As We Forgive Our Debtors

Posted on October 30, 2022 by salooper57
Approximate 27 minutes.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I want to bring Jesus before your minds: Jesus, mocked and humiliated, tortured and beaten. He is paraded through city streets to Golgotha, where soldiers strip him naked, and nail his hands and feet to a cross. When the final nail is pounded, they raise the cross perpendicular to the earth, maneuver it expertly, and drop it with a thud into the hole prepared for it.

While they are doing this (stripping him naked, forcing him down onto the cross, driving the large spikes into his hands and feet) – while they are killing him – they hear him pray: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

We are often told that we should forgive because, if we don’t, our resentment will eat us alive; it will make us miserable. But Jesus did not forgive because he was worried about being miserable. He was not trying to rid himself of negative feelings. He extended forgiveness because those men were in desperate need of it. He forgave them because he is “the image of the invisible God,” and forgiveness is what that God does.

It is also what his people do. It is one of their chief identifying marks. They forgive people who do not deserve to be forgiven. Even though people hurt them, they genuinely desire what is best for them and, to the degree it is in their power, they give it.  

Forgiveness is an identifying mark of God’s people, but it is not branded on them like cattle; it is not stamped on them in a moment. The mark grows clearer as they spend time with Jesus and learn from him. It is also why the people who get closest to Jesus are the ones who act most like him. That is why people whose Christianity is impersonal and transactional – doctrine-focused rather than Christ-centered – never seem to be able to forgive. It is hard to overstate how relational and personal the Christian life is.

Though God is ever the initiator in that relationship, it is not one-sided. It flows back and forth like the point/counterpoint in a Bach concerto. God acts: that is point. We respond: that is counterpoint. And that becomes the soundtrack of our life. Point: “He first loved us.” Counterpoint: “We love him” (1 John 4:19) Point: “He laid down his life for us.” Counterpoint: “We ought to lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16). Point: “The mercies of God.” Counterpoint: “Present your bodies as living sacrifices” (Romans 12:1).  Point: “Forgive us our debts.” Counterpoint: “As we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12).

When point is present without counterpoint – God acts but we don’t – the soundtrack of our lives loses its power. Our talk about God rings hollow. Our children and our friends tune out.

We are thinking about the Lord’s Prayer and particularly about the request, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Can you hear the point/ counterpoint in that? It is always present when forgiveness is extended. Jesus gives us numerous examples. “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:14-15). “And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins” (Mark 11:25).  “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37).

St. Paul understood the point/counterpoint of forgiveness. “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Colossians 3:13).

Our ability to forgive others depends on and plays off of God’s forgiveness of us, the way harmony depends on melody. Counterpoint does not exist in isolation. It derives its power from point. Just so, our forgiveness of others does not exist in isolation. It derives its power from God’s forgiveness of us.

Marcus Doe spent more than a decade dreaming of revenge. His father was a member of the Liberian Secret Service. When a coup removed the president from office, people calling themselves “freedom fighters” began killing the president’s men, including Marcus’s father. So, he made it his life goal to find the man who killed his dad and make him pay.

He came to America as an adolescent—an adolescent dreaming of revenge. As a young adult, Marcus turned to God during a time of personal crisis. He trusted Christ, and something in him began to change. He still wanted to find his father’s killer, but now he wanted to find him to forgive him. He even began to practice saying, “I forgive you.”

In 2010, he went back to Liberia to search for his father’s murderer and discovered that he had died in Liberia’s civil war. He forgave him anyway and began proclaiming forgiveness to the aggrieved and embittered people of Liberia. He told them that it is possible and that it comes from Jesus.[1]

Could you – would you – do what Marcus did? You would need God’s Spirit dwelling, and his character forming, in you. And along with that, you would need to believe rightly about God, about yourself, and about forgiveness.

Wrong beliefs prevent us from experiencing and extending forgiveness; they make it impossible. If, for example, we believe that God does not really want to forgive or that he will only forgive once or twice before he writes us off, we will be afraid to come to him, ashamed of asking him yet again.

Dane Ortland tells this parable: A compassionate doctor traveled deep into the jungle to provide medical care to a primitive tribe suffering from a contagious disease. He diagnosed the problem and had a helicopter drop off the medical supplies needed to treat it. But the sick would not come to him. They stuck to their traditional (and ineffective) healing methods. People continued to die. Finally, one brave person came to him, was healed, and people saw that the medicine works.

“What would the doctor feel?” Ortland asks. Joy. And that joy would increase with every person who came and was healed. That’s why he’d come.

Christ is like that doctor. “He does not get flustered and frustrated when we come to him for … forgiveness.” He wants us to come. He longs for us to come.[2]

We need to think rightly about God. He doesn’t need to be goaded into forgiveness. He wants to forgive. And he is good at it.

We also need to think rightly about ourselves. When someone sins against us – and all of us have been sinned against since our earliest years – something happens to us, happens in us. Sin, whether committed by us or against us, is disorienting. What I mean is that sin orients us away from God. It knocks us out of orbit. Instead of our lives circling around God, drawing strength and order and purpose from him, our lives begin to circle around our sins – the ones committed by us and against us.

Order then becomes disorder. The gravity that was intended to keep us in orbit around God keeps us in orbit around sin. When that sin is committed by us, that gravity can trap us in addiction. When that sin is committed against us, that gravity can trap us resentment. Apart from God’s intervention and the impartation of his Spirit, we will never have sufficient power to escape the gravity of our sins.

