The Power of Mercy

 

Text: Luke 18:9-14

Focus: Humility

Function: To remind people that mercy comes from God.

⁹He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ¹⁰“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. ¹²I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ ¹³But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ ¹⁴I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Good morning to the beloved Children of God!

May the peace of Christ dwell in your hearts and minds now and always.

This is a passage on humility.

I want to remind you of a life verse that we should all employ: Micah 6:8: He has shown you, mortal man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: Do justice, Love mercy and walk humbly with your God.

I like preaching the positive side of things. But there is a contrast here between the two men who are praying and the text points it out.

Jesus told us to keep our faith focused on ourselves by not judging others, but he also gives us these two people for a moral comparison.

The Pharisee was proud and trusted in his own self to save himself. The Tax Collector humbled himself in the presence of God.

Walking humbly with God is difficult for me. I too, like the rest of us, wrestle with my own pride. It is important for us to have a good self image because God commands us to love others the way we love ourselves and if we don’t love ourselves, we have a hard time showing love to others.

So it is a difficult balance to maintain an healthy self image and not be proud.

I believe it happens when we spend time in prayer and contemplation.

Both men were praying, but somehow, I get the feeling that the tax collector from our story has become aware of the presence of God and God’s majesty and realizes that in the presence of God, humanity pales in comparison.

It goes back to Proverbs saying that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. That doesn’t mean that God’s is inherently evil or temperamental and can’t be trusted because God is subject to human impulses, but it means that when we get a sense of God’s majesty in prayer and contemplation, we are reminded the fact the God is God and we are not god.

Sometimes in prayer and contemplation, we get struck with a sense of God’s presence that overwhelms us because of its awesomeness. Sometimes when we are singing, I feel that closeness of God calling us to God.

I don’t mean to rest my faith on feelings but when we read of the encounters with God in the scriptures that people had, it was always a life changing experience because of the awesomeness of God.

The Holy Spirit wants to lead and guide and direct our lives. And we know the leading of the Spirit because the Spirit of God is leading us to love others like Jesus does.

The Tax Collector was honest about his own shortcomings before God. Instead the Pharisee tried to appease his conscience by reminding God of all the good that he thought he was doing.

And it appears that all that he was doing comparing himself to others and then when he failed in comparison he made up for it with his own works of religious devotion.

It seems that he feel into the classic trap of trying to earn God’s favor by doing religious deeds as a cover up for his arrogance and pride.

His sin was pride. He said, “I thank you I am not like these…”

He didn’t stop to consider his own position before God and his own need. I try to tell people in the Church to not look at me because I am not perfect. No one is perfect unless we draw on the Christ within us. Otherwise at times, we I will fail each other even though we have the best intentions in our hearts because we are loving people in the power of the Spirit.

As a people, we hold on to the ideal of Jesus as a man who lived his life selflessly for others in order to please God.

And we strive to live a life that reflects that same kind of love for others that Jesus shared. But even though we have come to God and let the Spirit of God have control of our lives, we sometimes fail and let others down and there is no excuse for our behavior. We need forgiveness from God.

And God forgives.

I thank God that I serve in a forgiving church that knows how to make allowances for each other, just as we are commanded.

But I wonder if the reason the Pharisee didn’t find the Spirit’s leading to accept mercy is because he was too proud to accept mercy.

We are called to walk in humility before God as we love others.

It appears that the Pharisee thought he was too good to need saving and believed it was his duty to remind God how pious he was.

But Piety, without a heart of humility that strives for justice and loves the idea of mercy is what the Holy Spirit brings into our souls.

Resting In Peace

 

Text: Philippians 4:4-9

Focus: Thanksgiving

Function: to help us see the way of peace

⁴Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. ⁵Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. ⁶Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. ⁷And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

⁸Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. ⁹As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.

Good morning to the beloved Children of God!

May Christ’s peace fill your heart and mind as we study the scriptures.

Joy, peace, gentleness, confidence and beauty, these are the themes of the scripture this morning.

It seems to me that Brother Paul is sharing with the Philippian church part of his own spiritual practices. He ends the passage with the admonition that they imitate him in the way they live their lives.

When I think of the history of Paul the Missionary, I see him as a very bold preacher who was willing to endure a lot of hardship in order to plant the churches across the Western world.

That appears to be Paul in his public life. This passage appears to me to be glimpse into his private life and the source of the power that kept him going.

Again, this sermon reminds me of my Kairos sermon in two weeks where it is my job to give the men some spiritual tools to continue in the faith in the difficult prison environment.

Jesus was meek, but not weak. And it takes strength and faith to be meek and not weak. I believe he got that from the Holy Spirit also because he spent a lot of time away in prayer.

He first calls us to allow our joy to flow. Even going beyond allowing it in, he calls us to rejoice in God and to have joy in God.

