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Archives For Lent

Jesus is Not a Victim: Good Friday 2013

March 29, 2013 — Leave a comment

“Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment I received of my Father.” (Jn. 10:17-18)

It’s hard for us to imagine choosing suffering.

Who chooses to hurt? Who signs up for pain? Cancer, miscarriage, barrenness, the humiliation of job loss, strained and broken relationships, rebellious children, betrayal, misunderstandings that just don’t seem to go away, disappointment, death of our parents, a spouse, a child, not to mention the painful consequences and shame of any number of our own mistakes and failures.

Even the sturdiest of Christians often find themselves saying something like this: I wouldn’t have chosen this path, but I can see God’s grace in it. I wouldn’t have told the story this way, but I can see how the glory of God has shone through. How many of you have said something like that?

But Jesus is saying something different than that. Jesus is not saying that a series of unfortunate events will befall Him but God His Father will work them out for good. Jesus is not saying that. We know that God does in fact work all things out for good. God is working all things out for good. But Jesus is not passive in that work. Jesus is not merely being acted upon. Jesus doesn’t just have things happening to Him. Jesus is not a victim of circumstances. Jesus is not a victim of bad luck. Jesus is not even the victim of the plotting of evil men.

Jesus says that no one can take His life from Him. Jesus is not a victim. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. Jesus did not come to feed the sheep and somehow He got caught in the middle of a wolf attack. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, and the Good Shepherd gives His life for the sheep. That’s not a possibility, not a potential hazard, that’s the plan. That’s what the Good Shepherd does. That’s what the Good Shepherd is for. That’s how you know He’s the Good Shepherd because He gives His life for the sheep. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Galatians, bible - John, Bible - Romans, Church Calendar, Lent, Sermon Outlines

Broken for the Broken

March 25, 2013 — Leave a comment

This table is for sinners. This meal is not for good people. This bread is not for people who have their act together. This wine is not for people who have never made enormous mistakes. No, this bread is broken because Jesus was broken for the broken. This wine is His blood because Jesus bled for the guilty. We do not gather here at this table as the top of the class, as the winners, the success stories, the clean, the innocent, the popular, the good looking. No, we are here as the failures, the losers, the guilty, the outcasts, the rejected, the ugly.

There are any number of ways we could get the idea of a new building wrong. As we prepare for this new stage in our story as TRC, we should be thinking and praying about the ways we will be tempted. One danger is the temptation that we will think we have arrived, that we are now a respectable church, full of good, squeaky clean people. Yes, we are a forgiven people. Yes, by the grace of God, we are healed and healing people. Yes, we have been given many blessings. But if we understand who we are in the light of God’s grace, we have to constantly remember where we have come from and how far we have to go. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Isaiah, Eucharistic Meditations, Evangelism, Justice & Mercy, Lent

Jesus Was Not a Victim

March 19, 2013 — Leave a comment

Rich Bledsoe writes:

The book of Hebrews speaks of the “deceitfulness of sin.” Once sin is unmasked one way, it transmutes itself like a virus into a slightly different form that is immune to the old antidotes. We live in the very odd day when the Christian Gospels have done a great deal of work to unmask what was invisible to the ancient world in regard to the victim. But now in many cases the garb of victimhood can be donned in order to victimize others, in order to persecute. The persecuted have in many cases become the persecutors, and it is necessary to understand that victimhood is not an automatic ticket to righteousness or moral superiority. Several recent theological perspectives have granted to victims a special status and even an “epistemological advantage”, meaning that only victims really see the world as it is. In all of this thicket, it is essential to highlight the fact that Jesus was not in the final analysis a victim, and He did not pioneer the way to make victimization profitable, but he opened the way to overcome and create a new social order that is truly based on righteousness.

Read the whole article here.

In Culture, ethics, Justice & Mercy, Lent, Manalive, Pastoral Theology, Theology, Wisdom

Jesus is Not Optional

March 11, 2013 — Leave a comment

A few weeks back, as we were beginning the Lenten season, Pastor Leithart reminded us that Lent is normal Christian life. At different times of the year we focus on different things, but we focus on different things which should all be normal Christian living. The themes of Advent, Epiphany, and Trinity season are always true all the time, but we plan to consider those themes annually.

One of the ways of thinking about Lent is as a countdown to Easter. During Advent many of us do Advent calendars and wreathes, recounting the story of salvation leading up to the birth of Jesus as Christmas. At Lent, we are specifically focusing on the faithfulness and obedience of Jesus even to the point of death on the cross for us and for our salvation. But Jesus laid His life down specifically with the full intention of taking back up again on the third day. We are counting down to Easter, counting down to Resurrection.

