The Faith To Love

 

Text: Ephesians 3:14-21

Focus: Faith

Function: To see how it takes faith to love

¹⁴For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, ¹⁵from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. ¹⁶I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit ¹⁷and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. ¹⁸I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth ¹⁹and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

²⁰Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, ²¹to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Good morning and blessings to all of you!

Today, we are going to talk about faith and how faith helps us love and how the sacrifices of love that we make are the logical steps of us growing in the Love and faith of Christ Jesus.

So, I titled the sermon, The Faith to Love, because it takes faith to love and live sacrificially like Jesus has called us to do for him and on behalf of the for which Jesus gave his live, So that we may be restored to God.

That may seem odd to you, saying that it takes faith to love.

But love is more than the feeling of emotion that we get when we are with someone we like, those are mental and biochemical reactions that God has given us to bring us that sense of belonging in God’s beloved community.

The great Chapter on Love in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13 has perhaps a more accurate translation for the word translated as love, Agape, in the Greek of the New Testament in the King James Translation. The King James translates it as Charity.

And when we think of Charity, we think of giving alms to the poor. But again, Charity means more than that: I describe this charity as an attitude of mercy from the heart towards someone else. And the mercy is holistic. I mean, it is partly physical, caring for their needs. But it is also spiritual, caring for their souls and their relationship with God, and of course, it is also emotional in the way that it cares for the well being of the other individual.

Charity is empathetic. I mean, that it seeks to get to know the other and to understand them and their humanity. That happens because love, or Charity, a heart of mercy, sees the divine in everyone and everything and knows that since God is present in everything, the redeeming power of God’s love is here and present with us.

The Apostle John said that if I have not love, same word, agape, then I do not know God. It says that if I hate someone, I do not belong to God.

And if I have the resources to help someone less fortunate and I harden my heart to their needs, or merely tell them I am going to pray for them, then I am not walking in the Love or Charity or Mercy that God wants me to have.

So, what about this faith to love?

Yesterday at Kairos, we spent the day retreat focusing on what I believe to be the most important spiritual discipline, Forgiveness.

Without forgiveness, it can be impossible to be merciful and loving.

But forgiveness can be very difficult.

I was spiritually and emotionally abused by an arrogant preacher when I was 14. He condemned all of us people who are not sure of who we are sexually and accused us as the reason why God will turn his back on America and give it over to the commies.

It was a sermon, by the way, about Christian nationalism and white supremacy.

But since I was abducted and raped at 11 years of age, when this man ranted on about his own fear of others sexuality, condemning them, I was lead to believe that I too was condemned.

I don’t know what trauma was worse, the rape, or the overwhelming shame that this so called preacher laid on me.

So, as you can hear by me calling him arrogant and a so called preacher, forgiveness for this man is difficult.

And if it is hard for me, it can be very hard for the men who are incarcerated, especially those who are innocent or victims of the color of their skin or harmless use of Marijuana.

My problem is that I suffer PTSD because of the incident and without treatment, I will spend my entire day in a state of panic. And when that monster surfaces its ugly head in my life, I am reminded of the abuse and then I need to forgive again.

It takes faith to forgive. Because in order to forgive, I have to trust in a God, or The God who promises to set everything back to the right.

And I have to rest in the fairness of God’s judgment.

This can be hard.

Because we are forgiven to the extent that we forgive.

And when we have been truly wronged with no recourse for vindication, we have to rest in the ultimate fairness of God’s judgment.

God judges with mercy. God has judged me with mercy and according to out text today has blessed all of us beyond what we deserve and has made it possible for us to live an abundant life as promised in John 3:16..

I am glad I wrote this sermon before I left for Kairos yesterday because it reminded me that the power and the strength to forgive do not come from me or from the strength of my will but they come from God and the power of the Holy Spirit working in our lives.

God does this.

We concede to let God give us the power and the strength to forgive.

My prayer is often this when someone has harmed me and I have to forgive them: “Lord, do not get even with them on my behalf, but give to them the same mercy that you have given me.”