I believe that part of our worship, the singing, is a direct response to the command to rejoice. When we are singing, we are reminding ourselves of the goodness of God and our obligation to please God with our lives by loving others.

But beyond signing, we have the choice to allow ourselves to be joyful, or we have the choice to allow ourselves to be bitter. Now, I’m not talking about people who are depressed. God heals depression in God’s way and time. I found it through a combination of prayer, contemplation, medication and therapy.

But beyond depression, Paul is telling us not to resist joy, but to let it flow. I find joy to be a part of my relationship with the Spirit. Sometimes, as God gently speaks to me, I feel that joy well up inside of me. Let it flow, it comes from God.

The next command is to be gentle.

I believe this is an offshoot of living by faith. We trust that God is loving us and caring for us, so we don’t have to react with anger, malice or fear. God loves us and wants what their best for us.

I once preached a whole sermon on cussing based on this verse. We shouldn’t need to swear when things go bad because God is in control and swearing might indicate we don’t believe that.

Now, I’m not trying to get you hung up on saying or not saying curse words. Don’t be sin focused. Be faith focused. When bad things happen, take it to God in prayer and then the anger and fear that we feel reside inside will diminish and perhaps we will be able to respond in faith instead of fear.

I am reminded that this is a process in our lives.

But it sure makes a difference when I am rideshare driving and somebody cuts me off to remind myself that God is still watching out for me and to let it go.

I am learning to allow that peace to control me.

And Paul is not flippant about the solution. He says take it all to the Lord in prayer.

Jesus went away all the time to pray.

In the garden of Gethsemane, we get a rare glimpse into his prayer as he prays that God will give him the strength to endure.

Jesus succeeded I n h is mission, we may not because we are not perfect. But let God’s grace forgive and sustain you by remembering that we are now the beloved Children of God and God loves it when we pray to Them.

And Paul gives is a promise that might happen when we pray sincerely. God’s peace will work supernaturally. I love the Hymn “It is well with my soul.” My family always sings it at the deathside of loved ones and at funerals as well as other times.

I remember experiencing supernatural peace when my Grandmother died and while everyone was sitting at the wake, before the funeral started, someone started singing that song and the congregation joined in and I remember as we were singing that peace of God just flooded me in my heart and the sorrow at her death was transformed into the hope of the resurrection.

Paul admonishes us to rest in God instead of fear. Fear is opposed to faith, or better yet, faith conquers fear and this is a function of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Faith comes to us from God and like Joy, we allow it to give us hope or we can reject it.

So, that is the first paragraph of our text and it is basically about prayer. Paul then moves on to worship in the next paragraph.

Let your mind focus on beauty and the arts. Let your mind focus on the glory of nature and the wonder of what God has given humans to do.

I remember sitting in the theater opening night of the movie Chicago in our small town. I remember being fascinated by the music and the stage performance and enjoying it so thoroughly that I wept for joy. And this scripture verse came to mind as I appreciated the beauty that we can experience in the arts.

And we experience it in creation. For billions of years God has been testifying to their glory through the wonder of nature. When we are in nature, we are connected to the source of life that God has given us and as the scriptures say, we witness God’s glory.

Prayer and worship in our personal lives is a path for us to live out the peace that Christ has for us.

What If?

 

Text: 2 Timothy 2:8-15

Focus: security

Function: to help people see that God keeps us

⁸Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel, ⁹for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained. ¹⁰Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. ¹¹The saying is sure:

If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
¹²if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
¹³if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
he cannot deny himself.

¹⁴Remind them of this, and warn them before the Lord that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. ¹⁵Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.

Good morning to the beloved Children of God!

May the peace of Christ fill your hearts and minds always.

This passage of scripture is taken from a pastoral letter written by Paul to Timothy, his young apprentice and helper in the missionary work that he did.

As the intro states, Paul writes this letter from prison where God is allowing him to give a testimony about the sincerity of his faith through his imprisonment.

And he states that he is willing to do it because when he preaches about Jesus’s way of living people find the healing and restoration provided by God through the Holy Spirit. It’s a supernatural transformation brought about by God’s spirit inside of us.

And this text for today focuses on what appears to be a song sung by the early church. Each line starts with an IF, so I titled the sermon, What If? The song goes like this:

¹²if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
¹³if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
he cannot deny himself.

This is a beautiful song. Let us unpack it a bit.

It is a song about the security we have in Christ since we have placed our faith in him.

In the first line: “if we endure with him…” Paul is comforted, it appears, by the song since he is in chains for the gospel, he is willing to endure because he believes that God has a reward for him based on his faithfulness.

Although the song is filled with grace that we will get to in this little speech of mine, it does come with a warning about denying Christ.