But this is true all the time. Everyone of us will soon meet our Maker. We hope and pray for long lives of faithfulness, but we do not know the day or the hour when our Master will summon us to appear before Him. And all men must appear before Him sooner or later. There are no other options. Jesus is not optional. And on the great last Easter, all men will be raised from their graves, God’s beloved children will be raised to glory, and those who do not know Him will be raised to eternal judgment. And there will be no lies on that Last Day. All will be laid bare before Him. Nothing will be hidden. Continue Reading…

In Church Calendar, Exhortations, Lent, TRC

Jesus Love

March 10, 2013 — 1 Comment

Daniel and Claire, you know well Paul’s command to husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her. But I wonder if we often miss just how scandalous this command is. I think perhaps our modern culture’s general aversion and disgust with Paul’s teaching on marriage is probably approaching the level of scandal that it is. But I suspect that they are actually not scandalized enough. They get hung up on the asymmetry of Paul’s language. Husbands lead like this; wives follow like that. Husbands love; wives respect.

But the scandal is deeper than that. Paul says that husbands are to love their wives like Jesus loved the Church, and when we look elsewhere, we see that the kind of love Jesus had for us when He went to the cross for us was not a reasonable sort of love, not a sensible kind of love. In Romans 5, Paul uses four different adjectives to describe our state when Jesus died for us. Paul says we were weak, we were ungodly, we were sinners, and we were enemies when Christ died for us.

The culture around us uses a word that sounds exactly like our word “love.” They spell it the same; they even pronounce it the same. But I would suggest that based on what they actually do with that word, most of the time, they mean something entirely different than we do. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Family, Lent, Marriage Bed, Wedding Exhortation

Kill Your Feelings

February 27, 2013 — 3 Comments

A man is required by God to disconnect his feelings from his duty. This is not because a man doesn’t have them. A good man is not cold and heartless. But a good man represents Jesus rightly by bearing his own feelings as well as the feelings of others, specifically those people entrusted to his care. The man who dumps his feelings whether in an emotional puddle or in an outburst of anger is misrepresenting Christ. But a Christian man bears them patiently, cheerfully because He knows the gospel. He knows that he has an older brother named Jesus who has borne it all.

This is not stoicism or apathy. Rightly understood, this is just faithful obedience to our Lord. Feelings are not holy. They have no automatic rightful place in the world. Feelings may be as sinful as thoughts and actions and words. You have no innate right to your feelings. And they are not exactly the same thing as the pain you feel when you stub your toe. Of course there’s the “ouch” factor, but hurt feelings may be completely disobedient to Jesus. Anger may be in complete rebellion to Jesus. There is a time to mourn; there is a time for rejoicing. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Ephesians, Culture, Family, Lent, Manalive, Marriage Bed, Wisdom

Jesus is Enough Freedom: Col. 2:16-23

February 25, 2013 — Leave a comment

Introduction

We said last week that forgiveness is the foundation of our resistance to all lies, half truths, and empty philosophies. This is because guilt is what makes us vulnerable. Guilt is what makes us captive to every tyranny. It doesn’t allow us to see clearly. But the flip side of this truth is therefore that forgiveness is what sets men free. It gives us eyes to see.

Summary of the Text: Paul’s “therefore” is directly related to the fact of forgiveness just unpacked (2:13-15). Other peoples’ opinions are powerful, but Paul says when it comes to food and drink and holidays and feasts, we must not be bound (2:16). This is fundamentally because all the regulations of the Old Covenant were shadows of Jesus who is the reality (2:17). If we are held captive by those who are into fasting, worshiping angels, or mystical visions we will lose our reward in Jesus because His power is made manifest in simple weakness not our fleshly schemes (2:18, cf. 1 Cor. 1:25-31). The central problem is that these traditions fail to cling to Jesus, our Head, which is where we receive our nourishment, find unity, and grow up into Him (2:19). This freedom has everything to do with having already died (cf. 2:11-13) because if they have already died with Christ then it makes no sense to live as though they haven’t (2:20). On one level, the Jewish laws make no sense after Jesus has brought us into His new world, and on another level, those kinds of traditions don’t make any sense when we have already died (2:21-22, cf. Acts 17:30-31). What makes these kinds of things attractive is the fact that they have an appearance of wisdom, humility, neglect of the body, but they are actually worthless when it comes to restraining our flesh (2:23). And this is because when we find our safety and security in made up rules, we’re actually indulging our fleshly minds (2:18), instead of restraining the flesh. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Colossians, Church Calendar, History - Reformation, Jesus is Enough, Lent, Politics, Sermon Outlines, TRC, Wisdom

Paid in Full

February 20, 2013 — Leave a comment

In my sermon this last week, I said that God’s approval of us is not based on our performance but based solely on Jesus and what He has done for us. A reasonable question might be: But what about the fact that the Bible somewhat frequently describes God’s disapproval based on people’s performances? Don’t people reap what they sow? Didn’t Jesus say that men will be judged for their every idle word?

And the answer to these questions is yes. But everything hinges on whether you’ve already been judged or not.