When we think rightly about ourselves, we know that we are not strong enough to rise above our sin – to forgive and be forgiven. Try as we may, we cannot achieve escape velocity from our sins – the ones we commit, and the ones committed against us.

We need to believe rightly about God and about ourselves, but we also need to believe rightly about forgiveness. When we don’t understand what it is, or think that it is something it is not, forgiveness will seem impossible. We must learn to recognize and renounce false ideas about forgiveness and replace them with truth.

What are some of the false ideas about forgiveness that keep us from receiving it and extending it to others? I will mention five.

First, many people confuse forgiving sin with excusing it. Let’s say that someone you know has been spreading rumors about you. Old friends have started avoiding you and won’t take your calls. When you confront the person, they deny doing anything wrong. You have been sinned against and you are hurt.

You know that God has instructed you to forgive, but you can’t do it. You think that to forgive them is to excuse what they did, to say that it doesn’t really matter, that it’s alright. But it does really matter, and you know it.

Forgiving and excusing are different things. We do not forgive people for things that don’t matter; we don’t need to. We forgive people for their sins – sins matter! I can excuse you and in fact, it is my moral duty to excuse you – if what you did is excusable. But there is no excuse for people who sin; there is only forgiveness—thank God there is forgiveness. Sin, whether we commit it against others or they commit it against us, is inexcusable—but not unforgivable.

If I think forgiving and excusing are the same thing, I won’t be able to forgive, for I will believe that means minimizing what has been done to me. But forgiving is not minimizing. When I forgive, I am calling what was done to me what it really is: sin.

Likewise, when I receive forgiveness from God or seek it from others, I am admitting that what I did was a sin. I am not asking to be excused, as if I didn’t really do anything wrong. I am admitting my guilt. I sinned! I am a sinner in need of forgiveness, not a decent guy in need of understanding.

Right here is where we see the connection between forgiving our debtors and being forgiven. People who want to be excused rather than forgiven downplay their own sins. They make excuses for themselves and blame others – but they won’t do that for the people who sin against them. They will not forgive, and they cannot be forgiven. They are trapped by the gravity of their sins.

A second misbelief about forgiveness, related to the first, is this: We think that some sins are forgivable while others are not. So, we forgive this minor wrongdoing but not that major one. We say of it, “I can never forgive that!”

Strictly speaking, we don’t need to. We don’t forgive the sin; we forgive the sinner. Forgiving the sinner never implies that what he did was okay. When God forgives us, he does not say, “This one’s no big deal.” Sin is a big deal, which is why sinners must be forgiven. So it is with us: we do not minimize the sin; we forgive the sinner.

A third misbelief about forgiveness is that forgiving means forgetting. This one has caused endless trouble to people. They tried to forgive. They thought they forgave. But then they woke up in the middle of the night thinking about what had been done to them. Or they saw the person who hurt them at the store, and a sudden surge of emotion ran through them. If they haven’t forgiven until they’ve forgotten, then they haven’t forgiven.

But forgiveness is not forgetting – not even for God. Someone will remind me of Hebrews 8:12 (which is itself a quote from Jeremiah 31:34): “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” We need to be careful here. God is not saying, “I can’t remember what they did.” God is not getting forgetful in his old age. He does not suffer from dementia. What he says is, “I will remember their sins no more.” That is a choice on God’s part.

It is also a choice on our part. It is not that we forget what was done to us but that we choose not to remember. We choose not to recall that person’s sin to use it against them – either in our own minds or with others. When it does come to mind, as it will for a while, we affirm our forgiveness and we move on.

Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was at an event with a friend when someone who had wronged her came into the room. Her friend saw the woman and brought up what she had done to Clara. Clara didn’t seem to remember, but her friend wouldn’t let it go. She kept talking about it and said, “You must remember what she did to you!” Finally, Clara replied: “No, I distinctly remember forgetting that.” She was not suffering amnesia. She was choosing to forgive.

A fourth misbelief is that genuine forgiveness relieves us of feelings of anger or hurt. We think, “If I had really forgiven, I would not feel this way.” But forgiveness is not a feeling – though it can change our feelings. Forgiveness is more like surgery than anesthesia. Forgiveness removes the problem, not the pain. It may even initially, like surgery, increase the pain. But once the problem is gone the pain will begin to diminish. Recovery takes time – after surgeries and after forgiveness.

When I forgive you, I do so before God and with God. I enter into an agreement, a covenant of forgiveness, in which I choose not to use your sin against you. I do not seek vengeance against you because of what you did to me. I refuse to hurt you by showing contempt to you, by talking badly of you to others, or by rehearsing your guilt to myself. I trust God to make right what happened and I do to you as I would have others do to me.

Another misbelief (this is number 5) that makes forgiveness hard comes from the false notion that forgiveness restores trust. Let’s say you lend me money with the understanding that I will pay you back next week. But next week comes and you don’t hear a word from me. Next month comes and goes, and many months after that, but I don’t pay you back. Let’s say you forgive me and write it off as a loss. You say, “I’ll just consider it a gift and move on.”

But what happens when I come back to you in two years and ask to borrow money again? If you really forgave me the first time, shouldn’t you trust me the second time? How can you say that you have forgiven me when you won’t lend me more money?

