Philippians 2:3-8

Watch on YouTube

In the United States, we have a kind of specific idea about what constitutes a hero. Who might we look to for as like a great example of an American hero, somebody like Abraham Lincoln, right? Abraham Lincoln starts at the bottom. He’s born in a log cabin. But through sheer grit and determination, he becomes president of the United States. And, of course, then the union collapses around him. He fights his way through the Civil war, comes out on the other side. The slaves are freed. The Union is preserved. That is the story of an American hero. Somebody who starts at the bottom and crawls their way up to the top.

It’s inspiring. We like that sort of story. What is a Christian hero, though? The Christian hero kind of goes the opposite direction. Let’s take a look at these verses in Philippians.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:3-8)

These verses are describing Jesus in his state of humiliation. That is, a man who started at the top, right? He started off not even a man. The second person of the Trinity, God himself. And he becomes confined in a human being’s womb and is born of a human being. Even just the process of being born is suffering. He spends his whole life crawling down, becoming a servant, even to the people who are supposed to be serving him. He started on top and through sheer grit, determination and love for us, spent his whole life crawling downward.

We imitate Jesus Christ in His state of humiliation. It’s a challenging teaching of Scripture and we try to insulate ourselves from it. In fact, I hear Christians try to find ways to get out of this particular kind of obedience. You’ll hear things like, won’t people take advantage of me if I do this?

Yep. Yes. People are definitely going to take advantage of you.

Won’t that be really, really hard? Won’t that be painful? Yes, yes, that will be hard. That will be painful.

Well, what about me? When do I take care of myself? Who’s supposed to take care of me? Nope. That’s, that’s not your concern. God gave you the concern of looking after other people. He’ll send other people to look out for you. Your job is to think about other people as better than yourself. Put other people first.

This particular teaching of Scripture shatters any illusions of self-righteousness that we might have. This is not the way that we live. As soon as we start thinking about the life that we’re supposed to be living, it leads us really quickly into despair. And it leaves us with very few recourses except to turn to Jesus. This is the beauty of Theology of the Cross. Me carrying my cross directs me to Jesus on His cross. The devil might be able to torment me and say to me, you don’t deserve heaven. You have failed completely in this regard, and the only thing I have to say to the devil is “you’re right.”

You are right. I have not done what I needed to do. I’m not doing what I need to do now. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t even begin to approach what’s necessary of me for heaven. And yet, clinging to and leaning on my Savior, bracing myself against his cross, I have the assurances of his heaven. It’s the antidote to my self-righteousness to look at and compare what my righteousness is able to achieve, which is literally nothing against what Jesus’ righteousness has accomplished for me. This is how we are ultimately the beneficiaries of the true Christian hero, that he carried our self-righteousness and replaced it with his actual righteousness, that he carried our despair at everything that we deserved and paid the penalty for it, giving us instead the reward that he earned.

Mark 8:34

Watch on YouTube

The older I get, the more I find myself making little deals with the devil. And these aren’t interesting deals at all. I don’t get any wealth or magical powers or anything like that. These are mostly deals that center around a very particular teaching of the Christian church, something called theology of the cross. The way the Bible puts it in Mark chapter eight, verse 34, it says.

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. (Mark 8:34)

When you are a Christian, your life is going to contain some suffering that’s particular to you being a Christian. It’s colloquial if something very bad has happened to you, especially if it’s ongoing, you’ll say that you’re carrying your cross, right? You get cancer and now that’s just your cross to bear. These are definitely things that are suffering. There’s certainly the result of life living in a sinful world, but they aren’t actually crosses that we’re bearing. This isn’t suffering that’s unique to a Christian.

So what is then, this unique suffering of a Christian? Well, the core of it is that there is a tension that exists between what I want and what God wants. And oftentimes because I’m sinful and he’s perfect, those things are in direct opposition with each other, and I end up suffering as they contend with each other. My will is not in line by nature with what God’s will is, and that hurts. I end up having to deal with that my whole life. Maybe you’ve had this experience, actually. You’re sharing the gospel with somebody and you can see it’s clicking, right? Their head is nodding. You can see, man, the Holy Spirit is doing something. And then all of a sudden, there comes this moment where their face kind of falls, right? There listening, and then they go, oh, right. And we refer to that moment as cost of discipleship. But really it’s an extension of theology of the cross.

They have faith now. And the same moment that they got faith, they also got their cross. They realized there are things in their life that are not compatible with what God wants, right? That God’s will is not the exact same thing as their will, and that now they’re going to have to deal with some of that. That’s the special, unique pain of a Christian. If you don’t believe in God, there’s no reason to, you know, try to conform your life to what God wants.