For me, the faith to do this comes from faith in the love of God.

I started to write the mercy of God. But the mercy of God is based in God’s love for us.

And it was proven by the fact that God’s representative, Jesus Christ, suffered without revenge on those who killed him, even forgiving them in them during his own torture.

God does this in us, not we ourselves. We make a simple choice with a simple prayer: “God forgive them as you have forgiven me.”

And for me, it is the gentle process of God’s Spirit leading me, time and time again. And then I notice the pain lessens and I begin to understand my enemies in this situation.

I preached yesterday at Kairos that forgiveness is a spiritual discipline that requires practice. When we pray for the one we are having a hard time forgiving, our attitude begins to change and it might even change them.

When we quit criticizing them and speak blessings, our spirit changes toward them.

And then, maybe we can understand them.

It was funny for me that I preached on this subject to the men at Kairos because I was having an issue with unforgiveness myself. I was deeply hurt by someone in a debate about how we Christians are called to love the other and are commanded to take up the cause of the oppressed. It became somewhat a political discussion, but then it got ugly and the person began wounding me, instead of my argument and I was deeply hurt.

And as I was preparing my Kairos talk, they texted me, and the Holy Spirit revealed my hypocrisy and called me to repent for my unforgiveness. And as I spent the night awake praying about it, God showed me the other person’s fear and anxiety. I was able to see the other side of the argument. And it make forgiveness much easier.

The Holy Spirit will lead us that way.

And so now I think about what I called “that arrogant preacher and I realize that it was not as much arrogance but was fear. Fear causes most prejudice.

But fear is something the Holy Spirit can overcome and I believe in the power of prayer at times like this.

Paul tells us in this passage that we are truly blessed by the power of the Spirit in our lives.

Let us live in communion with her.

Secure

 

Text: Ephesians 1:3-14

Focus: Security of the believer

Function: to help build our faith in the promises of God

^3-6How blessed is God! And what a blessing he is! He’s the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.

^7-10Because of the sacrifice of the Messiah, his blood poured out on the altar of the Cross, we’re a free people—free of penalties and punishments chalked up by all our misdeeds. And not just barely free, either. Abundantly free! He thought of everything, provided for everything we could possibly need, letting us in on the plans he took such delight in making. He set it all out before us in Christ, a long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up in him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on planet earth.

^11-12It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone.

^13-14It’s in Christ that you, once you heard the truth and believed it (this Message of your salvation), found yourselves home free—signed, sealed, and delivered by the Holy Spirit. This down payment from God is the first installment on what’s coming, a reminder that we’ll get everything God has planned for us, a praising and glorious life.

Good Morning and welcome to a celebration of what it means for us to be secure, to be held in the hand of our God and then to know that we are safe because God loves us.

In theological circles, doctrinally, I have referred to this passage as “The Baptist Passage.”

I am not going to say anything bad about Baptists, they are our brothers and sisters in Christ and they too are full of the Holy Spirit and bear the image of Christ to the world.

And there is a lot we owe to them as they worked through the theology of the New Testament and came up with their framework of theology.

One of the tenants of it comes from the way they understand this passage and the use in the King James of Predestined and in the RSV of Destined as if there are a group of people that God has called be the elect and the saved and there is a group of people to whom God has not given that favor.

And I am not going to bore you with the depths of the argument but suffice it to say that it gives us a springboard for lively discussions in theological circles.

About being predestined: It seems that verses 11 and 12 tell us that God knew what choices we would make. The choice is whether or not to allow the Spirit of God to guide us or to go our own way and sever the connection that God has with us through the Spirit of God.

So, to me, it is not predestined but that God knew beforehand what choices we would make and has ordered the circumstances in our lives accordingly.

But the argument is a what came first argument, the chicken or the egg, faith or works and I believe that God looks at the heart and knows whether or not we want to love others or put ourselves first.

I read this from the Message translation in order to get a sense of what God is saying to us in the passage without the color of the word destined or predestined.