He says that if we deny him, he will return the favor and deny us. But as we unpack that concept, we remember grace and the fact that Peter denied that he knew Christ 3 times and Christ 3 times recommissioned him to establish a community that would care for everyone.

Still, grace aside, they sang that line as a warning to continue to trust Christ.

By denying him, I believe he is saying that we quit having faith in God’s provision and love for us. We quit trusting in him.

In coming to Christ, we place our trust and hope in what he taught us and now shows us through the Holy Spirit in our lives.

What he is saying is that prayers of faith, where we put our trust in God, reach God in a divine way. And when we don’t exercise our faith, we wane away spiritually.

At least that is the main point of the sermon I am going to preach at Kairos at the end of the month.

Now we get to my favorite part of the song that the early church sang.

They sang: “...If we are faithless, he remains faithful for he cannot deny himself.”

I don’t know if I can unwrap that any further. It speaks for itself.

When we were baptized, we made a covenant with God. Cool, we know that. But the neat thing is that God made a covenant with us.

I remember the prayer Jesus prays for the disciples in John 17 when he prays that we would be one with him just as he is one with the Father, we will all be one together.

The song is saying that we are now a part of God. We are in God and God is in us. I believe the mechanism for that is because we allow the Spirit to have control of our lives. We choose to allow the Spirit of God to lead us.

We can find comfort in knowing that we belong to God and God will not deny God’s own self.

I have experienced that mercy myself. In order to foster vulnerability at the prison, when we give a talk to the residents, we include personal stories that illustrate the point of the talk.

I am going to talk about how to keep the faith in the prison compound after the Kairos team leaves.

The sermon comes Sunday morning after we have cleansed ourselves with the forgiveness ceremony Saturday night.

In the message, I will mention my queer nature that I believe is a result of being violently raped by a stranger when I was 11.

As a teenager in a rigid home, and not knowing what my sexual identity was, I was covered with shame.

For a few short years I gave up on Christ because my prayers to end this what I was taught to be a sinful, and because we were Christian nationalists, anti-American, thoughts, wasn’t working. I became suicidal and got strung out on dope. I was self-destructive.

I completely rejected Christ for a season. I thought I could be my own god. I was faithless and denied Christ.

But God is faithful.

Even now, I can still sort of remember the feeling of being lost when I rejected Christ. I had known Christ since I was four and I felt something missing inside my heart. Deep down, I knew that if I just raised my hands and surrendered, God would restore me to that peace that Christ gives.

To keep the story short. While lost and away from Christ, at 18 years of age, I was promoted to Assistant manager of a Big Boy restaurant in Fort Wayne.

The 4^th night I was there, I was robbed and beaten by two men who tricked me into opening the back door. They beat me with a club on my head until I passed out and they locked me inside the walk in cooler. After they grabbed the cash, they opened the door to the cooler and discussed how to kill me since I could identify them. I heard one of them say that he wanted to stab me and make sure I was dead.

I wasn’t ready to die and I cried out silently to God: “Lord, Save me!”

And God did.

I actually heard inside me head the words: “You’ll be alright.”

And right here (point to right ear) I felt the Holy Spirit enter and flood my body with this overwhelming sense of peace. The presence of God was restored to me!

And then, miraculously, the other fellow said that he could kill me with the club. I counted 11 blows before I passed out. I woke up an hour later to a refrigerator door with no inside latch, shut from the outside.

Somehow, by the grace of God, I survived.

God saved me. The song that the early believers sang said that if we are faithless, he remains faithful is true.

God proved that with me and restored me.

Not only did God restore me, but God set me on the path to healing from the emotional trauma I felt when I was being formed psychologically.

I realize now that it wasn’t Christ that I rejected, it was bad theology that I rejected. In Christ’s healing, I found an inclusive theology that opens the door to everyone.

Through all of that the Holy Spirit has not quit working in the process of healing and restoring me. I see how God is faithful.

So, to answer the question what happens when we lose faith? God is faithful. Praise God!

Confidence

 

Text: 2 Timothy 1:1-14

Focus: Faith

Function: to help people have confidence in grace.

1:¹Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus,

²To Timothy, my beloved child:

Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

³I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. ⁴Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. ⁵I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. ⁶For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands, ⁷for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

⁸Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel, in the power of God, ⁹who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace, and this grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, ¹⁰but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. ¹¹For this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher, ¹²and for this reason I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day the deposit I have entrusted to him. ¹³Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. ¹⁴Guard the good deposit entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.

Good morning to the beloved children of God!

May the peace of Christ dwell within you now and forever.

This passage of scripture is filled with the kind of grace that builds our confidence in the faith.

And that confidence is not a result of our efforts but it is a result of the work of the Holy Spirit inside of us. The Spirit of God gives us the confidence to be bold before God and before people.