And so to avoid this pain, this is where we make those little deals with the devil, right? Where I’ll say there’s some temptation that plagues me. And so I will shake the devil’s hand a little bit and say, I’m just going to go this far with this temptation, And I won’t go any further. And, God, you’re just going to have to be good with the fact that I’m not doing the big sin, the really big like noteworthy thing. But I’m going to go this far, and this idea that God’s just going to have to be happy with the fact that we are going only this far with things, and that he’s going to have to be okay with that. Reality is, he’s not.

This is one of those places where Christians end up in this bounce between self-righteousness and despair. So what’s the antidote here? The antidote is exactly what it says inside of our verses here. Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me. Right? The word deny, actually, in these verses is kind of interesting. It’s just as well maybe even better to translate disown, to disown yourself. How does one even do that? How do you, how do you disown yourself? Well, the key to it is acknowledging who actually has ownership over you. You don’t have ownership over yourself. The devil, when you were born, had ownership over you to some extent, right? We were dead in sins and trespasses. But as soon as you were baptized, as soon as there was faith in your heart, that moment Jesus puts you on his father’s knee and said, look, here is another one for whom I died. Here is another one who gets the rewards of heaven.

The way in which we find our peace, and the way in which we make God happy in this is not by something we’ve done. It makes him happy that we’ve received the blessings that he has won for us in His Son, that we are the recipients of the grace that he has laid out for us. That’s what it means when he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Watch on YouTube

So can a Christian believe in aliens? It sounds like a completely wild question, but actually, I think more than any other question, this is one that I’ve been getting asked a lot lately. And it’s a really kind of tantalizing question, especially as we start to look at space and make all sorts of new discoveries. Can a Christian believe that there is something out there on other worlds?

There’s two ways to answer this question. The first one is a short, very unsatisfying answer, and the second one is a medium answer that redirects our attention a little bit to maybe something that we didn’t expect. So let me give you the short, unsatisfying answer first. The shorter, unsatisfying answer is the Bible doesn’t say. We know that God created all things. If he created creatures on other planets, that’s certainly well within his power. It’s maybe not something we would expect would be brought up specifically, since that’s not really what the Bible is about, but it certainly well within his capacity to have done it.

I’ve got to say, I’m really curious if we did find aliens, what kind of arguments would I hear from people who don’t believe that God created all things, what kind of arguments would we hear that abiogenesis occurred twice, but, you know, forgiving that, there’s nothing in the Bible to prevent it.

Okay, but what about when we if we’re not thinking about, like, life on a bacterial scale or if we’re thinking about like, animals as aliens, right. What about like, the smart aliens? What about like, the aliens who are in spaceships and, you know, like visit farmers fields in the middle of nowhere and that sort of thing? What about those aliens? That one starts to give us a little bit more pause. Like if we did meet super smart aliens, would they be Christians? Should we baptize them? Like, what would our, what the nature of our interaction with other smart creatures be?

When we start to deal with those questions, we actually find ourselves getting redirected into the actual purpose of Scripture. What is it that the Bible is about? The Bible is only about one topic. It covers a lot of things. There’s stuff in it, right? There’s there’s history and there’s science, and all of those are things that are kind of in the Bible, but they aren’t the purpose of the Bible. The reason for the Bible is one topic. It is the book of human salvation. It is about how even though we unmade the world, we get to go to heaven anyway. It is dedicated specifically to our plight. It was human beings that brought sin into the universe. It was human beings that took perfection and made it into imperfection. It was human beings that undid so much of the good that once upon a time existed inside of creation. It was human beings who owed the debt to God.

When Jesus came, he took on humanity. He was true man and true God simultaneously. Why? So that he could pay the debt that human beings owed to God so that he could absorb the punishment that human beings deserved for what we had done to creation, for what we had done to ourselves, to reconcile human beings with God. The Bible is the book of human salvation. If there are aliens, even super intelligent aliens, they’re living in a fallen universe. They’re living in a universe that would have been suffering the effects of our sin. But beyond that, we don’t really have any expectations about it. And it leads us down all sorts of weird, unusual paths, right? Like how would God interact with them? Would they have souls, that sort of thing? The Bible does not speak to any of those kinds of topics or any of those kinds of questions. I can say with some assurance, we probably wouldn’t want to baptize an alien, Jesus wasn’t an alien. Jesus came for human beings. If there are other provisions for other creatures, that’s an that’s an area of entirely just speculation.

