John 21:19-24 - Using the Gifts We’ve Been Given

We fudged a little this week and added verse 18 so we knew what Jesus was telling Peter. After asking Peter three times if he loved Him, Jesus repeatedly told Peter to feed His lambs or sheep. How many times do we have to be told that’s what we are supposed to do if we love Jesus? Throughout Luther’s sermons, he says the way we love God best is by loving our neighbor. FEED MY SHEEP! Have we learned anything yet? And then Jesus told Peter what kind of death he was going to glorify God. That’s an interesting way to put it. Glorifying God in our death? Is this physical death or spiritual death to the life our flesh desires or thinks is best? How will we glorify God, whether it’s physical, fleshly, or living? Jesus says, “Follow me.” How do we do this? How do we follow Jesus when He cannot be seen? Luther says by being the best we can be – if you are a husband or a wife, best the best husband or wife you can be. If you haven’t been specifically called to use your gifts in the ministry of the church, you be the best spouse, child, parent, laborer, employer, etc. that you can possibly be. This is how we glorify God until we see Jesus calling us to follow Him in another direction. He won’t pull us away from being a good spouse in order to follow Him. If church work or sacred acts are conflicting with our ability to be a good spouse, parent, or other, we should spend less time with the religious stuff that really doesn’t do anything for God anyway. We love God when we love our neighbor, spouse, child, friend, etc. We also don’t need to be trying to be someone we are not. That does no good to try to be someone else. God has given us gifts, formed us in our mother’s womb for a specific plan that will bring glory to God. If we deviate from that plan, we won’t experience the kind of joy the Father planned for us. So how in the world do we know what “plan” to follow? Peace. Three early church fathers, separate from each other, in different centuries, came up with similar methods of discerning the spirits. In a nutshell, follow the path that brings peace deep inside you. If a choice creates anxiety, distress, unrest, uncertainty, hesitation, or desire for worldly gain – that’s not a desire in line with God’s will. On the other hand, when making a choice you find a sense of calmness, interior peace, confidence, attraction to God in all things – these are movements of good desires. Many times “no decision” is a decision, and a good one. More time may be needed for God’s answer to surface, so one can follow Jesus. One of the main themes of this passage is that Jesus tells Peter he is to use the gifts he has been given and not worry about what God has planned for others. Keep your focus on what God is calling you to do and do it well. It’s none of your business if another disciple appears to have fewer sacrifices to make or won’t die a violent death, but you will. People are not content with their own work, and complain that someone else has it better. God’s plan is perfect and each has his or her own part in it. Blessings - PWM

John 20:19-31 Jesus Appears to his Disciples & Thomas

This has been a hectic week. Vacations tend to make the following week busy. And since I downloaded Internet Explorer 8, it's messed up my pasting into this blog. Time burns faster than fuel. In this lesson, we spent time talking about Jesus breathing on the the disciples, saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit. Whosover sins you forgive, they are forgiven. Whosoever sins you retain, they are retained." To forgive means 'to let go.' Does this mean we are in control of giving out God's forgiveness or our own? Some thought letting go of the wrongs others commit against us brings us peace and unburdens us of the wrongs we feel others have done to us or their neighbors. Some thought forgiveness was more for our benefit than the benefit of the forgiven. This may be true, but Luther said that the giving of forgiveness is not for the benefit of God, the church, or the individual, but for the receiver only. To know the offenses you have committed against someone are completely forgiven is more likely to make you return to that person to attempt a relationship than if you felt there was something you owed. Isn't that what might attract more people to God - to hear they are forgiven without qualification, without payment, without obligation to pay back once you got in the door? Why aren't more people attracted to the church today? Is the church an image of forgiveness? Brother Martin says our only law is love. There are too many Lutherans who disagree with him. Thomas is known and minimized for his doubting attitude, but is that the point? After all, the other ten disciples had seen, heard, and touched Jesus a week earlier, and this was the only reason for their belief. Thomas simply asked for the same evidence. Maybe Jesus wanted a teaching event because he wouldn't be able to hang around for two thousand years - especially since he was fully human - so everyone could see him. And yet, we do see, hear, and touch Jesus in tactile ways now through the body of Christ and its members. That's why it's important for us to share the times we know Christ's presence in and through each other - so people will hear us talking and claiming to have seen him, and they will also want to see him. People are blessed when they believe without seeing, but Jesus seems willing to comply even with those who want evidence. Just ask. Luther pointed out that Jesus does not break down doors to get to us. By this he means he doesn't change the outward affairs of government or nature, but in orderly appearing to us. Jesus never forces his way into our hearts.We come to him because we have heard he is kind, able to help us, and willing to help us. As the body of Christ, is this the image we are giving? Peace in Christ - PWM

