WHAT WE CHOOSE TO SEE IN DISAGREEMENTS?

The following perspective arises from the blessings I received at the DOXOLOGY retreat this past week.

In any disagreements that take place in the local congregation, each person has two ways of seeing those on the other side of every issue. This is especially true when a person begins using whispering campaigns, force, threats, and intimidation to attain the outcome he or she desires.
When a person uses such methods in a disagreement, what do you see when you look at the one doing such things?
Do you see that person as “stubborn”, “arrogant”, “wrong”, or “hard-headed”?
On the other hand, do you see that person as one who is captive to the power of his/her own sinful pride’s illusions? ... someone captive to the illusions and reasoning of Satan? One does not have to be demon possessed to be deceived by Satan and his wiles.
To see that person apart from the cruel confusing and confounding power of sin and Satan is to see that person with eyes other than those of Jesus Christ. To see them this way, we are left to manage them and the issue ourselves. This being the case, we will have to turn to the same methods that sin and Satan have convinced them to use. Our only hope of winning the issue requires that we use their sinful ways in greater measure and with more cleverness.
To see them as one captive to sin and Satan is to see them as one pinned in a crashed car. So let us consider:
If they wrecked their car, would that keep us from calling 911?
If we caused their car to wreck, would that keep us from calling 911?
If they could not get out of the car, would that keep us from calling 911?
If we could get them out of the car, would that keep us from calling 911?
Of course, the answer to all four is NO!!! Definitely not!!!
We would call 911 because we would want to have those who can – to get to them, free them, and bring the needed aid to their wounds. We would want them to do for them, what we cannot do.
Yet in truth, such is the real spiritual condition of anyone who turns to whispering campaigns, force, threats, and the like. They have crashed their faith on some issue and they are trapped and cannot free themselves.
As with any accident, the first issue cannot be who is right or wrong, or who caused it. The issue must be their injuries and meeting the needs for which their injuries cry out. Only the eyes of mercy can see this.
We can stand around looking at the crash and the person pinned inside, describing them, their driving and even the crash, but to what end? None of this frees them from the crash. None of this brings that aid they need. None of this summons the ones who can get to that person and help them. None of this frees them from their crash.
On the other hand, we can see with the eyes of mercy, and bow to their needs by calling on the Lord Jesus Christ to come and set them free.
Just as none of us can save ourselves from our sin or sustain ourselves in saving faith, neither than can we save those in sin’s crash or sustain them in their journey of faith. He alone came to our crash site. He alone allowed himself to be pinned in the damning crash of our sin, not by us or our sin, but by His own love for us. “… He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed.” Is 53:5.
Christ alone mercifully forgives us so freely that we are saved from the crash and set back again upon the journey of faith and unity with one another.
What we choose to see in others will determine whether we “walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Ep 4:1-3.
In addition, what we choose to see is always determined by what we believe the Lord sees and does to us, and those that we see: “He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.” Psalms 103:10.
What will you choose to see today?
A bunch of selfish, self-serving, stubborn, arrogant and apathetic people?
Or will you choose to see personal crashes of faith in desperate need of someone to call – not 911, but God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to come in mercy and rescue those who have crashed their faith and been crushed and pinned in sin?

Lord God, heavenly Father, have mercy upon us and give us eyes to see and tongues to call upon You for our deliverance from sin and Satan, and for the same constant deliverance of all those You have given to us at home, at church, at work or wherever we find ourselves. In the blessed name of Christ our Lord. Amen.

- pmwl

All depends on faith

"All depends on faith [in Jesus Christ alone].  He who does not believe [in Christ alone] is like one who must cross the sea, but is so timid that he does not trust the ship; and so he must remain and never be saved, because he does not embark and cross over." 
- Martin Luther.
A Treatise Concerning the Blessed Sacrament and Concerning the Brotherhoods - LW II.