But as we speculate and we kind of can’t help but speculate, it’s too interesting to not speculate on these sort of things. But as we speculate on them, it should always redirect our attention to what we know to be the truth. That the Bible was written for you, that the Bible was written with your life and your salvation in mind, that the Bible was written because God wants to see you in his heavens.

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

Human beings and the world were designed together. This world provides for us everything that we need in order to get by. It gives us agreeable climates so that we can live and live comfortably. Sadly, there are millions of human beings who ignore these good gifts and instead choose to live in Minnesota.

Now, admittedly, I’m a little bit salty about Minnesota today. I practically had to dig my way here today through the snow. I know that we need the snow, right? Intellectually, I know that it has to be here, but that doesn’t change how I feel. In a certain nonreligious way. I could say I have faith that this snow, even though I don’t like it, is going to ultimately do something that is good. But that doesn’t change how I feel about it in the moment.

This is actually one of the questions that I end up fielding most often from Christians. Christians who know that God has secured for them good blessings in heaven and that they are theirs. But at the same time, have to go through the struggles and difficulties and evils of this world. Nowhere is this more apparent than with death. There’s no evil in this world that rivals death. There is nothing that so clearly illustrates that this place has fallen. We have death because we have sin and it hits hard.

So Christians end up oftentimes with questions around these most difficult points when you are experiencing the death of a loved one, because intellectually you might know that God has won wonderful things for that loved one who has passed away. You might know that they are right now enjoying the victory feast in heaven, produced and provided by God. At the same time, you might be feeling very different from what your head knows. You might be feeling anger and sadness and pain. So the question that I oftentimes gets is, does that mean they lack faith? Is the way that I feel in the face of death, a bad reflection on my state of faith?

Remember that this world is populated by evil people with exclusively evil desires who do evil things. And yet God is so unbelievably powerful that he’s able to come into this place, filled with all of this evil and still work his will still work it for good. In fact, it was through this absolute worst of evils that God worked his absolute greatest good. On Jesus’s last day. We could read it as a story of just moving from one horrifying, hideous evil to the next. We don’t call Jesus’s last day evil Friday. We don’t call it Sinful Friday or Dark Friday. We call it Good Friday, because all of those things that were committed over the course of that day were placed on Christ on the cross. All of the sins that we commit today were placed on Christ, on the cross. He paid the punishment for all of that evil and swapped out for his own perfection.

That is the essence of Christian faith. Just like my non-Christian faith in the idea that the snow will one day do something good and that we need it doesn’t alleviate my suffering. Just in that same fashion, I might know that death is transformed into something new, a portal into eternity, and yet still have feelings that are attached to the fact that it was necessary in the first place. That it takes place in the first place. The core of Christian faith is clinging to the hope that God has won for us in Christ. Even when we feel the effects of a sinful world.

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

When I was in high school, I got to play Scrooge in a Christmas Carol, and he was such a fantastic character to be able to portray this snarling, snarky, creep. But I do have to say, when people are interpreting Christmas Carol, I think that they miss some of the critical elements when they look at what’s really a rather pointed story of Scrooge’s conversion. The way that he starts off just miserable and wretched and evil and cruel and ends up being like everybody’s Santa. And I apologize if I’ve just spoiled it for any of you, but you have had 150 years to watch it.

But it starts off with Scrooge being in a state of what actually looks like poverty. We’re told that he’s rich, but he goes into his home and all the lights are out. He lives in literal darkness and he’s got meager little bits of food that he eats. As he’s pursued his own interests he’s effectively ruined his own life and lives merely in every way. He eats meagerly. He lives meagerly. He loves meagerly. And his life is in a shambles. The spirits of Christmas, past and present show him that he’s ruined the lives of people around him. He’s left a trail of victims. He’s made the world a worse place. And then finally, you get the ghost of Christmas future. And it shows up and shows him his tombstone. It reminds him, in a pointed way, that he is going to die.

When you see the lack of mourners around his grave and you hear the people celebrating that he is gone, you get this very pointed reminder that he deserves it.

Just like any conversion story, A Christmas Carol starts off with the law. That in pursuing our own interests, we ruin our own lives. We live meagerly. That by pursuing our own interests, we end up making victims and making the world a worse place. And finally, we have to face our death. The tone shift that we get in the Christmas Carol is made really clear at the end. And I think that people don’t necessarily always pick up on this, right? When he transforms into a happy go lucky guy who’s living life to the fullest, sometimes people are like, oh, he’s embraced the true spirits of Christmas and goodwill towards his fellow man.

But that’s not actually the root of what happens. When he’s looking at his tombstone he isn’t begging the ghost of Christmas future to give him a second chance so that he can be a better person. He isn’t asking him to let him be a light in the world. Those are all things that happen. But what he begs the ghost of Christmas present for is he says, let me sponge out the writing upon the stone.