John 16:23-30 - The Practice of Prayer

“In that day”, the day Jesus is talking about is when he returns from the grave, the resurrection, when their grief will be turned to joy. In that day the disciples will no longer ask him for anything because they will know that Jesus has opened the door of relationship/communication with the Father and they can go directly to the Almighty with their requests. The reason they had not asked anything in Jesus’ name yet was because he had not made them righteous in God’s sight in the crucifixion, and until the resurrection / receiving of the Holy Spirit, they had not trusted completely that He was the Son of God, Mediator to the Father.

Luther finds five requisites for true prayer in this text. First, the foundation for prayer is the promise of God to hear and answer it. Why would anyone approach God with requests if they did not believe God could provide an answer? And since the promise has been made, Luther questions why anyone would fail to take advantage of the riches offered since God is more willing to give, and even more than we ask.

The second requisite is faith by in the individual that the promise is true. This may be obvious, but it may be the reason why many people don’t pray. They don’t have faith that God will be true to God’s promises. Yet, faith is a gift from the Holy Spirit, so how can we criticize those who don’t pray? If you haven’t been given the gift of faith, why would you pray? So, if you have been given the gift of faith, then why not pray for high and lofty things? Like Elijah, who prayed that it not rain for 3 years – he became lord of the clouds! By faith. Our trust grows when we taste the sweetness of God’s promise in seeing prayers answered (1-#6).

We talked about answers to pray that help us to grow in our confidence in prayers being answered. Weeks ago, our church prayed for a preschool mom who had an inoperable brain tumor. Yesterday, she found out it was gone. What happened to it? She said to thank our church for praying for her. God is glorified when we proclaim the power of prayer and give evidence for God’s presence and power and activity in our world today.

A third requisite for prayer is to be specific in naming what we want. Jesus taught us to pray for specific things in the Lord’s Prayer. And we pray for needs, not necessarily frills. I suppose the more specific we are in our requests, the more clearly we can see God’s answers, and yet we can’t tie God’s hands with time limits, etc. One of our participants said her brother was very sick with a painful ailment, partially self-inflicted, and was living with her after her husband died. And she was praying that God would take him because she was so distressed about his discomfort. One day when she was at work, he fell asleep and dropped a cigarette, which burned down her house and killed him. She felt like she’d prayed for the wrong thing, and lost her house as a part of that ‘answered’ prayer. Maybe we should be careful what we pray for? Yes, but also what good came out of having to move? She moved out of Chicago to western KY where she’s in a wonderful neighborhood and gets to fish whenever she wants. Didn’t it all turn out good?

The fourth requisite is that our prayers arise from the depths of our soul that reveals the true desires within us, not just spoken words that are read from a page. The words are important to start the process, but our deepest needs are offered in wordless prayers in which the Spirit intercedes for us and which we cannot even speak. That’s pretty deep desire. Yet this is the truest prayer.

The fifth requisite is that we ask in the name of Christ. What he means by this is that we ask, knowing that nothing we have done or can do makes us worthy to approach the Almighty. But we ask, knowing that Christ has interceded for us, and God hears because we love Christ, the Son. Those who pray long, beautiful, and many prayers merit nothing. It is only because we trust our prayers will be answered for the Son’s sake and not our own sake that makes us worthy to receive answers.

Overall, the more we pray, the more we see the promises of God are true. So our faith grows in proportion to our prayers. Start praying, and don’t stop. Blessings, PWM