I did that because the salient verse comes when in the Revised Standard version it says that “God choose us in love.” Or according to our text, God made us in love.

The translation The Message bears out this concept of love over predestination very well.

And it is important to remember that the author is telling us that God’s motivating value is Love.

In Love, God made us.

God is Love.

And we are and were made in love.

I praise God that the theme of this years Annual Conference was Worthy and Welcome.

Carol and I heard a sermon on Friday night about this very thing, that God created us in love and we are indeed worthy of God’s love regardless of what color, race, religion or gender with which we identify.

And then we were given an opportunity to respond and be anointed with Frankincense as a symbol of how the Holy Spirit has indeed filled us and accepted us into God's family.

And again, as I seem to mention every Sunday because it is in the text, Paul comes back to one of my favorite themes: It is important for us to become spiritual people by focusing on the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives now that we have trusted in Christ to restore us to God and to each other.

He reminds them of the importance of this in the last verses of our passage: “...delivered by the Holy Spirit. This down payment from God is the first installment on what’s coming….”

He calls the Holy Spirit the Down Payment from God. He reminds us that this Christian life is a journey with God through this earth and is a gift to us from God for us to get to know God and God’s creation.

As I was praying over the text through the week and preparing to write my sermon on Saturday, my thoughts kept coming back to the experiences I had during the late 70’s through the 90’s in what was known as the Charismatic movement.

We certainly experienced a level of joy and a sense of belonging as we worshiped God together with our eyes closed and our hands raised in worship.

The feeling of closeness to God at times was a real blessing.

There were a few times when just as this passage describes, while in worship we focused on the Cross of Christ and the demonstration of his love for us and Christ’s willingness to live for us by dying for us, and then raising from the dead that I too experienced an overwhelming sense of God’s love and power that filled me with hope.

I must admit that it has almost always been tied to my willingness to forgive others with the Holy Spirit’s help.

And I don’t want to base my Christian faith solely on feelings because they can be misleading.

But Paul is talking about the sense of forgiveness and acceptance that we feel from God when we believe that good news, the gospel, that Jesus does love us and has provided the way for all of creation to be reconciled to God.

I guess the I call it being saved. It is the experience I had when I felt forgiven and restored to God. It happened for me when I prayed “Lord Jesus, please come into my heart and restore me to you.” I used the words “forgive me,’” but I think God understood the meaning. I wanted to be delivered from my shame and be free.

And God did it.

Paul calls it the down payment of God to us. And I believe it is there to remind us that God loves us and is with us. We belong to God now.

As I was thinking about those days when the Spirit moved during our praise and worship, I was asking God how to make the Spirit move in our midst again.

And then I believe God answered with the subtle reminder that the Holy Spirit moves like the wind and we cannot manipulate God.

God reminded me that moving in our midst is the result of His Spirit’s power, not mine.

So as we close remember that in Love God chose You. God is love and God created you to be loved by God. Let the freedom of that understanding bless you and fill you and deliver you from all shame.

We Belong Together

Text: Ephesians 2:11-22

Focus: Belonging together

Function: To see how God crossed racial boundaries to include us, we should do it as well.

¹¹So then, remember that at one time you gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a circumcision made in the flesh by human hands— ¹²remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. ¹³But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. ¹⁴For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us, ¹⁵abolishing the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, ¹⁶and might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. ¹⁷So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near, ¹⁸for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. ¹⁹So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, ²⁰built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone; ²¹in him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, ²²in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

Good Morning!

I am delighted that you gave Carol and I the opportunity to attend the Church of the Brethren Annual Conference. I found the Spirit of Christ alive and well there and have come home with a lot of hope for the future of this congregation and the future of the Church as an whole.

One of the things happening in the denomination and our district specifically is an initiative to stand with People of Color.

I haven’t said a lot about it because of the makeup of Darke County demographics.

However, I believe that it is naive to think that we do not come into contact with people of color.

I don’t know about you, but I was raised, in the Church, to be afraid of black people.