Scrooge doesn’t want to die. Now, it would have been incredibly ham fisted if it had played out in this exact way, but you can almost imagine a character then telling Scrooge why he doesn’t have to die, why that writing does get sponged out. Because, of course, in a real sense he does die. And so why is it that we would expect anything to change? Well, it’s his conversion. You can expect that somebody standing there says it’s Christmas. Jesus came. He lived the life that you should have lived. He died the death that you should have died. As Scrooge is standing there over his own open tomb. It’s not open because it’s going to suck him in. It’s open because Christ opened it up and he has an escape.

Scrooge, just like all of us, has an open tomb through faith. When he wakes up and it’s Christmas morning. What we see is not a drive to be a better person for the sake of being a better person. What we see is a guy who’s living in the light of repentance, a guy who’s living a life under Christ.

When we go through the Christmas season, I actually kind of like these little moments that turn me into a worse grump that gives me sort of a reprisal of that role as Scrooge. As I’m rushing around trying to make the whole season festive for my family and I start to get grumpier and grumpier, I can’t help but quirk a little bit of a smile and think back on that king of the humbugs Scrooge, and then remember what it was that turned him. Remember that by focusing on Christ and Christmas, that’s how things ultimately are made to be merry.

Genesis 3:7, 21, Galatians 3:27, Matthew 11:30

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

Through sheer tyranny of will my wife and I have managed to grow a fig tree even though we live in the frozen tundra of Minnesota. The fig, of course, features rather prominently in the Bible. In fact, fig leaves were our very first clothing (Genesis 3:7) and I never really appreciated how lousy they would be at being clothing until I actually started growing a fig tree myself.

When you feel a fig leaf, it’s a really rough and actually almost even a little bit stingy. If you were to make a garment out of fig leaves, it would be unbelievably itchy and chafing and it would be terrible to wear. Beyond that, fig leaves are really light and delicate. If a little itty bitty breeze comes along it would completely blow the outfit away. It would completely leave you exposed. They offer nothing by way of insulation. They’re very thin and papery. So if it were to rain on you or if it got very cold or if it got very hot, you’d have no protection from the elements whatsoever. And in fact, I’d probably make them a little bit worse with how itchy and scratchy it is to be in the cold or to be in the heat while wearing those garments of sandpaper, practically.

And then at the end of the day, the actual shape of a fig leaf is completely impractical, completely useless for actually covering you up in any meaningful way. As soon as humanity fell in the sin, we found the stupidest possible thing to try to cover up our sinfulness with. It hurt. It chafed. It didn’t do the job effectively. Any little disturbance in the world blows the entire thing away. It leaves us exposed. And at the end of the day, even if everything was going correctly, it still wouldn’t do the job that it had been intended to do.

God came along after our earliest ancestors fell into sin, looked at what they had done, took away the terrible, pathetic effort that they had put in, and he replaced it with something new. He gave them different garments made out of leather and fur. (Genesis 3:21) Leather and fur are still the best things that you can wear now. They’re incredibly comfortable to wear. They feel nice against your skin. When the elements come along, if you get rained on, it rolls right off. If it’s cold outside, it’ll keep you nice and warm. And they actually do the job. They cover you completely from head to toe. But in order to have that happen, blood had to be shed. A life had to be lost in order to cover up our nakedness, in order to cover up our sin.

The analogy here is pretty obvious. Any time we look to our selves to try to cover up who we are and what we are and what we have done wrong, the result is catastrophic. It hurts as we try to make up for the wrongs that we’ve done and as we tried desperately to live lives that we can’t possibly live, it leaves us completely exposed because even the littlest of breezes will reveal in a very pointed way how deeply we have failed. And ultimately, it doesn’t do anything at all to cover us up. We are still sinful people. God gives us garments that actually cover our sins, that actually cover us up. But it required the shedding of blood. He had to send Jesus into this world to live the life that we should have lived and ultimately face the cross. It’s his blood, his body that provide us with the garments that actually cover our sins. (Galatians 3:27)

When Jesus said that his yoke is easy and his burden is light, (Matthew 11:30) he is referring to the difference in what we were trying to do to cover our sins. And what he does instead, wearing his garments is a relief. They actually do the job. They actually shield us from the world. They actually cover our sin. When we look to our earliest ancestors and their failure, we can relax and smile and take hope knowing that the Lord has provided Christ to truly be a garment that covers us.

