our maker.  It’s only in Christ that we find forgiveness, and the relationship with God for which we were made.

And we’ll only find that relationship if, indeed, our sins are wiped away by the blood of Christ.  Our sins are only wiped away if the old curse of death and hell has somehow been lifted.  The curse has only been lifted if Jesus endured the punishment, and lives.  And Jesus only lives if, indeed, the tomb is empty.

Which is what it came down to for Peter and John and Mary. And what it comes down to for us.  Is the tomb, in fact, empty?  Is Jesus risen?  Is he alive?  I assure you that he is.  And because he’s alive, all of the other pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

Jesus is risen.  He lives.  He reigns – not as some kind of ghost, but as the risen Son of God.  For those who trust in him, the curse of sin and death is broken forever.  The stain of sin is wiped away.  And they’re restored to their maker, to their God.  Praise Jesus that he lives, and reigns, forevermore.  Amen.

 

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April 5, 2012 – John 18:28-40

Apr11
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, humbled himself, taking on our flesh and our weaknesses in order to save us from judgment, and what did we do?  We put him on trial for his life.  Twice.

The first trial here in the eighteenth chapter of John took place before the high priest – the man whose job was to represent the people before God.  The charge was blasphemy: claiming by word and deed to be… well, exactly who he was.

Even by the standards of the day, the trial before the high priest was a farce.  Jewish law written down a couple of hundred years later, but almost certainly dating to Jesus’ time, laid out the standards for a fair trial: the charges had to be read out beforehand, so that the accused had time to prepare his defense; the trial had to happen during daylight, in public; there had to be reliable witnesses to the crime; and no one could be punished before he was properly convicted.  At Jesus’ trial, every single one of those rules was broken.  Jesus was dragged before the high priest in the middle of the night.  The high priest – the judge – had declared Jesus guilty before it even began.  His men beat Jesus in the middle of the trial, while he was tied up.  And according to Matthew’s Gospel, the witnesses had been bribed.

There was no good way for Jesus to respond to this charge of blasphemy.  He couldn’t deny that he was the Son of God; and yet he couldn’t declare it without it sounding like an admission of guilt.  So instead he simply insisted that he had always taught in public, and invited the high priest to tell him where had committed a crime.

The high priest didn’t bite.  He wasn’t interested in a debate.  The temple authorities had already determined, according to verse 14, that it would be good if one man died for the people.  But no Jewish court had that authority.  In the early hours of the morning, Jesus was dragged down the street to the headquarters, an obscure Italian bureaucrat named Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea.

This second trial – the one before Pilate – was even more of a sham than the first.  The evidence against Jesus wasn’t flimsy: it was non-existent.  To Pilate’s annoyance, Jesus’ accusers wouldn’t even enter the building to testify against him. They simply stood at the door and shouted that he had been “doing evil,” which wasn’t a real crime, even for the Romans.  Desperate for something, anything, to run with, Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Now, strictly speaking, Jesus never actually claimed to be the King of the Jews.  Others had said it, but he never did, probably because it was so easily misunderstood.  Rather than answer directly, Jesus turned the question back on Pilate: “Do you say this of your own accord,” he asked, “or did others say it to you about me?”  Pilate, who had been clutching at straws, insisted in turn that Jesus must have done something to get the mob outside angry.

“My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus replied.  “If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting… For this purpose I came into the world – to bear witness to the truth.  Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”

This was turning into a religious debate, something that Pilate had no interest in.  His question – “What is truth?” – was more cynical than sincere.  He didn’t know the truth, and he didn’t really care.  He cared about his job, about that mob outside the front door, and about keeping the emperor happy.  Pilate made a couple of feeble attempts to placate the mob by offering to free Jesus as a gift for Passover, and then by beating him some more and hoping they’d be satisfied, but when the crowd started questioning Pilate’s loyalty to Caesar, it was all over.  Jesus might be innocent.  But as far as Pilate was concerned, there were bigger considerations at work.

Thus sinful men put the Son of God on trial, twice, and found him guilty.  But Jesus wasn’t really the one condemned on that night before his death.  Human religion and worldly wisdom were – all the things that sinners use to try to justify themselves before God.