In other words, if one day you get a bill in the mail out of nowhere and it turns out there was some major accounting failure, and now you owe hundreds of millions of dollars in back payments, well, unless you have a nice stash of cash somewhere, you’re sunk.

And just to keep things interesting, what if you knew that even if you worked 80 hour work weeks your entire life and only spent the bare minimum necessary to live, you’d still never be able to pay the debt? You’d still be sunk by millions.

But what if you already knew about the bill before it came? And what if you knew the debt was already paid? Well then, when the bill showed up, it would come more like a scheduled visit to the dentist. You don’t really look forward to those sorts of appointments and they aren’t usually fun, but they’re bearable and expected.

And here’s what I mean. For those who know Jesus, they already know that they have sinned and will sin again, and that Jesus freely suffered and bled for those sins already. They know that bills have piled up, and they know that there are still more bills in the mail. We may not know the exact breakdown of the bills, but we know what the total was. The wages of sin is death. The total debt owed was a perfect, sinless life, impossible for any sinner to pay. But the news that changed our lives was the news that Jesus has paid our debts in full. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Colossians, Evangelism, Grace, Jesus is Enough, Lent, TRC, Wisdom

We Will Not Lie

February 13, 2013 — 10 Comments

For as long as I can remember, in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday, one of my daughters always tells us every year that she doesn’t want the ashes on her forehead. And whenever we ask her why, the answer is always the same. She says, “I don’t want to die.” And while we’ve always asked her to go up with the rest of the family, and she’s always been compliant, she’s also been known to have wiped them off her forehead almost by the time she’s made it back to her seat. At some point, we realized that she also thought dying always meant literally being crucified, dying on a cross. Now, she still talks about not wanting to die, though she still occasionally reminds us that she might not die on an actual cross, and she often remembers to mention that after she dies Jesus will raise her from the dead. But she still doesn’t particularly like Ash Wednesday. She still doesn’t want to die.

I’m convinced that my daughter actually understands this service far better than most people do. Next to Christmas and Easter, I sometimes wonder if Ash Wednesday is the third most attended service in the Christian Calendar. I couldn’t find statistics to confirm or deny that, though among Protestants it appears that Mother’s Day has the third highest attendance. So maybe I’m wrong. But there’s still a strange sort of enthusiasm surrounding Ash Wednesday that seems all wrong. It’s understandable that Christmas and Easter would be popular celebrations even among unbelievers or nominal Christians. But as a culture, we don’t really know what to do with death. We are a nursing home culture. We are a distraction culture. We are a drug and alcohol culture. We pay to be numbed, to be distracted, to be lied to, to avoid the harsh realities of suffering and death.

But come Ash Wednesday, if you live in a big city you’ll see people on the street with crosses on their foreheads. Joe Biden will no doubt make an appearance on national television with a cross on his forehead. And then, if you drove down Main Street today here in Moscow, you saw a woman on the corner of Sixth Street with a big white sign that read “Ashes To Go.” Which pretty much sums it up for me. We want death like we want most things: fast, easy, painless, and could I get fries with that? She might as well have been smearing a Nike swoosh on people’s foreheads. Continue Reading…

In Bible - Acts, Bible - Isaiah, Church Calendar, Culture, Grace, Lent, Sermon Outlines, TRC, Wisdom, Worship

Putting on the Armor of Light: Resources for Lent

February 13, 2013 — 6 Comments

For those wondering about what we teach or think about the season of Lent at Trinity. Here’s what we print in the front of our bulletins during this season:

“Lent is the season of the Church calendar that spans the 40 days leading up to Easter. Lent is from the old English word which means “lengthening” and refers to Springtime, when the days are getting longer and lighter. Another name for this season is “Quadragesima” which simply means “fortieth,” counting backwards from Easter to the fortieth day before Resurrection Sunday.

In the history of the Church, no other season has perhaps been so abused or misunderstood as Lent. Historically, Lent began as a discipleship class for new believers. It became customary to have baptisms at Easter, and so new believers would be enrolled in these classes prior to Easter to teach them the basics of the faith, frequently working through the Apostles’ Creed, the most basic Christian confession. Eventually, many leaders in the Church saw the need for all Christians to be annually reminded of the basics of the Christian faith and reminded of the basic Christian disciplines.

Over time, many practices like superstitious fasting and various forms of abstinence became substituted for real Christian disciplines and by the time of the Reformation, Lent had become something of a symbol of the oppression of the Roman church, and therefore many of the great Reformers cheerfully taught their congregations to disregard the Roman church’s rules and regulations for Lent. Standing squarely in the Reformation tradition, we want to remember and embrace their wisdom and courage in freeing the people of God from man made traditions and rules. In Christ, we are free, and no Christian man or woman should be bound by man-made customs or traditions regarding eating or fasting, food or drink, days or seasons. No one should feel any tinge of guilt for doing absolutely nothing different during Lent. Continue Reading…

In Church Calendar, Evangelism, Family, History - Reformation, Lent, TRC, Worship