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

My grandmother was raised in an abusive household and she was raised not knowing her Savior at all. When she was 14 years old, she had gotten a job working in mechanic’s shop and she was working on the car one day when the radio came on and it was set to a Christian radio station. Just so happened that that day they were carrying the latest episode of the Lutheran Hour. And as my grandma worked on the car, she heard the message of the gospel for the very first time. In her mind, up to that point, God was an angry thing. God was a nebulous thing, and God was a thing that had nothing to do with her life, which was miserable and poor and dangerous here on Earth. But over the course of that show, the Holy Spirit worked on her heart. When it returned to the regularly scheduled program after that, there was a little advertisement for a Bible study where they said, This Bible study program takes six months, it costs a dime to participate, but if you don’t have a dime, you know, send us a letter anyway. We’ll see what we can do.

Well, my grandma was exceedingly poor. She did not have a dime to spend on this Bible study program, but she was interested. And so she sent the letter and somebody at the radio station ponied up the dime so that grandma could take the Bible study program. She took it the whole way through the six months. They sent her a pin at the end of it. The pin is still in my family. She came to faith. She married a Christian man. They had six children. All those children were Christians. Two of those children became pastors. She has like 36 grandchildren and one of them ended up becoming a… well, Bethany professor and a seminary professor. And so many Christians, generations of faith, resulted from that radio broadcast. I cannot wait to get to heaven and meet the guy who ponied up the dime that saved my soul.

Christians have a different way of viewing the message that we share. Most of the time when you say something or when you do something, it has an impact on the people around you right at that moment, we have a special message. We have a message where the impact goes on and on through multiple generations, across centuries, across millennia. We have faith because of work that took place in Ephesus. We have faith because of work that took place in Wittenberg. The community of Christians, the Fellowship of the Invisible Church is one that links us together unbelievably closely. Despite differences of miles and differences of time. This makes pretty good sense.

The message of the gospel is something that has the power to transform lives. It changes how we live to know that we don’t need to fear death. Death rightly holds every terror for us. We are afraid of it for good reasons, and God sent his Son to take that fear away. He confronted all of the evil of death, the pain, the punishment, and he bore it on the cross. He instead gave us what he had: eternal life in heaven as princes there. He gave us his inheritance of the eternal lands above.

While you enjoy your faith, never fail to forget what it could mean for other people and their lives here on Earth and their lives in eternity.

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

Most of these Devotions tend to be kind of little sermons. This is going to be a bit of a deviation from that. This is just something that I’ve noticed. I’m very lucky to be a communication professor at Bethany Lutheran College, and I do tend to kind of think a lot and even obsess a little bit about how Christians have employed communication through history. And it’s something that jumps out at me to look at history and see how God seems to have positioned his church right at the epicenter of every single communication revolution that has ever taken place.

Egypt is where writing really managed to explode in a huge number of institutions, became highly dependent upon writing. They expanded the system of writing using hieroglyphics and really developed it. And it just so happened at that time the children of Israel were there in slavery. The only people in Egypt who could actually learn to read and write would have been aristocracy and priests. And it just so happened that the way God chose to deliver Moses was by bringing him into a palace where he would have been one of the very small portion of the population that actually could learn how to read and write. And then God made use of that right away when he had Moses record Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.

The children of Israel got to the Promised Land, and there they drove out all the peoples. But there was one group that God didn’t instruct them to remove, and that was the Phoenicians. And it just so happened that at this exact same time the Phoenicians were developing an innovation concerning writing called phonics, where all of a sudden the alphabet went from tens of thousands of characters to a much more manageable 22 for their system. The Phoenicians simplified writing and made it so that it could apply across a whole bunch of cultures. It was much easier to record information, it was much easier to get information. And Israel and Phoenicia were besties. They did everything together, shared people, shared wars. They were very good friends, and most importantly, shared language. We have the Old Testament recorded in Hebrew because of the Phoenicians and their development of phonics. And God’s church just happened to be centered right there.

When the canon of Scripture, the books that we have in the Bible, started coming together the Church was kind of headquartered in Rome at the time, and it just so happened that at the same time they were inventing the codex, they were inventing a book. So we have the Bible in the form that we’ve got it, where a whole bunch of different books have been put together into this single searchable browser able compendium because of the technological innovation that happened to take place right where the church was centered.

If you’re a Lutheran, you already know this one. The printing press was invented in Germany just in time for Martin Luther to write 95 theses and a small catechism and share it with the entire world. The gospel has been dwelling here in the United States as we developed radio and thank goodness we developed radio, my grandma came to faith listening to a radio broadcast.