That is a small matter compared to what some people face. I have met women whose own fathers abused them as they were growing up. Some of them, as adults, have forgiven their father. But does that mean they must now trust him to be around them or to be around their kids?

It does not. Forgiveness and trust are two different things. Forgiveness is not and cannot be earned, but trust is earned. Because you have forgiven someone does not mean you must place yourself or others at risk of injury from them. It is always wise to forgive. It is not always wise to trust.

Let’s bring all this back to the Lord’s prayer. We pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” and we have Jesus’s word that if we forgive others “when they sin against [us, our] heavenly Father will also forgive [us]. But if [we] do not forgive others their sins, [our] Father will not forgive [our] sins” (Matthew 6:14-15).

Now we’ve seen what forgiveness doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean excusing sin or saying that it’s no big deal. Forgiveness is not the absence of hurt or anger or distrust. It doesn’t mean that we forget what was done to us or put ourselves back in the place where we it can be done to us again.

Well, what does it mean? It means that before God and with his help, I choose not to use your sin against you. I will not harm you because of it. I will not seek revenge, either by talking badly about you, or going over and over your sin in my mind, or by avoiding you or by getting even. I will commit you to God and treat you as I would want to be treated if I were you.

That is how God treats us and how he wants to help us treat others. Doing so will bring us freedom and bring God glory. Is there someone God wants you to forgive? Will you obey him now?

[1] Marcus Doe, “Orphaned by War,” CT magazine (November, 2016), pp. 95-96

[2] Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (Crossway, 2020), p. 36

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Faith, Peace with God, relationships, Sermons, Theology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Image Protection Systems and Us

Posted on October 29, 2022 by salooper57

We all have an image of ourselves which we protect, whether we realize we are protecting it or not. This is a built-in function of the human machine. Humans were programmed with image-protection because they were made in the image of God. The preservation of that image is essential to creation’s welfare.

This makes sense when we realize what the Creator intended to do with his human images. He meant them to be placed all over the earth. In ancient times, kings placed images of themselves along the borders of their land to remind people who was in control.

There is a parallel in the contemporary world. Leaders like Mao Zedong, Kim Il Jung, and Saddam Hussein all placed giant banners of themselves in major cities, or erected statues of themselves at busy intersections. These images were intended to remind people who was in control, to assure the doubter and intimidate the rebel.

God’s intention was not to frighten the world with his living images but to bless it. They were to be a source of comfort and encouragement to all who saw them, both humans and animals. Unlike a tyrant’s images, God’s images were alive, and he intended to rule the world through them. In the Book of Genesis, God states: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Because God’s image was central to the security and welfare of creation, he programmed “image protection software” into his image bearers. But that image was defaced by our father Adam’s – and our own – subsequent rebellion, and it continues to deteriorate. Yet the built-in image protection system remains operational.

With the image of their creator damaged and growing less distinct, humans create their own image and then fight to protect it. Much of the insanity that happens in our world stems from men and women trying to protect false images of themselves. People will live in denial, “deceiving and being deceived,” as St. Paul put it, rather than see their image defaced.

This is even true when the image is not a flattering one, for images are not always fashioned to exalt. They are more often fashioned to protect. Think of Paul Simon’s, “I am a rock, I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.”

Because this is true, people will fight even to protect the images that thwart their happiness: the loner, the rebel, the outcast, and the curmudgeon. “Victim” is an unflattering image, but many people cling to it. It affords a kind of status to some and provides an excuse to others.

A person’s image protection system may lead them into foolish behaviors to prop up their image. Hence, people who image themselves as “the smartest person in the room” may be incapable of admitting that they do not know something. Instead of listening to others, they do all the talking. If they happen to lead an organization, their image protection software has the potential of ruining many people’s lives.

It can get worse – and has. Imagine the leader of a nation with a faulty image protection system. He has for years imaged himself as the tough guy. Now his mind supplies reasons to maintain that image even though doing so means going to war against another country. He is unable to consider evidence for or against war objectively. It is all filtered through his own distorted image.

The self-righteous person will for the same reason be unable to admit being wrong. The “loser” will not be able to admit having won. The “winner” cannot acknowledge having lost.

The way to repair this problem is not to disable the image protection software, but to restore the original image for which it was designed. This is the point of spiritual formation through discipleship to Jesus. Its biblical goal is nothing less than for humans “to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Spiritual life, Theology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

Posted on October 23, 2022 by salooper57
Approximately 26 minutes (text below)

What did Jesus mean when he said, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors?” Will we not be forgiven if we don’t forgive? And for that matter, why do translations have “debts” when we pray “trespasses”? This message is the first of two parts on forgiveness – why we do forgive and how we do it.

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From time to time, we see an actor on TV or in a movie say, “I can never forgive that!” From time to time, we hear a friend or acquaintance say the same thing. Perhaps we have said it ourselves: This thing is so heinous and hurtful, so intentional, it does not deserve to be forgiven – can’t be forgiven!

When people say that kind of thing, it is clear that they feel justified in not forgiving. They feel righteous. But Jesus taught his followers to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We’ll go into that in just a moment but, before we do, I just want to point out that Jesus’s wisdom diverges from the wisdom of television writers, friends, and family on this issue. Jesus teaches his people forgiveness while society at large teaches its people resentment. Who do you think is wiser?