Blessed are the "un-cool"

An excellent article on why worship isn't about what's cool or makes the worshippers feel cool. 

"People sometimes assume that because I’m a progressive 30-year-old who enjoys Mumford and Sons and has no children, I must want a super-hip church—you know, the kind that’s called “Thrive” or “Be” and which boasts “an awesome worship experience,” a fair-trade coffee bar, its own iPhone app, and a pastor who looks like a Jonas Brother.
While none of these features are inherently wrong, (and can of course be used by good people to do good things), these days I find myself longing for a church with a cool factor of about 0.
That’s right.
I want a church that includes fussy kids, old liturgy, bad sound, weird congregants, and…brace yourself…painfully amateur “special music” now and then.
Why?
Well, for one thing, when the gospel story is accompanied by a fog machine and light show, I always get this creeped-out feeling like someone’s trying to sell me something. It’s as though we’re all compensating for the fact that Christianity’s not good enough to stand on its own so we’re adding snacks.
But more importantly, I want to be part of an un-cool church because I want to be part of a community that shares the reputation of Jesus, and like it or not, Jesus’ favorite people in the world were not cool. They were mostly sinners, misfits, outcasts, weirdos, poor people, sick people, and crazy people.
Cool congregations can get so wrapped up in the “performance” of church that they forget to actually be the church, a phenomenon painfully illustrated by the story of the child with cerebral palsy who was escorted from the Easter service at Elevation Church for being a “distraction.”
Really?
It seems to me that this congregation was distracted long before this little boy showed up! In their self-proclaimed quest for “an explosive, phenomenal movement of God—something you have to see to believe,” they missed Jesus when he was right under their nose.
Was the paralytic man lowered from the rooftop in the middle of a sermon a distraction?
Was the Canaanite woman who harassed Jesus and his disciples about healing her daughter a distraction?
Were the blind men from Jericho who annoyed the crowd with their relentless cries a distraction?
Jesus didn’t think so. In fact, he seemed to think that they were the point.
Jesus taught us that when we throw a banquet or a party, our invitation list should include “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” So why do our church marketing teams target the young, the hip, the healthy, and the resourced?
In Bossypants (a book you should really go out and buy this very instant), Tina Fey describes working for the YMCA in Chicago soon after graduating from college. This particular YMCA included, “a great mix of high-end yuppie fitness facility, a wonderful community resource for families, and an old-school residence for disenfranchised men,” so Fey shares a host of funny stories about working the front desk. One such story involves one of the residents forgetting to take his meds, bumping into a young mom on her way to a workout session, and saying something wildly inappropriate (and very funny—you should definitely go out and get this book). Fey writes, “The young mother was beside herself. That’s the kind of trouble you get when diverse groups of people actually cross paths with one another. That’s why many of the worst things in the world happen in and around Starbucks bathrooms.”
Church can be a lot like the Y...or a Starbucks bathroom.
We have one place for the un-cool people (our ministries) and another place for the cool people (our church services). When we actually bump into one another, things can get awkward, so we try to avoid it.
It’s easy to pick on Elevation Church in this case, but the truth is we’re all guilty of thinking we’re too cool for the least of these. Our elitism shows up when we forbid others from contributing art and music because we deem it unworthy of glorifying God, or when we scoot our family an extra foot or two down the pew when the guy with Aspergers sits down. Having helped start a church, I remember hoping that our hip guests wouldn’t be turned off by our less-than-hip guests. For a second I forgot that in church, of all places, those distinctions should disappear.
Some of us wear our brokenness on the inside, others on the outside.
But we’re all broken.
We’re all un-cool.
We’re all in need of a Savior.
So let’s cut the crap, pull the plug, and have us some distracting church services… the kind where Jesus would fit right in.
Do you ever get the feeling that church is just one big show? Have you found a congregation in which Jesus and his friends would be welcome?"