God throughout history always positioned his church right at the center of every single communication revolution that ever took place. It gives us a way of thinking about the importance of the message that we share. God places a huge amount of emphasis on the need for us to spread the gospel. There is a message for every human being that you can not save yourself, that you are worthy of the punishments that you fear after death, but that God loved you so much that He sent His only begotten Son to take the punishment that you deserve to live the life that you should have, and that the end to turn all the credit for that life over to you. It’s no surprise, maybe, that we’ve been at the center of every single communication revolution since the sharing of that message is so foundational to our faith, to our hope, and to our lives.

Now, whether this moves you to faster embrace the next communication revolution, I don’t mind one way or another. But hopefully it does bring something to the forefront. Hopefully it plants right at the front of your brain the urgency, the need, and the fun that comes along with introducing someone new to Jesus.

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

I’d like to tell you about the first time that I ever had a gun pulled on me. I was a new pastor, kind of freshly minted, and we had been called to a kind of rural community. And it was a bit of a struggle, certainly a big adjustment for my wife and I. One morning we sat down and we prayed that God would just sort of show us that he was in our lives and that we had this support.

Now, that night, we were babysitting for another pastor’s kids. They were having their anniversary. And when we got done, it was about one in the morning. We started driving home and it was pitch black in the middle of dark rural Florida. We were driving along. There was a van not too far in front of us, and then all of a sudden there was a bang sound and the car was airborne. When we landed, I pulled over reasonably quickly, opened up the door, got out, and there was just nothing around. It was just pitch black.

And suddenly, out of the darkness, I saw a man just running full tilt at me. Now, this was seemed like good news to me. I thought maybe he had seen what had happened and was coming to help. He had reached into his pocket and I didn’t see it at the time, but my wife did. She saw that he had just pulled a gun. What I saw was this guy come running straight up to me, run right past me, and then disappear off on the other side of the street into the woods.

So as it turns out, what happened was this man was a kidnaper who had carjacked the car, dragged the woman he had kidnaped into that car, and he had been driving the opposite way down the freeway. Now, the woman had jumped out of the car. When she did that, he lost control, slammed into a utility pole, the cord dropped down in front of my car and broke a little electrified hook, poked up, grabbed on to the bottom of my car and discharged a huge amount of electricity which caused the air conditioning to explode. That’s what caused our car to go airborne.

When the car was pulled over there had been smoke billowing out from underneath the hood. And so when the carjacker came running, he saw my car pulled over, thought that we made for a great mark for a car to take. But he saw the smoke coming out from underneath the hood and decided he could probably find better transportation and ran along.

Now, there are so many opportunities that we could have been facing our own demise that day. But it made me think, how many times in life does it occur where you run over the cord and it doesn’t break and you have no idea that God just saved your life three times? That day I could have been killed, that little hook that attached on to the bottom of the car if that had not come detached only about 20 feet away from us, then when I had opened up the door and stepped foot on the ground, I would have been electrocuted and killed.

The accident, which had propelled the car airborne and then caused us to come slamming down. I could have lost control of the vehicle and then killed. The maniac with the gun could have decided that it was worthwhile to kill me and try to take the car, which actually would have gotten him away. I drove the car home that night. It was just the AC that was busted.

So three times that night where I could have been killed, but I wouldn’t have known at all with any of them. If the car had just run over the cord, it hadn’t broken, I’d have gone about my whole night not knowing that God just saved me three times.

We live in a dangerous world. We live in a world that wants to kill us, not just physically. We live in a world that has enmity toward our souls. We live in a world that would like to see us in hell. God’s operation in our lives is extensive, and without Him, we face dangers that we can’t even conceive of. There are so many things hidden from our view because we have a God who loves us so consistently and so persistently that even without our knowledge, he operates.

That night I was saved from some true mortal danger. God goes so much further than that. He has thrown himself between us and destruction eternally. He cares so much about us that the eternal death that we faced, he was willing to face himself instead. Every horror that this world could have thrown at us, Jesus absorbed. Every punishment that we deserved for what we’ve done, Jesus took. The amount of God’s care towards us, the degree to which he was prepared to preserve our lives, took his Son to the cross, where his eternal reward, his eternal life was given to you. Where his empty tomb became a foreshadowing of the eternal life that you have with him.

Knowing that you have the almighty, everlasting, all powerful God working behind the scenes and in front of the scenes inside of your life frees you to live a life of faith, of confidence and of joy.

