Wednesday, May 31, 2006

In our world today, we are all about convenience. If something works for us and fits into our schedule then it is good and we will spend the time on it that is needed and required.

If something is not convenient and throws us off our game, so to speak, we would rather not take part in it.

So it is with God.

There are tons of times in the Bible when God tells us what to do and not to do. For instance he tells us "marriage should be honored by all and the marriage bed pure", meaning that we should only have sex, of any kind, with the person to whom we will be married for the rest of our life.


To us, living in the world, this is very inconvenient and downright impossible. To God, this is his will. Which one shall we choose? Which one is right?

This is just one example of hundreds where our convenience and our wants and needs take precedence over God's will for our lives. Yet, we can see that because we choose our own will over God's will, time and time again. Our lives suffer greatly. Not just our lives but also the whole world in general suffers because of sin.

The thing is, we want God himself to be something we can handle and put in a box. We want him to be all powerful, all knowing and all loving, but only if he is going to do what I want him to do.

We want him to be understandable and reasonable, which, I would think, would go directly against any definition of what "God" is supposed to be. We want him to conform to our will, norms and rules instead of us conforming to his. We want him to be this nice grandfatherly type who gives us whatever we want whenever we want instead of the vengeful, just and sometimes angry God that we often see in the Scriptures. To sum this all up, we want control of God.

This goes with what he says in the Scriptures. If something in Scripture doesn't quite fit our ideal way of thinking we can do one of three things.

We can explain it away, saying something like, "That was only for that time and place. Things are different now", which in some cases might be true, but not all cases.

You can totally dismiss it as not really being God's word, which is what the "Jesus Seminar" and other fringe groups have so often done. But what does that do for this verse in II Timothy 3:16?: "All Scripture is God breathed and is useful teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." I guess if you want, you can take out that verse too.

Homosexuality is an issue, living together before marriage is an issue, divorce is an issue, whether Jesus is God or not is an issue, whether Christ rose from the dead or not is an issue, basically everything that is in the Scriptures can be questioned once you throw out the II Timothy 3:16 passage.

People, just because something in Scripture doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean that it isn't from God. Just because your sinful human mind doesn't want to acknowledge that something isn't from God doesn't mean it isn't.

It is a sin as old as Adam and Eve. We put ourselves above God. When God plainly tells us "You shall not", we say "He didn't really mean that." When one of the gospel writers tells us that Jesus rose from the dead, are we ready to say, "He didn't really mean that?"

You can pick and choose what you want to believe, but that doesn't mean what you believe is true, does it? If I believe, with all my heart, that the moon is made out of green cheese does that mean it really is? In the same way, my believing that Jesus rose from the dead doesn't make it true. The only thing that makes it true is that it really did happen.

The only thing that the people who wrote Scripture said about it is that it is all completely true, real and from God's mouth. Nowhere does it say that some of it is true while other parts of it aren't. It only claims to be true and real, nothing else.

Not only that, but the Scriptures have withstood the test of time. We have found no evidence that anything in the Bible didn't happen just the way it is stated. In fact it has always been just the opposite. Those trying to find evidence to prove the Bible false have always found evidence that only proves the Bible true.

The last thing you can do is simply believe the Scriptures to be what they say they are. Believe in God's word. Hold on to it, even when you may not like it too much. Trust in it to guide your life. Live by it so that you may be blessed instead of cursed.

My friends, I encourage you to let go and let God be God. Don't try to put him in a box, or to minimize him to your standards. Don't try to put your own conscience and your own reason above God's will and his word. If you do, you will only hurt yourself, and cause yourself years of bitter anguish pain and sorrow because of your sin.

I leave you with these words from Proverbs: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understandings. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths."

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

It is very clearly stated in Ephesians 2:8-9, yet, for some reason, people choose to ignore or it or deny it.

My favorite passage tells us all how we are saved. It says, "For we are saved by grace, through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is a gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast."

Let's unpack that verse for a second. What does the word "grace" mean? There are many dictionary definitions for this word, but the one that is useful for us states:

"Unmerited Divine assistance given man for his regeneration and, or sanctification."

A way that I have learned to describe it is through an acronym, using the letters for the word grace to say God's Riches At Christ's Expense. It is a gift. It is something that is not earned or even taken, but something that is simply given and received. If we try to earn it, then it is not grace.

The second part we must look at is the "through faith" part. Faith is described in the dictionary in many ways as well. The one that works best for us is:

"Firm belief in something for which there is no proof."

The Bible tells us a definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1. "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."

In other words, Ephesians 2:8 could be paraphrased to say, "We are saved by God's riches at Christ's expense through being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."

This still doesn't answer the question about how we get faith in the first place. Does it just come to us magically? Do we somehow conjure it up as if we have the power to do so? Or does God work through means to bring us to life by the power of the Holy Spirit?