From:  http://rachelheldevans.com/blessed-are-the-uncool

Why Christmas is on December 25

Biblical Archaeology Review has a good scholarly discussion of why Christmas is celebrated on December 25. And it is evidently NOT because it was superimposed on a pagan holiday:

The most loudly touted theory about the origins of the Christmas date(s) is that it was borrowed from pagan celebrations. The Romans had their mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 C.E., the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.
Despite its popularity today, this theory of Christmas’s origins has its problems. It is not found in any ancient Christian writings, for one thing. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth: The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. But early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly don’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.
It’s not until the 12th century that we find the first suggestion that Jesus’ birth celebration was deliberately set at the time of pagan feasts. A marginal note on a manuscript of the writings of the Syriac biblical commentator Dionysius bar-Salibi states that in ancient times the Christmas holiday was actually shifted from January 6 to December 25 so that it fell on the same date as the pagan Sol Invictus holiday.5 In the 18th and 19th centuries, Bible scholars spurred on by the new study of comparative religions latched on to this idea.6 They claimed that because the early Christians didn’t know when Jesus was born, they simply assimilated the pagan solstice festival for their own purposes, claiming it as the time of the Messiah’s birth and celebrating it accordingly. . . .
There are problems with this popular theory, however, as many scholars recognize. Most significantly, the first mention of a date for Christmas (c. 200) and the earliest celebrations that we know about (c. 250–300) come in a period when Christians were not borrowing heavily from pagan traditions of such an obvious character. . . . In the first few centuries C.E., the persecuted Christian minority was greatly concerned with distancing itself from the larger, public pagan religious observances, such as sacrifices, games and holidays. This was still true as late as the violent persecutions of the Christians conducted by the Roman emperor Diocletian between 303 and 312 C.E. . . . .
There is another way to account for the origins of Christmas on December 25: Strange as it may seem, the key to dating Jesus’ birth may lie in the dating of Jesus’ death at Passover. This view was first suggested to the modern world by French scholar Louis Duchesne in the early 20th century and fully developed by American Thomas Talley in more recent years.8 But they were certainly not the first to note a connection between the traditional date of Jesus’ death and his birth.
Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus diedc was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar.9 March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception.10 Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.d
This idea appears in an anonymous Christian treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which appears to come from fourth-century North Africa. The treatise states: “Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in the month of March [March 25], which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” Based on this, the treatise dates Jesus’ birth to the winter solstice.
The article goes on to document other ancient sources that associate the day of Jesus’s conception with the day of His death, going back to rabbinic Jewish texts that make similar connections.
________________________________________

Article printed from Cranach: The Blog of Veith: http://www.geneveith.com
URL to article: http://www.geneveith.com/why-christmas-is-on-december-25-2/_4074/
[1] Biblical Archaeology Review: http://www.bib-arch.org/e-features/christmas.asp#location1

The faith of the saints - which closes its eyes to see eternal light.

As we give thanks to our Lord for all the saints in Christ, one might well wonder how they remained and endured as the saints the Lord has made and kept them to be.  Such wonder is born of a faith that looks to much to the things seen.  Such saints are those who lived by faith in what the Lord said and still says to them.  To live this faith is to live beyond what is seen and experienced.  Such faith lives and abides in the living Word of God - i.e. Jesus Christ.  This is not a simple or easy faith, it “is the experience of faith, the faith that does not see, that does not understand, such faith as Luther attributes to the dying Abraham: ‘He closed his eyes and withdrew into the darkness of faith.  There he found eternal light’”  (Herman Sasse – We Confess Anthology [Jesus Christ – Theology of the Cross] p. 54.)

- pmwl

... my works are a stink in the nostrils of God

Apart from Him, my works are a stink in the nostrils of God.
Apart from Him, I am so deeply damned that I cannot even conceive the depth of my damnation.
There is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.
The world hates it when we preach this.
It will hate us as it hated the One whom we preach.
And the world is not kidding.
It will not give us a pass, but will execrate and reject us as those who disturb civil tranquility and turn the world upside down.
There is nothing quaint or tolerable about the preaching of the church about sin and grace.
There just isn't. This causes the cross of persecution to be laid upon our shoulders.
So be it.
We preach the cross of Christ so that we are empowered to bear our cross when it comes.
Now and to the ages of ages. Amen.