This message is for all of us who pray the Lord’s prayer. More specifically, it is for all of us who know that we need mercy. And it is for all of us who have been wronged and injured – whether last week or years ago – and whose lives have been damaged by that wrong. That surely includes each of us.

Years ago, a woman came to me for pastoral advice. She had done something she knew was wrong and had sensed that her self-destructive behavior was somehow rooted in the sexual assault she had suffered as an adolescent. Here’s the thing: she was around 70 at the time.

For nearly six decades, her life had been dominated by the sin committed against her. It had affected her relationship with her husband, her kids, with men, with God. She was wounded and had not experienced the healing available to her. One step in that healing – and there are others – would have been to forgive.

But does Jesus really want this disciple of his to forgive her assailant? Yes. Perhaps you don’t believe that. Perhaps you don’t believe it is even possible for a person to forgive something like that. But that is because you do not understand forgiveness in the way Jesus understands it. We will look at that more closely next week.

This dear woman was hardly the only person in our church family whose life has been harmed by unforgiveness or whose unforgiveness has manifested in disruptive behavior. You have suffered offenses just as real as hers and, in some cases, just as hurtful. Some of us have been conformed to the image of our injury rather than to the image of Christ. Instead of Christ being our life, as he intends, our injury has become our life—God help us. (He has.)

We have all been wronged. We have all been hurt. But let’s not forget that we have all done wrong and we have all caused hurt. We have sinned, and we have been sinned against. Some of the people we have sinned against sit at our dining room table, and some sit around us in this room. And some of the people who have sinned against us are those same people. God knows that we will be shaped to the image of our injury unless we are forgiven, and we forgive.

I suspect that a principal reasons for the church’s ineffectiveness in our day (and at other times in history) is that Christians don’t forgive each other as Jesus taught us to do. God will not – cannot – bless or even condone our unforgiveness. We become human storage units filled with anger, evil thoughts, and resentments. Mistrust abounds. We can’t work together. The church is incapacitated. This principal difference between Jesus’s people and others, which should shine like a beacon in the darkness, has been shut off—and we’re the ones who pulled the switch.

Unforgiveness is an obstacle to what God wants to do in our lives and church. Unforgiveness dams up the current of God’s love in our midst. We must not allow that to continue. If you are a genuine disciple of Jesus and think that you cannot forgive, you are mistaken. You can forgive; it is possible (though I don’t say it is easy).

We have a lot to get into, and we should begin with what Jesus actually said. When we recite the Lord’s Prayer, we often use a word that is not actually in the prayer. Jesus gave two version of this same prayer, one to the crowds on the mountainside in Matthew 6 and one to his disciples in Luke 11. In Matthew 6, he told people (literal translations now) to “…pray thusly … forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” In Luke 11, he said, “When you pray, say …forgive us our sins for we also forgive all who owe us.”

If Jesus used the words “debts,” “debtors,” and “sins,” how did we end up with “trespasses” in the Lord’s Prayer? Trespasses slips into the prayer from verses 14 and 15, which form Jesus’s own explanation of the request. But in the actual text of the prayer, Jesus uses the word “debts.” It could be translated, “cancel our debts.”

What is he talking about – “cancel our debts,” “forgive us what we owe”? What debts? I pay cash on the barrelhead. I’ve had a credit card now for about twenty years and have never paid a cent of interest. What is Jesus talking about – “Forgive us what we owe”? I don’t owe anyone anything.

Or do I? Do I owe my wife something? I think I do. Do I owe my parents something – the people who brought me into the world (they didn’t have to), fed me, clothed me, educated me, worried over me, provided me with a thousand things to keep me alive and well? What about my church family, who has loved me, forgiven me, encouraged me, and made it financially possible for me to serve Christ in the way I do?

And what about my God? He is the life-giver. He made me. He knew me while I was still in my mother’s womb. He gave me gifts to use so that I could do good in this world. He gave me family, sons and daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. He gave me a world suited to my existence, a mind, sensations, feelings. He gave me a conscience. He gave me a Savior and gave me his Spirit.

To say, “I don’t owe anyone anything” is to utter as great a falsehood as has ever been spoken. I have lived my entire life by the mercy and pity and gifts of others – most of all God. “It is because of the Lord’s great compassion that we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail” (Lamentations 3:22).

Unless you see this truth for yourself – and we have been diabolically brainwashed not to see it and will only see it by the work of the Holy Spirit – you will never be as free and joyful as God intends you to be. You are alive only by the pity of God; you are under obligation to the God who through Christ made you and redeemed you; you are obligated not only to God but to myriads of people for the life you have and the benefits you have experienced. Only those who own this truth can pray, “Forgive us our debts” with any sense of urgency or receive that forgiveness with any sense of gratitude.

Unless you grasp this truth for yourself, you will only pray for forgiveness when you have done (or fear getting caught doing) something that is clearly wrong. The rest of the time, you will think that there is no sin for which you need forgiveness or – in the way Jesus put it – no debt that you owe. Me? I don’t own anyone anything.

In the Bible, sin is conceived in different ways. Early on, it was conceived as a burden one carries. Sin was not thought of as an abstract concept but a real thing, an evil thing, which weighs us down and causes us and others trouble. St. Paul spoke of it as “sin living in me,” which sounds like some scary science fiction movie. St. Peter, sticking to the image of sin as a burden or weight wrote, “He himself bore” – he carried – “our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24). He took the burden that was crushing us and that we could not carry.