The result of the first trial – before the high priest – is nothing less than the damnation of human religion.  The religious authorities in Jerusalem thought that they were doing something noble.  They were trying to preserve the institution.  They were afraid what might happen if this Jesus business got out of hand.  What if the Romans came down hard?  What about the Temple?  What about the priesthood?  Who would be left?  This is the reason Caiaphas declared that it would be good for one man to die for the people.  But in the process of preserving the institution, of upholding the Temple and the priesthood and the ritual, they passed judgment on the One all of those things were meant to serve.  They chose the trappings of religion over God incarnate, and revealed it all as hypocrisy.

That judgment isn’t limited to the religion of the Pharisees and Sadducees.  There are plenty of people who trust in church rather than the one whose Church it is, who try to justify themselves by saying that they give their money and volunteer now and then.  Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with church, or with volunteering, or with tithing, any more than there was with the Temple.  But if those things are the root of your hope, if that’s what you’re trusting in, they’re worse than meaningless.  They bear witness against you.  God looks at the heart.

The result of the second trial, before Pilate, is the damnation of worldly wisdom.  Pilate didn’t care about truth.  He just wanted things to run smoothly.  He wanted to be pragmatic, realistic, to do his job and go home.  He prided himself on being a good servant of the emperor.  And in the process, he sent the King of Glory to his death.

We sinful people are so quick to compromise, so quick to convince ourselves that we have no choice but to sin, so good at making excuses for our behavior.  We measure our wisdom by the opinions of men, rather than God.  We don’t have time to worry about truth.  A lot of the so-called wisest among us don’t even believe that there is such a thing, objectively speaking.  Against all that, Jesus bears witness.  He doesn’t measure us by our own wisdom, but by his holiness.  And we fall very, very short.

The simple fact is that anything we cling to in order to justify ourselves before God is going to fail.  Anything, that is, but Christ himself.  And the good news is that for those who trust in him, there is no condemnation.  Yes, he went to his death – and to life.  But he went willingly, out of love, for you and for me.  He gave himself to poor sinners like us, who had nowhere else to turn, and promised us eternal life, not for our sake, but for his.

The table behind me – which we’re going to share in a minute – stands in judgment over empty, hypocrital religiosity, over worldly wisdom, over legalism.  But it’s also a testimony to the grace of God in Jesus Christ.  To those he loves, he gives himself.  Which is far, far better.

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April 1, 2012 – Matthew 14:22-33

Apr01
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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March 25, 2012 – Matthew 6:5-15

Mar25
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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For a while now I’ve been looking for a quick and easy way to bankrupt my family, so when my son asked if he could play hockey, I figured why not, and signed him up for lessons in Canonsburg on Saturday afternoons.  We’ve been at it for a month and a half now.

Two weeks ago, there was a surprise: one of the instructors for the afternoon was Sidney Crosby.  Now, the really interesting thing, in hindsight, isn’t that these kids had a lesson with the single greatest hockey player of the 21st-century.  It’s that they didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.  Of course they were excited, but when you’re four or five or six years old, you see no reason why something like that shouldn’t happen.  Crosby’s a hockey player.  The kids are playing hockey.  Obviously he’ll visit.  The only question in their minds was whether he’d be back the next week.

I can’t help but think that most of us have a similarly casual attitude about the prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples here in the sixth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel.  Yeah, it’s the Lord’s prayer.  It’s good.  We say it in church.  Ho hum.

Stop to think about it, though, and it’s absolutely incredible. What we have here is a direct answer to one of mankind’s oldest questions: how can I communicate with my creator?  And we have it not from some random preacher, but from the Son of God, through whom all things were made, who knows and is known by, loves and is loved by, the Father.  To call this expert instruction would be to sell it short.  It’s nothing less than a window into the mind of God, opened to Jesus’ followers.