Anyway, our District brought a query to Annual Conference a few years ago and the result of it was a class I took in how to talk to congregations and people about what it is like to be raised in our culture as a person of color.

Remember, God has called us to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with Him.

Understanding the differences between the races and the motivations and hope of the different cultures will help us to become the peacemakers that Jesus calls us to be.

So, let us consider our text for today:

The text focuses on the importance of breaking down racial barriers.

I believe, or I hope that this passage is Paul explaining the epiphany he has about racism.

If we know the history of Paul, he was a very strict Jew. And Jews were not allowed any fellowship or partnership with us Gentiles.

Paul, while he was still called Saul, believed that the only way to salvation was to follow the rules set forth in the OT and codified in the Talmud. It ended up to be about 13,000 rules.

And he was strict and taught it and even had people who didn’t believe like him put to death. And on a journey to lock up more of us Christians, Jesus appears to him in a vision that blinds him and reveals to him that he was actually fighting against God.

He was passionate about his faith and it is important to understand that one of the principle tenants of that faith is this feeling of ethnic exceptionalism as if they are better than anyone else because of God’s revelation to them specifically. DON’T MIX THE RACES! That was the rule. If you do, then God will allow them to lead you away from God into idolatry.

The only way to keep the religion pure is to keep it racially pure.

Paul mentions this racial pride in the way that the Jewish people referred to others as “the uncircumcised.” it was demeaning language. Demeaning language used to enable the feelings of prejudice that come from meeting people who look different than us.

The sinful words like: the N word, Illegals, and during Vietnam, Gook, and other words are used so that we don’t see the humanity of the other and see them as valuable in the eyes of God.

But as Christians, we know that God created everything and is in everything and that means that God, the image of God, is in every single human that we meet. Even in those who might feel like an enemy.

In this passage, Paul rejoices at what it means to be in the family of God.

And I had to rewrite this after David’s text this morning about belonging to a family in a Church setting. We belong together.

Now, the theology behind it expressed in this passage is pretty cool.

It says that Christ, through his sacrifice, became our peace and broke down those dividing walls that were so important to him in his racial pride..

And the purpose was to make out of all humanity one people who are no longer divided and tribal, but loving and caring toward the world entire.

And, in that theology, he says that Christ through the sacrifice did away with all those rules that were guiding Paul in the past and have set him free to be able to love and care for others regardless of his race or their race.

There is something to be emphasized here. The law is gone.

The law, especially the OT law, seems to me to be a law of retribution. In the New Testament, the new law, the royal law, according to James is the law of love and it focuses on restoration.

Jesus came to restore the world to God.

Paul, in this passage, is rejoicing about the extent of that restoration. It goes beyond the narrow confines of one group who has an exceptional history to the world entire.

When I read this passage, I almost feel like Paul is greatly relieved to be a part of something much bigger than the politics of one particular nation.

Paul is now called by God to be part of restoring the world entire to God.

That is also part of our mission as we are called to represent Christ and be Christ’s peacemakers.

I am trying to learn to give up dualistic thinking, this “us and them” mentality and realize that we all must strive together for the good of humanity.

Of course, it affects the way I vote. Instead of voting for what is best for me personally regardless of how it affects others or the environment, I try to vote for what is good for all of us instead of just me.

But most importantly, it affects the way I treat the other person.

I am trying to see the humanity and sincerity of those on the other side. I pray that I can help them overcome their fears and vote the love of God for all.

And his conclusion to the revelation that God gives him is praise to God and his repeated mention of the power of the Holy Spirit.

He says the proof of this unity is the way the Holy Spirit fills everyone regardless of race.

It happened in the Book of Acts the 10^th chapter when the Spirit feel on the Roman Centurion’s household while Peter was preaching to them about Jesus.

It was proof of this new way of loving and dealing with others.

And the Spirit leads us to this place where we belong. Where we are accepted and are now part of the fellowship of the family of God that transcends the world,

We are indeed a global family and are called to bring the peace of Christ to this global community.