- not sure where this came from, but I pray the Lord may grant me such wisdom in all the throws of life. 

pmwl

A Prayer for the Treasure in a clay jar

Gracious God, heavenly Father,
You have chosen to place Your eternal treasure – Jesus Christ,
Within me, a clay jar, a broken and most weak clay jar.
While I cannot comprehend such choosing and placement,
I do gratefully pray that this blessed Treasure of Jesus Christ,
Whether He be spilt through cracks and weaknesses of my life and living,
Or He be poured forth by work of Your Spirit in my various vocations,
Grant that this Treasure may enrich the lives of all upon whom He is spilt or poured,
With a closer walk with You in faith.
Let this heaven sent Treasure be spilt upon this feeble prayer that it may be pleasing in Your sight.
Amen.

- pmwl

Are you crying for the truth and proper instruction ....?

A person may pretend to be a Christian while in reality he is not.
As long as he is in this condition, he is quite content with his knowledge of the mere outlines of the Christian doctrines…
However, the moment a person becomes a Christian, there arises in him a keen desire for the doctrine of Christ.
Even the most uncultured peasant who is still unconverted is suddenly roused in the moment of his conversion and begins to reflect on God and heaven, salvation and damnation, etc.
He becomes occupied with the highest problems of human life.
An instance of this kind is afforded by those Jews who flocked to Christ and also by the apostles. Those multitudes heard Christ with great joy and were astonished because He preached with authority and not as did the scribes.
But the majority of these hearers never advanced beyond a certain feeling of delight and admiration.
The apostles, too, were uneducated people, but they acted differently.
They did not stop where the rest stopped, but propounded all manner of questions to Christ…
It is, therefore, quite true what the Apology to the Augsburg Confession says: “Men of good conscience are crying for the truth and proper instruction from the Word of God” … (Mueller, p. 191; Triglot Concordia, p. 290).

—C. F. W. Walther

Treasury of Daily Prayer (Kindle Locations 24221-24226). Concordia Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

bad sermons ...

 This is a repost from a blog: http://letitstet.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/bad-sermons/

It is written by a lay person who is fed up with preachers trying to be something other than the Lord called them to be in the hopes that they'll get done what they Lord called them to do.  Enjoy!

There have been a lot of bad sermons in the world.
Sermons about the Packers’ score, unicorns, global warming, lands of make-believe, funny stories that really aren’t funny at all, and a lot of other topics that leave parishioners willing Jesus to come back before the sermon is over just to make the insanity stop.I’m not a pastor. I don’t know how hard it is to write ten minutes of theological genius each Sunday. I don’t know the sheep in the pew and what they need to hear.
But here is what I do know: pastors have, at best, one hour for church and ten minutes to pack all the Gospely goodness they can into a sermon.
They have ten minutes to cut those of us listening down with Law, apply the sweet salve of the Gospel, and to give us Jesus . . . again and again and again.
This other stuff is all superfluous. It’s filler. It’s what one of my favorite professors said:
This fill-in-the-blank bit is the in thing. (1) It is too late. We all know about it already. (2) It is a Gospel substitute. (3) The world is perishing.
And as if that isn’t reason enough, and although I may not be a pastor, I do know that taking up five minutes of those precious ten describing the latest YouTube video (which I already saw, thanks), recounting the newest movie (which I wouldn’t be caught dead seeing), telling us your kids’ soccer score (which I don’t care about), or attempting to create a bad analogy (which falls apart horribly moments later) is unnecessary and unhelpful.
And let’s be honest: it’s also a waste of time. If I want to watch YouTube videos, I’ll stay home in my office. If I want to see a movie, I’ll go to the theater. If I want to watch a soccer game, I’ll go to one. If I want to hear bad analogies, I’ll argue with someone.
But if it’s Jesus I need, and it is, I’ll go to church. And I’m counting on the pastor there to deliver the goods, the goods that the Internet, the theater, sports, and the world can’t.
I’m not a pastor. I don’t know anything about sermons.
But I am a Lutheran, and I do know this: It ain’t rocket science, and it’s not an atomic secret.
So spare me the Packers’ score, unicorns, global warming, lands of make-believe, and funny stories that really aren’t funny at all, and give me the one thing needful: Just give me Jesus.