To answer this question we must first look at what the Lord tells us about ourselves before conversion. He tells us that we are all are conceived and born sinful and so are in need of forgiveness when he says, "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."(Psalm 51:5), or "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins." (Ephesians 2:1)

Can a dead person do anything? No. Can a dead person come back to life? A dead person can only come back to life if God acts upon him in some miraculous way as in the story of Lazarus and others, but especially in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

God must act upon us to bring us back to life. How does he do this? Well, we have the answer to this in Romans 10:17 where Paul tells us that "Faith comes from hearing the message and the message is heard through the word of Christ." This word is what we would call the good news or the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The message is that Christ has died on the cross and has risen from the dead. The Holy Spirit has the power to use that message and those words of good news to bring a person, who was dead in their trespasses and sins, back to life.

Consequently, what this is saying to us is that all you need are two ears to hear the good news and you can be brought to faith. I know of 3-year-olds who can barely talk, and yet they can tell me that Jesus died for them. It doesn't take any special training or special age requirement or some sort of understanding that goes above and beyond believing that Jesus died on the cross for you.

You don't even have to be able to express it. According to this verse all you have to do is hear it. If you hear it and believe what you hear, you are saved according to everything written in the Scriptures.

The reason I am writing this article is that there has been some confusion as to how we receive the grace that God gives to us. Many different Christian denominations teach many different things. In my church, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, we believe that the Holy Spirit works through means. We call these means the Word (Bible) and the Sacraments (for Lutherans there are two Sacraments — Baptism and the Lord's Supper).

Other churches believe that God works immediately, that is without means, to bring a person to faith (The Spirit goes where it wills).

Still others believe that God works with a person, this is called synergism, to bring him/her to faith. In these churches, a person still has the ability to work with God for his own salvation. Whether this is called a choice, a decision, or being slain in the Spirit, is up to the individual denomination or even congregation.

This can all get very confusing, but there is one thing we must keep straight. In order to be a true Christian, one must believe that Jesus died on the cross for them and that by His death on the cross he has saved us from all sins.

A man once asked Peter, "What must I do to be saved?" Peter answered, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved." John said in his Gospel, "God loved the world so much that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but eternal life." Mark says, "Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned."

Belief (faith) is what counts, not just belief in anything, but belief in Jesus Christ, he is the Son of God and that he came to suffer, die, and rise again for us.

Some say we get faith only one way, some say that we get it through means, and still others say that we work with God to get it ourselves. What matters most to me is that people get it. If they simply hear the Gospel and believe, then great. If they get it through the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, that's great. If they get it through an immediate, "Pentecost" moment, that is awesome too.

As Christians, we are simply able to praise God for the faith that we have. Thanks be to God that we receive God's grace by faith. I can't wait to get to heaven.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Recent events demand question — What is truth?

Last week I talked to you a bit about the debate between those who believe in evolution versus those who believe in the Scriptures and creation. We talked about the fact that there are some people who believe that their own brains and their own thoughts and feelings can be held as equal with God. We talked about the fact that our sinful human nature is, by nature, opposed to God's word. Therefore, even among Christians, the devil works to get us to think that we can become equal with God. That, of course, was the first temptation of Adam and Eve, and it has not stopped since.

Today, I would like to bring up a few modern heresies that have popped up in recent months and years. One is "The DaVinci Code" and the other is "The Gospel of Judas".

I call them heresies simply because they go directly against what the Scriptures teach, and because those who have written these things have put their philosophies and their own minds on par with God.

The first one, "The DaVinci Code" is about some sort of "relationship" between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This relationship is unbiblical and is only supported by a speculation of Mary Magdalene being in the famous DaVinci picture of the Lord's Supper. Although the book is purported as fiction, the author supposedly states at the beginning of his book that all places, documents and events are factual.

The second one is a supposedly "lost gospel." It is about Judas, although Judas didn't write it, because he had been dead before it was written. It is a story that someone made up. It states, among other things, that Jesus took Judas aside and told him that he would be doing God's will by handing his friend Jesus over to be crucified. There is also a promise from Jesus to Judas that Judas would become scorned on earth but be revealed as great in heaven.

Unfortunately these types of things are not something new. These false teachings and being held as true and real have been around as long as Christianity has been around.

Certain heretics like Arius and others tried to teach that Jesus was not fully God or that he was not fully man. Certain people throughout the ages have written other "gospels" or other "testaments" with the intent of turning people away from the true word of God and faith in Jesus Christ.

It is important here that we realize criteria for including something into the Canon of Holy Scripture. They didn't just accept everything that came along that talked about Jesus or God. There were some very strict rules they followed for a book to be included in the Christian Scriptures.

For the Old Testament there were two things to which they held. One was that Jesus quoted from every book of the Old Testament except for two and the other was that the Jewish scribes were meticulous in their preservation of God's word. Therefore the Old Testament has not been in question even from the very beginning. There were several books called "The Apocrypha" that didn't stand up to the tests and scrutiny and that is why these books are still not fully accepted as true and real.