Later in the Old Testament, and throughout the New, sin is described as a debt. When we sin, we withhold what we owe – our lives, our love, our goodwill – from God and others. We act as if we owe nothing to anyone except ourselves. We think of ourselves as “self-made men” and women – which is ridiculous on so many levels – the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul. And thus, like Adam, we defraud God and people. Humanity lives (and dies) in Adam’s sin and the result is a world that bears a crushing weight of isolation, anger, mistrust, and malice. It is not the world God made; it’s the world we’ve made.

If that is what sin is like, what is the forgiveness of sin like? J.D. Greear explains that forgiving “somebody means that you are agreeing to absorb the cost of the injustice of what they’ve done. Imagine,” he says, “you stole my car and … wrecked it, and you don’t have insurance and/or the money to pay for it. What are my choices? …I could haul you before a judge and request a court-mandated payment plan. …

“But I have another choice. I could forgive you …. What am I choosing to do if I say, “I forgive you”? I’m choosing to absorb the cost of your wrong. I’ll have to pay the price of having the car fixed.” (Or bear the burden of not having it fixed.)

He goes on to say: “You have no debt to pay—not because there was nothing to pay, but because I paid it all. Not only that, I’m choosing to absorb the pain of your treatment of me. … I’m choosing to give you friendship and acceptance even though you deserve the opposite.

“This is always how forgiveness works. It comes at a cost. If you forgive someone, you bear the cost rather than insisting that the wrongdoer does. And that is what Jesus, the Mighty God, was doing when he came to earth and lived as a man and died a criminal’s death on a wooden cross.[1]

Jesus teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our debts” – cancel them – “as we also forgive our debtors.” It is about this line of the prayer – and only this line – that Jesus adds an explanatory note. These are verses 14 and 15: “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

I can think of no verse that has received the old theological brush-off more often that verse 15. We assume that Jesus didn’t mean what we hear him saying – we have no place for this in our theological system! But if you have to choose between your theological system and Jesus’s own words, you’d do well to choose Jesus’s words. If we don’t understand them, let’s admit it, but let’s not write them off as meaningless. Jesus meant something by them, and we’d better take them seriously.

I think that people brush this off because they hear Jesus saying that people merit forgiveness by forgiving others in a sort of quid pro quo arrangement. But Jesus says nothing here about meriting forgiveness—or meriting anything. We do not merit forgiveness by forgiving. It is not a matter of cause and effect.

A millennium ago, people believed that having lice was good for one’s health. They based that on the observation that people who didn’t have lice – and in the Middle Ages everyone had lice – usually got sick. But the real reason was that lice are extremely sensitive to a host’s body temperature. Before a person realized he had a fever, the lice had already left in search of another host. The absence of lice did not cause the sickness but resulted from it.[2]

When we hear Jesus’s words and conclude that God won’t forgive us because we won’t forgive, we are making a similar kind of error to the one our ancestors made. Our lack of forgiveness does not cause God not to forgive; it indicates that we are not in a forgivable state. A person who refuses to forgive others has not seen nor repented of his or her own sin – and as such is not forgiven. People who don’t forgive are people who think they don’t need forgiveness.

But sometimes it is not that we refuse to forgive; it is that we assume that forgiveness is not possible. Why even think about something that can never happen? How many marriages have ended in divorce and resentment because Christians assumed that forgiveness was impossible? How many siblings have endured lifelong separation for the same reason? How many churches have been ruptured because Jesus’s own people did not believe him when he spoke about forgiveness? But forgiveness can happen. It does happen.

It is possible to enter and live in the mercy of God. It can envelop us, and we can begin to bring others into it. Relationships can be healed. Forgiveness can be extended and received. Every sin and trespass and unmet obligation – from sibling unkindness to marital unfaithfulness to murder – can be forgiven. Jesus’s people are able to do that. The life, energy, and drive that enabled Jesus to forgive the people who were killing him is in you if you are his. If you are not his, forgiveness will remain out of your reach; but if you are, forgiveness is possible.

I’ve known Christians to forgive the person who sexually abused them. And Christians who have forgiven the spouse who was unfaithful to them. And forgiven a fellow Christian who damaged their reputation through lies and rumors. And forgiven a family member who cheated them out of their inheritance. And on and on.

Randy Frazee stopped in at a church member’s business and saw a picture of the man and his wife prominently displayed on his office wall. He said, “Nice picture.” But when he turned to the man, he saw that his eyes were welling up with tears, so he asked him what was wrong.

This was the man’s answer. “There was a time in our marriage when I was unfaithful to my wife, and she found out about it. She was so deeply hurt and injured she was going to leave me and take the kids with her. I was overwhelmed at the mistake I had made, and I shut the affair down. I went to my wife in total brokenness. Knowing I did not deserve for her to answer in the affirmative, I asked her to forgive me. And she forgave me.

“This picture was taken shortly after that. When I see this picture, I see a woman who forgave me. I see a woman who was willing to stand with me … So, when you see this picture you say, ‘Nice picture.’ But when I see this picture, I see my life given back to me again.”[3]

That woman – injured to the core of her being – was able to forgive her husband. She bore the weight of his sin, absorbed the price of his infidelity, and gave him back his life, their marriage, and their kids. Christ makes that possible.