The passage indicates both.

We are bold before people because through God’s Spirit we proclaim Christ’s teachings as the path to peace for the entire world. We are not afraid or embarrassed because God has given us faith.

Faith is a difficult lesson to learn since I believe that faith is given to us by God. It isn’t something that we manufacture, but at the same time, God calls us to have faith. What God is calling us to when God calls us to have faith is to trust God, or to rest in them. To rest from our fears in God.

In many ways, faith is the opposite of fear. Or at least, fear is a force that is sometimes spiritual and sometimes physical. It is physical when our senses perceive beyond our conscious train of thought. That physical fear is important to pay attention to.

But spiritual fear, the lack of trust in the promises of God, is different from our bodies natural protection system.

Verse 7 from our passage is a promise that I hold on to. It says: God has not given us a spirit of fear, or cowardice, but a spirit of power, love and self-discipline or a sound mind.

The Spirit given to us by God is a spirit of power and love and the ability to discern good verses evil as we reject the way of greed that the world around us teaches and we embrace the generosity of God’s grace to us.

I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. There are three main areas of sin in the bible. One is idolatry, one is lack of concern for the poor and the third is a lack of faith in God’s promises.

God wants us to rest in the fact, the knowledge, that God loves us and cares for us. When we pray “Give us THIS DAY our daily bread,” we are symbolically reminding ourselves and God that we need God to provide for us and we rest in God not ourselves.

The Lord’’s prayer is that kind of prayer of faith.

Resting in God instead of relying on ourselves is difficult in this culture of self-sufficiency. But when we rest in God, our relationship to our wealth changes to the priorities of God’s purpose for humanity, which is to cease war, and then love and forgive each other.

So, Paul tells Timothy to be bold in proclaiming the grace, mercy and peace of Christ.

Be bold in the presence of mankind with our witness.

As the Spirit gives us confidence before others, it also gives us the confidence to be bold in the presence of God.

There are a few recordings in the scriptures of people who got to see the glory of God and survived. Job, when he finally got an answer from God and saw God’s glory said that he was completely undone. Daniel fell down as a dead man until the angel of God touched him and revived him. Paul saw a vision of heaven to glorious to explain to mortals.

Now, Paul opens the passage with his mention of worship toward God. Which he does that often. In his first letter to Timothy he is also worshiping God and it is recorded this way:, 1 Timothy 6:16 in the New Living Translation: He alone can never die, and he lives in light so brilliant that no human can approach him. No human eye has ever seen him, nor ever will. All honor and power to him forever! Amen

Because of God’s majesty, OT humans could not approach God. The theology around God states that God is so awesome and majestic that we as humans if we were in God’s presence would die except for the atonement of Jesus. As I mentioned, a few people saw God in the Old Testament and survived, barely, but all of them were transformed by their experience with God.

And we are taught that because of Christ, a way beyond our own sins, or failures, or selfishness is opened up to us to survive that fear and I believe, all of humanity, for us to be able once again to have the fellowship with God that Adam and Eve lost in the garden.

God commands us to forgive without exception. I believe it is because God has forgiven all of humanity. It is proven symbolically by the atoning sacrifice of Christ. Christ defeated death and the fear of death through the resurrection.

Through the resurrection, God makes all things new. And now that God has forgiven humanity, God’’s Spirit can dwell with us.

Jesus said that we will be one with God and him, just as he is one with God. John 17:21-23

That is pretty fantastic!

Instead of being afraid of God, the author of Hebrews tells us that we are now called to boldly go into the presence of God because God loves us and has forgiven us through Christ.

That forgiveness is felt when we trust Christ. Those who don’t trust Christ don’t yet have the blessing of that peace. But when we are near others who don’t yet rest in Christ, that same Spirit is near them, calling them to a new way of living and loving their neighbor. God is working through us in spite of us.

The promise is that we get to go boldly into the presence of God.

So, that brings us to verse 32. Paul gives the promise that I have relied on heavily as God has lead me through my faith development over the years.

The verse says that it is up to God to keep us in the faith.

Twice in my life I have heavily doubted and turned my back on what I thought God was. But God didn’t turn their back on me.

Instead, God drew me to the light.

As I rejected bad theology that was abusive and patriarchal, I thought I was abandoning the faith, but instead, it was the Spirit of God leading me out of abusive religious faith practices.

Here is the thing, when we are baptized, we make a covenant with God to follow God wherever God leads us.

But what is fantastic about that is that God also made a covenant with us. And God is not human like us. God is not going back on God’s promises to us.

Paul tells us that our restoration, our healing, our salvation is up to God and because God is able, God will not fail us.

In that we have confidence because God is love and we believe that God’s love will indeed transform the world. We are bold because of the Spirit inside of us. It is God who prevails, we can rest in that.