For the New Testament there was quite a bit more scrutiny. There were four very strict questions that needed to be asked. Was the author an apostle or someone very closely connected with an apostle? Was the book accepted by the body of Christ at large? Did the book contain consistency of doctrine and orthodox teaching? Did the book bear evidence of clear high moral and spiritual values consistent with the Old Testament? A good book to read about all this is called "The Canon of Scripture", by Bible scholar F.F. Bruce.

The apostles approved of books that already existed. Peter talked of Paul's writings as inspired. Paul talked of Luke's Gospel as equal with the Scriptures of the Old Testament. Several of the early church fathers, such as Clement, Ignatius, Ireneaus, Polycarp and Hyppolytus, accepted certain books. Only Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 John and 3 John had any real question as to their authenticity, and only that by a few people because of their origin.

Today, unfortunately, the world's philosophy is, "Whatever you believe about something makes it true for you." Or "If it makes you happy it must be right." It is a theory of relativism.That is why, you can have someone like Dan Brown write a purely fictional book and have hundreds of thousands of people take it as true. Or you can have an old writing found by archeologists, calling itself the Gospel of Judas, and right away, without question, people come to believe it as a true and real gospel because it is old or because one or two people say it must be true and real.

As I said last week, it is your choice. Are you going to believe in someone or something that is here today and gone tomorrow? Or are you going to believe in something that has withstood the test of time over centuries of debate, ridicule, whole countries and groups of people trying to destroy it, and even the punishment of death for those who were caught with these writings in their possession?

At the time of the acceptance of the Canon, these men were risking their lives for these books. They were willing to die for them. That is how precious the Scriptures were to them. Are they that precious to you?

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Evolution, creationism both take faith

I have been watching the debate that has been fought in the letters to the editor of this newspaper these past few weeks. I didn't really want to even bother with it, because frankly, I believe that it is a waste of my time.

I would rather be telling you about Jesus and how much he loves you and how much he wants to see you in heaven with him when the time comes.

Yet, I feel as though I must get the facts out about this debate that continues to rage on, and has raged on for over 150 years.

How many of you, when you hear or talk about how the earth is billions of years old, the ice age, missing links, the big bang or any other thing having to do with evolution, ever hear the word "theory"? Probably not too much.

I hate going to science museums for that very reason. Evolution is always purported as fact by those who believe in it. I guess I can't blame them. When you have faith in something, you want and need to believe it is real and true.

You're not going to have faith in something you know and believe is false, are you? We, who believe in the Scriptures, don't call creation a theory, do we?

The debate is about what to believe in. Do you believe in God and his word or do you believe in the study of evolutionary science and the scientists who study it? They both take faith. One has faith in God and the other has faith in scientists. So let's look at them both and see which one holds more credibility.

In case you don't quite understand the theory of evolution, here is what this theory states: 1. All life forms have developed from other species. 2. All living things are related to one another through a common descent. 3. All life on earth has a common origin. That is, in the distant past there once existed an original life form and that this life form gave rise to all subsequent life forms. 4. The process by which one species evolves into another involves random, heritable, genetic mutations, some of which are more likely to spread and persist in a gene pool than others.

Let me just say a Christian can agree with numbers three and four as they are stated here. The difference is that, for number three, we would call that original life form God. We would also say that the subsequent life forms were and are called plants, animals, and people.

For number four, we don't have a problem with "microevolution," which is the constant change within a species. Humans grow shorter and taller over generations. Humans, as well as other species, develop immunities as well as new bacteria and viruses all the time.

We also don't have a problem with the idea of natural selection. Different families within species, and sometimes whole species, go extinct. Through climate changes and the survival of the fittest some species thrive while other species deteriorate.

Yet, to use the scientific evidence for microevolution and transfer it to macroevolution is simply a denial of the real origin of all life. Why is it so hard for people to admit that God created the world in six days? Why is it so hard for people to simply accept the word of God? The reason is very simple and it comes from last week's article.

They want to be like God, or even more, they want to be a "god" unto themselves.They want to believe that the earth is the center of the universe instead of the creator. They want to believe that their minds, their reason and their intellect can go above and beyond anything in the Holy Scriptures and anything that God declares to be true and right.

It is a sin as old as Adam and Eve.

An evolutionary scientist will say that any talk of creation or study of biology, chemistry and physics in the light of creation cannot be called science because it involves trust in someone and something that goes above and beyond anything "scientific".

I went to Lutheran schools my whole life. I learned a lot about life systems, chemical reactions and how things live, move and have their being. I know there are a lot of good scientists who believe in a six day creation. Tons of them are working in labs and fields across the world right now.

Don't let these evolutionists trick you into thinking that you can't do good science if you believe in creation.

My friends, you have a choice. You can either believe in flawed, and at best, speculative evolutionary "science" that relies on poor, sinful, human brains making hypotheses and theories, a brain that can change its mind in an instant.

You can believe in a sin-filled earth and a bunch of fossils that are flawed because of sin. Or on the other hand you can believe in God's infallible word. You can believe in an almighty God that created all life, including fully developed human beings, in six consecutive, 24-hour days just like it says.

Both take faith. Both take a belief in something. It is just that one is human science and the other is God. You choose.