I say to Jesus’ followers, because it’s pretty clear that this isn’t a prayer that’s intended for just anyone to say.  For starters, Jesus taught it to his disciples, not to some random crowd.  And if we listen to the words, it’s pretty clear why.  To pray, for example, “hallowed by thy name” – in other words, let your name be holy on our lips – and then to speak lies about God, or to misuse his name, is hypocrisy in its purest form.  It would be better never to have said that at all than to have said it without meaning it.

Or how about the next sentence: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  Thy kingdom come. When we pray those words we are praying, my friends, for the end – for the consummation of history, the final, inevitable triumph of God over all his foes, and the submission of all things to him.  At the very least, you’d better have a pretty good idea which side you’re on before you ask for something like that.  Otherwise you may not like what you get.

The most outrageous, revolutionary bit of the whole prayer, though (if we really thought it through), is the one that almost no one suspects: those six familiar little words at the very beginning, “Our Father, who art in heaven…”  We’ve heard them so many times – we’ve said them so many times – that by now we’re almost completely oblivious to what a terrifying and wonderful thing it really is to call God our “Father.”  For most of us, “Father” is just something that people call the Almighty, almost a nickname.  But if we really understand what Jesus is getting at, these six words – “Our Father who art in heaven” – may well be the most important that can ever pass our lips.  Our lives literally hang on whether we call God our Father and mean it, in the sense that Jesus did.  So I’d like to spend the next few minutes with you trying to figure out exactly what it means to pray to God as “our Father.”

Before we get into it, though, there is one thing that needs to be said, and said plainly.  To call God our Father has nothing, in particular, to do with our own human fathers.  That’s important to understand, because while some of us may have had decent, godly men for fathers, others did not.  It’s hard for people to pray to “our Father in heaven” when the first image that pops into their minds is the abusive drunk who abandoned them when they were ten.  If that’s the case for you, the only thing I can do is remind you who came first.  God isn’t our Father insofar as he reminds us of our human fathers.  Quite the opposite, actually – human fathers are really only “fathers,” in the strictest sense, insofar as they remind us of God.  We’re all, at best, only dim reflections, shadows of the one true Father.  And an abusive jerk is no father at all.

But if calling God our Father doesn’t mean he’s just like dear old Dad, what does it mean?  Well, very briefly, I’d suggest to you that it means at least three things.  First and foremost, it says something about the relationship we have – or the relationship we claim to have – with the Almighty.  Second, it says something about our relationship with one another.  And finally, it says something profound about what we can expect to receive from the hand of God.

First, our relationship with God, and a simple question:  What right do we have to call God our Father?  Most people, I think, assume that the Fatherhood of God has something to do with the fact that he created mankind.  In as much as we’re all creatures of God, made by his hand, we all have the right – or so the reasoning goes – to approach his throne and address him as “our Father in heaven.”  Holy Scripture disagrees.  What we find in the New Testament is the declaration that we are sons and daughters of God not by virtue of the fact that he made us, but only by the new birth that Jesus said is necessary in order to enter the Kingdom of God.

That’s just a complicated way of saying that not everyone is a son or daughter of God.  The fact that God made you really has nothing to do with it.  God made a lot of stuff.  Are the rocks his children?  Of course not.  God watches over the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field, but do they call him “Father”?  No.  The few times in the Old Testament that God calls anyone his son or daughter, he’s referring either to the nation of Israel, which alone of all the peoples on earth he had chosen and rescued; or, as in our reading from the 2nd Psalm, to Israel’s promised Messiah.  In other words, there are only two kinds of people who can really, truly pray to God as their Father.  The first is the Son of God himself, which is kind of a no-brainer.  The other group – and these are the people Jesus is talking to – is made up of those whom God has chosen and rescued, who have put their faith and trust in his Son and live their lives for him.

Jesus put it even more bluntly in the eighth chapter of John’s gospel.  He was confronted with an angry, self-righteous crowd of people who declared that they were too sons and daughters of God, and warned Jesus that they wouldn’t take it kindly if he continued to say otherwise.  “If God were your father,” Jesus replied, “you would love me… you are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires…”  I don’t think it comes as much of a surprise that the crowd tried to stone him to death for that.