When 16-year-old Shannon Ethridge was on her way to school one morning, she hit and killed a woman named Marjorie Jarstfar, who was riding her bicycle along a country road. The guilt and shame ate Shannon alive. She was on the verge of committing suicide three or four times. The person who saved her from that was Marjorie’s husband Gary.

He forgave her. He asked that all charges against her be dropped. He bore the cost that she should have paid. He simply asked that Shannon follow in his wife’s godly footsteps. He told her, “You can’t let this ruin your life. God wants to strengthen you through this. In fact, I am passing Marjorie’s legacy on to you.”[4]

Many such stories can be found in the history of Jesus’s people, and in the history of our church. They may be less common now because even Christians have bought into the societal narrative of resentment and revenge, but they still happen. Forgiveness – both receiving it and extending it – is possible. It is possible for you in your situation.

If you belong to Christ but don’t believe that you can forgive, you are almost certainly thinking that forgiveness is something it is not. You can forgive; God will help. We will explore how that happens next week. 

[1] J. D. Greear, Searching For Christmas (The Good Book Company, 2020), p. 52-53

[2] 25 Fallacy Examples in Real Life – StudiousGuy

[3] Randy Frazee, from sermon preached 6-24-01, “Uncommon Confessions”

[4] Kevin Jackson, “Christian Author Carries Mantle of the Woman She Killed,” http://www.christianpost.com (6-21-07)

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Election Year: It Is Hard Not to Be Cynical

Posted on October 22, 2022 by salooper57

It’s hard not to be cynical in an election year. My wife just brought in the mail, which includes two political messages, one produced by conservatives the other by progressives. Both are irritating.

The piece produced by conservatives is a so-called “Voter Guide.” It pictures the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor along with their “Yes” or “No” stands on eight issues. The issues are intentionally titled to put the Democratic candidate in a bad light. One title, for example, was “Abortion on Demand.” Had progressives printed a voter guide they would have titled this issue, “Reproductive Freedom.”

Progressives produced the other piece of political mail. It pictures soldiers in fatigues and on patrol and in bold print urges voters to “Make sure their vote is counted.” But the soldiers are window dressing. This proposal itself is a wide-ranging progressive wish list for voter reform. It is not all bad but, for heaven’s sake, tells us its real purpose.

Five states are taking up the abortion issue in November. In our state, there is a constitutional amendment on the ballot known as the “Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative.” Because Americans value freedom, its sponsors made sure to get that word into the proposal’s title.

The proposed amendment is deceptive on many levels. For example, it promises protections for women having a miscarriage or an abortion. Protections from whom? There is no history of women in our state being punished under the law for a miscarriage or an abortion. In fact, the State Supreme Court ruled almost 60 years ago that a woman performing an abortion on herself or receiving an abortion was not guilty of a crime.

Proponents of this proposal make a big deal of saying that the decision on abortion should be left to a woman and her doctor. Yet the proposal does not mention a doctor but rather an “attending health care professional.” That is a big umbrella. In our state it includes dentists, chiropractors, massage therapists, acupuncturists, counselors, psychologists, and many others.

The proposal would ban the state from prohibiting an abortion when a “health care professional” considers it “medically indicated to protect the life, or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual.” One could argue that morning sickness, stretch marks, and a declining bank account all qualify as threats to “the pregnant individual” by this definition.

Further, the proposal would enshrine in the state constitution protections for “someone aiding or assisting a pregnant individual in exercising their right to reproductive freedom with their voluntary consent.” What if this “someone” is the person who got the “individual” (who could be a minor) pregnant? One can certainly imagine a teenager giving her “voluntary consent” to a manipulative older lover who protects himself from criminal action by “aiding” her to “exercise her right to reproductive freedom.”

Speaking of minors, some critics of this proposal suggest that it leaves the door open to children undergoing sterilizing gender transitioning procedures without their parents’ consent. My reading of the proposal does not make that clear, but with so many intentionally unclear statements, it raises concerns.

The most egregiously deceptive thing in this proposal is its summary statement suggesting it will: “Allow state to regulate abortion after fetal viability.” This is the opposite of what it would allow. If passed, the proposal will effectively redefine viability and create a loophole in state regulations big enough to drive a truck through. What the proposal speciously grants with the right hand it snatches away with the left.

Subtle misrepresentation of other people’s views and intentionally misleading statements about one’s own are symptomatic of a politics gone wrong. Such duplicity is the result of the commitment to beat one’s adversaries by any means. Deception is a strategically necessary tactic in that cause.

I, for one, am fed up with it. If, for example, a group is committed to making abortion available to any female, even a child, for any reason, tell voters that and let them decide. Don’t disrespect and manipulate them. This is common decency and should be the standard to which all players in the political arena – conservative or progressive – are held.

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Avoid the Shortcuts (Following Christ Today)

Posted on October 18, 2022 by salooper57
Approximately 43 minutes.

This class follows Jesus’s warning against using religion to build a reputation. The instruction he gives is straightforward: Be careful not to do your righteousness before people to be seen by them. The temptation to build a reputation – to seek the “praise that comes from people” – is a dangerous detour that does not lead to the Kingdom of God.