John 5:39

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

Most of the devotions that we do are kind of tiny sermons, and this one’s maybe a little bit less of a tiny sermon, but more of a strategy that I employ to try to address a common problem. You see growing up and frankly, even into what might be called my adult years, I had difficulty reading scripture. And it wasn’t because of the challenge of the words. It wasn’t because I don’t like reading. The fact of the matter is, I just found reading the Bible to be boring. It was really difficult for me to figure out a way to be interested in these things. And I knew I should be. I knew intellectually that the Bible was the most interesting document that had ever been produced. Maybe it was the fact that I was raised with it. Maybe it was the fact that I heard takes on it very often. Maybe it was the way the language was being used. But it was always challenging for me to read scripture and remain interested.

It wasn’t until I actually started training for the ministry that I started to find some of the strategies that would completely change that for me and really open up the Bible, turning it into this living exciting document. Now, one of those areas that really opens the thing up for me is something called hermeneutical principles. Hermeneutical principles are principles of interpretation. There are things that we think about when we read something in order to interpret it. Scientists use it. Archeologists use it. And theologians use it when we read the Bible. The Bible very nicely gives us the hermeneutical principles that we employ when we read it.

The first one I’d like to tell you about is one that we call in German die ganze Schrift treibt Christum. It means the entire scripture pushes Christ. It’s drawn straight out of scripture itself. In John chapter 5, verse 39, Jesus said,

You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me. (John 5:39)

When we read the Bible, it doesn’t matter what part of the Bible were in, the entire thing is about Jesus. The Bible is the book of salvation. It tells you how to resolve humanity’s worst problem, our separation from God and our imminent confrontation with death. The Bible is about salvation, and salvation comes from only one source. It only comes through Christ. As he says, there’s only one mediator between God and man, the man, Jesus Christ. He says, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.

So if the Bible is the book of salvation. And Jesus is the way of salvation, die ganze Schrift treibt Christum the entire book is about him.

When we read in Genesis about God creating the world and humanity’s fall into sin, it’s pointing forward to Jesus.

When we read about Moses taking the children of Israel out of their slavery in Egypt through the wilderness, crossing the Jordan River and into the promised land, we are reading about something that points forward to Jesus.

When we read about Job in agony over the loss of his family and possessions, but still finding it inside to say, I know that my redeemer lives. We are reading about Christ.

When we read in Revelation and we read about the seals being opened up, plagues and terror is being unleashed on the world, we’re reading something that points us back to Christ. Die ganze Schrift treibt Christum. The whole scripture pushes Christ.

The next time that you’re reading some portion of scripture, try bearing this hermeneutical principle at the front of your mind and ask yourself, how is this text, how are these verses, about Jesus? Sometimes the answer is a little bit challenging, but the more challenging the path, oftentimes the greater the reward. Die ganze Schrift treibt Christum. At the end of the day, it’s all about Christ crucified for me.

Ephesians 6:1-3

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

When I was a kid, one of the most mystifying commandments to me was the fourth commandment, honor your father and mother, that it may go well with you, that you may enjoy a long life on the earth. It’s not that the commandment itself didn’t make sense to me, honoring my father and mother, doing the things that they said that is to some extent intuitive. Right? That’s written on my heart. I knew it was a good idea to listen to mom and dad. It was that other part that part at the end that always kind of got me a little bit so that I might enjoy a long life on the earth. Was obeying this particular commandment, some sort of a magic spell that got cast over me so that I would make it to 80 or 90. It was a weird one.

It wasn’t until I was actually a grown up that some clarity started to get shed on this, especially when I would view it in the light of how it’s written out in Ephesians

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with a promise: “that it may go well with you and that you may live a long life on the earth.” (Ephesians 6:1-3)

Now that I’m a parent, I can see the wisdom that’s being relayed here because a good 75% of my parenting time is spent trying to prevent my children from killing themselves. They are consistently inventing brand new creative ways to try to off themselves. It is perpetually horrifying. They are like suicidal Looney Tunes characters. I have watched my oldest child on separate occasions almost be crushed by a piano and an anvil. I’ve only seen two Anvil’s in my entire life and one of them almost did her in.

Trying to keep your kids alive is a constant exercise. Your calling after them, Brin! Please stop! As they run into the Pacific Ocean. Madison! Stop, wait! You’re always trying to pull them back from danger. And there’s a scariness there as a parent because it only takes one time, one lapse in attention, where they don’t honor their father and mother, where they don’t obey their father. And that call of stop, as my daughter runs out into traffic, ends in tragedy.

This commandment is a recipe for staying alive. But beyond just that. This is talking about other relationships and other forms of authority that we have in our lives. There’s our relationship with the government and of course, most relevantly, there’s our relationship with our God, the need to obey him.