The simple truth is that God has only one natural Son.  The rest of us, if we are indeed his sons and daughters, are adopted.  And our adoption came at a steep price: the blood of Christ, shed on the cross.  When we call God “our Father,” we’re saying that out of sheer grace, for no reason other than that he loved us, God rescued us when we couldn’t rescue ourselves.  We’re saying that while we were yet sinners, as the Bible puts it, Jesus laid down his life for our sake.  We’re saying that because he died in our place, we’ve been adopted – not born, mind you, but adopted – into the family of God.  This is what Jesus meant when he talked about being “born again.”  And by praying to “our Father in heaven,” we’re declaring our own willingness to let God reign supreme in every part of our lives, to count his love, his truth, and his righteousness more valuable than anything in this world.  You see why this isn’t a prayer that can be said by just anyone?

As if that weren’t enough, praying to “our Father in heaven” carries a second implication, this time concerning our relationships with one another.  Jesus doesn’t teach us to pray to “my Father,” but to “our Father.”  God’s is not a small family.  It isn’t limited to one denomination, or one race, or one language, or one country.  It isn’t limited by time either.  When we pray, we pray with all the saints and angels in heaven, with every servant of God who has gone before.  That doesn’t mean that we pray to them.  Prayer is a form of worship, and the first commandment requires that we worship the Lord alone.  It simply means that the family of God, which is united in prayer, is infinitely larger than what we can see with our own eyes.

My final point is short and simple.  To call God our Father says something about our relationship with him and our relationships with one another, but it also says something about what we can expect from the Lord’s hand.  Jesus asked his disciples which of them, if his child asked for bread, would give him a rock instead.  “If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,” Jesus said, “how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him?”

That doesn’t mean that by praying to God as your Father, you’ll get exactly what you want, any more than you would give your own children exactly what they want.  The fact is that a lot of the time, we ask for things that we probably shouldn’t have.  What it means is that come what may, we can trust the promise of Scripture that all things work together for the good of those who love God.  He knows what his children need, and he’s always – always – ready to provide.

“Our Father, who art in heaven.”  By God’s grace, those may be the most important six words that ever cross your lips.  Amen.

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March 18, 2012 – Luke 3:1-22

Mar18
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Pastor Andy Scott

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One of the signs, I think, that something is genuinely from God is that it causes people to do something good and decent and true that they never would have considered doing otherwise.

Look at the preaching of John the Baptist.  From the perspective of a church growth consultant, John got almost everything wrong.  He didn’t set up shop in some growing suburb of Jerusalem, with a nice mix of professionals and young families.  He picked a spot out by the Jordan River, miles from anywhere that people actually lived.  John didn’t try to put his congregation at ease by dressing in a nice, non-threatening, sport-casual style.  Truth is, the guy was personally kind of repulsive.  I mean, he didn’t even wear pants.  Just a hair shirt tied around his waist with a piece of rawhide.

His personal demeanor wasn’t much better.  This is a man whose idea of welcoming people to church was to point at them and shout, “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

Then there was the content of his sermons.  Or I should say, his sermon, since every single message seems to have had pretty much the same point:  repent.  He told no jokes.  He offered no finely-crafted illustrations or inspirational stories.  He simply told people, rather literally, to turn or burn.

By any reasonable standard, John should have been pretty lonely out there in the desert.  But as he began preaching something incredible happened.  People came.  Thousands of them.  Now, it’s no great feat to drum up a big crowd by telling people what they want to hear.  Demagogues and would-be dictators do it all the time.  What John was doing was different: he was telling people what they needed to hear.  And the people, in turn, recognized that what they were hearing was from God.

The substance of John’s message is summed up here in verse three:  “He went into all the region around the Jordan,” Luke says, “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”  In other words, John was calling on the people of Israel to turn away from their sins – that’s what repentance means, literally – to give up trying to run their own lives, by their own wisdom, and instead to turn to God, trusting in his forgiveness, and living humble lives of obedience to him.