(Co-teacher Kevin Looper was leading a Spiritual Disciplines Retreat this weekend but will be back next week’s class.)

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Daily Bread

Posted on October 16, 2022 by salooper57
Approximately 26 minutes. (Sermon text below.)

Does God really provide our daily bread – what we need for life today? Can we trust him to take care of us? Jesus knew we could. This encouraging message helps us to trust God as we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread…

Immediately after World War II the allied armies gathered hungry, homeless children from across the countryside and placed them in large camps. The children were given all the food they wanted, shown acceptance, and given care. But at night they did not sleep well. They were restless and afraid.

A psychologist had an idea. He suggested that the children’s caregivers give each of them a slice of bread to hold when they put them to bed. If they wanted more to eat, they were given it, but this particular slice was not to be eaten—they were just to hold it.

The results were remarkable. The children began sleeping better immediately, subconsciously assured that they would have something to eat tomorrow. Just knowing that was enough to give them a good night’s sleep.

King David would have understood. He wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” The shepherd makes plans today so that the sheep will have grass to graze on tomorrow. David understood that God planned to provide for him. Figuratively speaking, he went to bed with a piece of bread in his hand. He knew God would take care of him.[1]


But we’re not David. Will God take care of us? Will we have what we need tomorrow? Today, we arrive at the fourth petition in the Lord’s prayer, the first which makes a personal request: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

There are six (or seven, depending on whether you link the final two) requests in the Lord’s prayer. The first three concern God, the final three concern us. The first three mention God’s name, his kingdom, and his will. The final three mention our bread, our debts, and our deliverance.

Many of the church fathers couldn’t believe that Jesus would follow the first three high and holy requests by telling his followers to pray for something as mundane as bread. They thought that Jesus must be talking about the bread of Holy Communion, which seemed more noble.

But there is not a hint in this text or anywhere else in the Bible that the church fathers were right about this. They were, it seems, trying to be more spiritual than Jesus. He knows his people need food to survive – God made them that way – and he wants them to survive. More than that, he wants them to thrive.

A man once described to me how he prayed – I think he thought I would be impressed. He talked about how he would pray for others – friends, family, missionaries – but made a point of saying that he never prayed for his own needs.

He seemed to think that praying for one’s own needs was selfish and spiritually immature. He was wrong. It is not selfish to want daily bread, only to want someone else’s daily bread. Nor is it spiritually immature. The spiritually mature need daily bread too, and the more mature they are, the more they appreciate the privilege of asking their Father in heaven for it, and the more joy and gratitude they experience when they receive it.

Martin Luther said that “daily bread” was a metaphor that stood for “everything necessary for the preservation of this life, like food, a healthy body, good weather, house, home, wife, children, good government and peace.”[2]

Do I need a car in order to live and do good and serve God? Then a car is my daily bread, and I can ask our Father in heaven for it and expect to receive it. Do I need health to live and do good and serve God? Then I can ask Father for it and he’ll give it. Do I need a job, an education, a friend, a spouse, a child, a computer, or a vacation in order to live and do good and serve God? If so, I can ask Father and expect him to answer.

Now I may think I need things I don’t really need. For example, I may be wrong about needing a computer to live and do good and serve God. I may not need a spouse to do those things. I may not even need a body – at least temporarily. God’s plan may be for me to live better, do better, and serve joyfully in heaven. But if I need a body and health, I can ask and be confident that he will provide.

The prayer for daily bread is a recognition of dependence on God. Many people find that hard to do. They would rather pray, “Give us this day the winning lottery ticket, and we’ll never bother you again about our daily bread.” They hate being dependent. They never want to be in a position where they must depend on anyone else – even God.

To pray for daily bread is to depend on God daily, not once in a while. Jesus’s choice of phrasing was no accident. He intended “daily bread” to carry his hearers back to the Old Testament story of manna in the wilderness. Do you know the story?

Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt and through some of the most rugged, barren, country on earth. It was one of the largest refugee flights in history: hundreds of thousands of people crossing the desert, in need of water and food to survive.

They quickly despaired. They could see no way to feed that many people in the desert and wanted to turn back. They feared they would all starve to death. But God told Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day” (Exodus 16:4).

Each morning, the people were to gather enough bread (called manna) for that day. On the weekend, they were to gather enough for two days because no manna fell on the Sabbath. God said, “In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions” (Exodus 16:4). If they tried to save up the manna – to get ahead, have a stockpile – the stored manna would spoil. The point is they could not manufacture a situation for themselves in which they would be independent of God. They didn’t get a three-month supply of manna. They had to trust God to provide for them today, and then again tomorrow, and then the day after that.

We are a lot like the Israelites who tried to stockpile their manna, to set themselves up for the future, and take control of their destiny. Why are we like that? I think it is because we have trouble trusting – we do not want to trust.

Jesus knew that. We have been brainwashed into thinking that it is all up to us, that we have to look out for ourselves, for no one else will do it for us. That kind of thinking needs to change before we can thrive. We need to learn for ourselves that Father will provide for us.

Jesus not only wants us to ask for our daily bread; he wants us to have the joyful, faith-building experience of receiving it. When we know God as Father and long for his name to be hallowed, when we yearn for his kingdom and genuinely desire his will, we will see our prayers for daily bread answered.