... man putting himself at the center of everything.

In his book Worldviews: A Christian Response to Religious Pluralism, Anthony J. Steinbronn writes,

“According to Stott (Between Two Worlds), the missionary task is -

‘faithfully to translate the Word of God into modern language and thought-categories, and to make it present in our day.  However, if we are to build bridges into the real world, and seek to relate the Word of God to the major themes of life and the major issues of the day, then we have to take seriously both the biblical text and the contemporary scene … Only then shall we discern the connections between them and be able to speak the divine Word to the human situation with any degree of sensitivity and accuracy.’

At the heart of this bridge-building activity is a threefold commitment by those who are serious about making disciples of all nations: (1) studying God’s Word; (2) studying one’s target culture; and (3) discerning and constructing missiological bridges that communicate the apostolic message into the hearts and minds of the hearer because “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).”  (Kindle Locations 154-163).

In the study of our culture, Steinbronn identifies what I believe to be the foundation upon all that drives and authorizes much of our culture.  I fear that it is the same thing that is behind and drives the exodus from the true church for the non-denominational churches and gives rise to those who confess to being “spiritual” but not “religious”. 
What is it? HUMANISM!   Steinbronn goes on:

“What Is Humanism? There are three basic humanistic principles that provide the core assumptions of humanism:

NATURALISM – the rejection of the supernaturalist worldview that understands God as the ultimate source of all existence and value.
ANTHROPOCENTRISM - Reuben Abel traces the origin of modern anthropocentric thought to an assertion by Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. (See Reuben Abel, Man is the Measure, New York: Free Press, 1997.)
SCIENTISM – the view that science is the measure of what exists and of what does not exist. Since the Enlightenment period, the Christian truth-claims have had diminishing effectiveness for many people, partly because they have seemed inconsistent with the understanding of the world in modern science.

• Humanism is a system whereby man, beginning absolutely by himself, tries rationally to build out of himself, having only man as his integration point, to find all knowledge, meaning, and value.
• It is ‘the effort of modern man to find the meaning of his life in his own purposes or in his own communities and historical causes.’  Glover, Biblical Origins of Modern Secular Culture, 109.
• In a thoroughly anthropocentric world, there is no room left for God.
• The world spirit of our age, observed Francis Schaeffer, is autonomous man setting himself up as God in defiance of the knowledge and moral and spiritual truth that God has given.
• Humanism is freedom from “any restraint, and especially from God’s truth and moral absolutes.” Schaeffer, Great Evangelical Disaster, 315.
• Humanism, in its most fundamental expression, is man putting himself at the center of everything.

Worldviews: A Christian Response to Religious Pluralism
Anthony J. Steinbronn, (2007-01-01).
Concordia Publishing House. Kindle Edition. (Kindle Locations 439-444).

As much as we need to understand this humanism, it is critical that we understand it to be the most pure, raw and unleashed form of the old man born of original sin in the drivers seat.  As such it is all part of the first illusion Satan cast for Adam and Eve - that they could be like God.  
Truly there is nothing new under the sun. 
May the Lord grant us the wisdom of His Word and Spirit to articulate His Law so as to put the old man to death so that we might speak His Gospel by which He might resurrect a new life in all. 

- pmwl