Now, Ephesians the word that’s being used for Obey here is actually kind of an interesting one. It’s the word that gets used for answering the door when somebody knocks. That’s not really something I usually think of as obeying. It’s not like that when somebody knocks on the door. I feel like they’ve put some big, onerous obligation on me. It’s just something that I do. It’s almost reflexive. I don’t even really think about this. Someone’s knocking at the door, I just, I go in and answer it. And it’s usually a wonderful thing. It’s not too often that I answer the door and I feel depressed. It could be a package from Amazon that’s getting dropped off. It could be a visitor to hang out with me. Maybe the neighbor kids came over to play and they’re going to take the kids out for a little bit. It’s usually going to be good news. It doesn’t feel onerous. It doesn’t feel like a difficult thing to do, to obey, in that sense.

When we take our relationship with God and we put that same spin on it, this commandment takes on a whole new light. God gave us the commandments for our benefit. We don’t obey the commandments to do anything nice for him. These are things that we do for our own good by reflexively and quickly heeding the word of our God, hearing his voice and doing as he says, we benefit ourselves.

Of course, we have the same lapses in judgment, and when we have our lapses, just like a child running into traffic, ignoring their parents cries to stop, for us it can end in tragedy as well. But rather than have us bear the pain and humiliation and death of our failures, God took all of that and transferred it to his infinitely obedient Son. His Son obeyed the fourth commandment, honored his Father, even though honoring his Father meant taking every time I have failed to honor mine and carrying the punishment for those failures onto the cross. He honored his Father to the end so that I can have his reward. Now because of Jesus Christ and his sacrifice, I can look at God and truly call him my Father, even to the point that I receive a Son’s inheritance. Walking into the kingdom of heaven after my death and living there for eternity in my Father’s house.

Revelation 22:18

Watch on YouTube – Watch on Facebook

Having a cell phone has changed my whole life. It means a whole phrase has been entirely removed from my vocabulary because I’ve got a smartphone. I never need to say the words: “I don’t know” ever again. Any random factoid, any piece of trivia, anything that I in any moment want to know the answer to, I can pull out my phone and the omnipotence of the Internet is available for me to find an answer.

Now, just like most good things, this does tend to be a double edged sword. There are some negative consequences to having immediate access to every single answer and expecting that immediate access. It amplifies the fear of being wrong. Now, Revelation 22 deals with some sins concerning what we add or take away from the Bible.

I give this warning to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book. (Revelation 22:18)

The sin of adding something to the Bible that God hadn’t talked about is called legalism. Legalism is when you take God’s word and you amplify it for one reason or another. Jesus would consistently come after the Pharisees for their legalism, adding new rules on to the Bible in order to make themselves look better. But there’s another source that can be a potent source of legalism, and that is simple, old fashioned fear.

We crave the security of being right, but in this world, there’s so much uncertainty that we’re confronted with. We’re worried about political circumstances. We’re worried about financial situations. We’re worried about the direction that our lives should take. I had a teacher a long time ago. She was convinced that by thoroughly searching through scripture, she had found the answer to what breakfast cereal God wanted her to have in the morning. We live in a world of uncertainty.

The Bible is a book about salvation. It’s about that one topic. But we’re faced with fear, how do we react to the latest scientific discovery? How do we react to the latest bill that’s being proposed? We think that not knowing right now, right away the answer to whatever challenge it is that comes our direction will reflect badly on us and maybe by extension, reflect badly on God.

This fear can lead us to say more than the Bible does in terms of how we vote, what life decisions we make, how we view the world, what breakfast cereals to have in the morning. To combat this fear. God throws something truly frightening out at us in these last verses of the book of Revelation. That he would pour out plagues on anyone who adds anything to the words in scripture.

Now, at first, this seems like just a naked threat, something to make us worried and scared. And that’s legitimate. We should fear adding anything to scripture. But at the same time, as Christians, there’s a tremendous comfort to be drawn from how aggressively God is ready to defend his word. He shows us what his priorities are in these verses. He wants to keep scripture, his word, his plan for salvation, pure and clear and able to be delivered to you.

He reminds us of the ultimate truth while we could do nothing, He did everything. While we knew nothing, He knew just what we needed. When we struggled, lost in our sins, grasping for any way out, He sent his Son with a plan. On the cross Jesus bore all sins. He even carried the sin of muddying the things that God had said, the sin of legalism. He hung that on his shoulders and died, leaving it there. While we knew nothing, God sent his Holy Spirit to work faith in our hearts to trust our savior and secure the way to eternal life. We can embrace our own weakness and throw ourselves on God in confidence, even not always knowing the right way to go. Always certain of the one most important thing: eternal life, secured by Jesus.