Now, there was nothing particularly new about that.  It was the message of all the prophets, from Moses on.  Half of the Old Testament is made up of calls to repent and trust in God.  When John told his listeners to give to the poor, to be content with their wages and not to cheat or steal or lie, he was only saying what had been said a hundred times before.

But there were a few things that set John’s message apart from anything that had gone before.  One was the sheer breadth of its scope.  In the past, when prophets had been sent by God to call for repentance, their message had usually been focused on a particular individual, or group, or city, or nation.  Think of Nathan calling King David out for murder, or Jonah preaching to the city of Nineveh, or Jeremiah to Israel.  But John’s message was universal.  Nobody got off the hook.  It didn’t matter who came to see him: rich men or beggars, priests or prostitutes.  Race, nation, even religion – it made no difference.  The message was the same: repent.  Now, while you still can.  Don’t compare yourself to the woman three doors down.  Don’t think that just because you’re a good Jew, just because you say your prayers and show up in synagogue two or three times a year, that this doesn’t apply to you.  “I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.”  The axe is laid at the root of the tree.  Confess your sins.  Ask for forgiveness.  Humble your hearts before God.

The other thing that set John’s message apart was what he demanded from his hearers in response.  He called on them to go down o the river and be baptized.  Judaism in John’s day had a few rituals that involved bathing, usually in a special pool called a mikvah.  For example, a man who had touched a dead body, or a woman who had completed her menstrual cycle was required to wash in the mikvah before they could be considered ritually clean and enter the Temple.  But those were baptisms of outward purity.  What John demanded was a baptism of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins.  The only ceremony in Judaism involving a baptism of repentance was the one for foreigners who were converting.  In other words, what John was asking these people to do – good Jews, all of them – was to be converted to the Lord.  It didn’t matter who they were, or who their fathers were.

“Do not say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,” he warned in verse eight.  “For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.”  In the coming Kingdom of God, ancestry, geography, education – none of it matters.  Only repentance and faith.

And time was short.  When he was asked to explain why he was doing what he was doing, he quoted this prophecy in verse four here, which comes from the 40th chapter of Isaiah:

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight…”

The people needed to be ready, because the Lord himself was coming.  John meant that quite literally.  “I baptize you with water,” he said in verse 16, “but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit, and with fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

It’s only after Luke lays out this explanation of what John was up to out there along the Jordan that he shares with us, in verse 21, the most incredible part of the story:

“When all the people were baptized,” he says, “and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.’”

Jesus was baptized.  Remember what this was: a baptism of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins.  A desperate plea to the people of God to quit their petty rebellion, to turn from their sins and to obey God in preparation to see him, face to face.  And when the Lord showed up, what did he do?  He got in line.

Why?  Of all people, Jesus alone had no need for a baptism of repentance, because he had nothing to repent of.  “He was tempted in every way as we are,” it says in Hebrews 4:15, “yet without sin.”  Matthew’s Gospel reports that John initially refused, saying that Jesus should baptize him instead.  Maybe, as some have suggested, Jesus was trying to set a good example, as if to say, “go and do likewise.”  Others point to Jesus’ baptism as evidence that he was somehow less than the sinless Son of God portrayed in Scripture.

With all due respect, I think they’ve missed the point entirely.  The baptism of Christ isn’t a puzzle or an embarrassment.  It’s the glory of God.  You want to see what kind of God you have?  You want to see his love and his grace?  Look here.  It’s clear as day, for those who have eyes to see, and ears to hear.

You see, this is the gospel: that God wasn’t content simply to shout at us from on high, but that he sent his Son, who despite the fact that he alone had no sin, that he alone was the perfectly obedient Son of the Father, took our sins on himself and stood in our place, lifting the burden from us.  He wasn’t baptized for his own sins.  He was baptized for ours, just as he didn’t die for his own sins, but for the sins of those he calls his own.  In the words of the Book of Hebrews, Jesus Christ became sin for us, so that we might be reconciled to God.

This is his glory.  This is the beloved Son, in whom the Father is well pleased.  And this is our salvation, standing there in the middle of the Jordan.  God grant you a repentant heart, to see his glory, and to know his love.  Amen.

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