I am not saying that God will not answer our prayers for daily bread until all those conditions are met. I suspect that he will. But I don’t think we will recognize the answers, for we will remain spiritually nearsighted and our ability to trust our Father will be strictly limited.

We cannot thoughtlessly recite, “Our Father,” rush past, “hallowed be thy name,” and pay lip service to “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” and still pray effectively for daily bread. It doesn’t work that way. Think of the Lord’s Prayer as a seven-story building. You don’t start with the roof. You start with the foundation, and the foundation of the Lord’s Prayer is its very first word: “Father.”

When that foundation has been laid, the frame erected, and the doors and windows opened to receive our daily bread from heaven, our needs are not only supplied; our faith is inspired. Think of what receiving daily bread did for the Israelites in the wilderness. It daily reinforced the fact that God cared and was able to help. His provision for them today helped them to trust him for tomorrow. God’s answer to our prayers for daily bread will have the same effect.

Unfortunately, the ancient Israelites began taking God’s provision for granted. They stopped appreciating his gifts and, when that happened, their faith started to diminish. They began to doubt God – not because he gave them the bread they needed, but because he had not given them other things they wanted. Instead of their hearts overflowing with gratitude, they were hardened with greed. If we cease being grateful to God for his gifts, the same thing will happen to us. Gratitude and faith are closely linked.

When we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” there are various dynamics in play. There is a family dynamic. We do not pray, “Give me my daily bread,” but “Give us our daily bread.” Our request does not exclude others and their needs but takes them in.

There is a recurring dynamic in the words, “day” and “daily.” We never ask for provisions in a way that will remove us from the Provider. We don’t ask for our “monthly” bread, so that we can remain independent of God until the month is almost up. Our need unites us to God. If his provision then divides us, the problem lies with us.

Sometimes, the daily bread for which we ask is literally bread. We have no money in our pocket and no food in our pantry, and our need sends us to our heavenly Father.

Sometimes the daily bread for which we ask is healing. Our bodies are under threat. Disease is advancing. Our need brings us to God, brings us daily, and many times each day. But when we receive our daily bread – healing of the body – we mustn’t stop coming to God. I have sometimes marveled at how quickly people have turned from God when they’ve got what they wanted.

When I was pastoring in another place, a neighbor was diagnosed with cancer. He was a lapsed Catholic who showed no interest in church or in God – until he received the diagnosis. Then he was interested. When I learned of his situation, I visited him and he asked me to pray for him, which I gladly did. I was even gladder when I learned that God had provided his daily bread: the cancer had gone into remission, he was ecstatic, and gave God the glory. A couple of months later –just before we moved here – I stopped to say hi and was disturbed by what I saw. He had taken his daily bread and walked away from God with little more than a nod in his direction.

What people need more than daily bread is a daily God. Bread may keep our bodies alive, but God causes our souls to live and thrive. Bread gives us energy; God gives us meaning. Bread gives us enjoyment; God gives us joy.

My friend Dave Brown says that he doesn’t buy lottery tickets because he is afraid that he might win. I understand where he is coming from. There is in most of us a stubborn independence even from God – perhaps especially from God. If we won millions of dollars, we might fall into thinking that we are enough without God. Our bodies would get fat, but our souls would be lean. Our bank account would be robust, but our spirit would be feeble.

When you have a need for bread of whatever kind – food, health, relationships, possessions – instead of bemoaning it, thank God for it. That need is a door, and faith is the key that opens that door. If you’ll go through it, you will find yourself in the company of our good Father. You will experience him for yourself, and your confidence in him will grow.

Don’t take your daily bread and walk away, like our old neighbor did. Take it and stay. Enjoy it with God. An old gospel song I know captures this idea in its first verse: Once it was the blessing, now it is the Lord; once it was the feeling, now it is His Word; once His gift I wanted, now, the Giver own; once I sought for healing, now Himself alone. The man who wrote those words knew how to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

In our younger days, Karen and I had hoped to serve the Lord overseas in the denomination that ordained me. We were required, as part of our preparations, to serve in a stateside ministry for at least two years. The denomination placed us in a mission-style church and gave me – who had never had a pastoral ministry class of any kind – the responsibility of pastoring the church.

It had endured a very ugly split seven years earlier. When we arrived, it was on its last leg. During our first year there, our average worship attendance was 19 – and only about a dozen of those were adults. Two months after we arrived, the church’s largest giver died. Within a year, the church was having trouble paying us. Sometimes we would get our full pay, but more often we would get half, and sometimes even less. We began dipping into our personal savings.

That was gone before long, and there were times when we had no money. How we were going to put gas in the car and food on the table was sometimes in question – not always, by any means, but there were times. I remember some of those times vividly. I also remember how we talked to our Father in heaven about our daily bread and how he provided. He did not give us so much that we could forget about him, but he gave us more than enough for us to trust him. The faith that came out of those experiences has been worth more to us than gold.

We had many remarkable manna from heaven moments. There were times when we prayed, and God answered within hours, like the time I prayed for a car, and one was in our driveway three hours later—without any effort or knowledge on my part. Or the time I prayed in the morning for a very specific amount of money I needed that day – the next day would be too late – and had it (stuffed in an envelope and wedged in our door) before mid-afternoon. Or the night when, on the verge of giving up, I poured out my heart to God. The next day a woman I had not met before asked to speak with me. She handed me an envelope with cash and said that God told her to give it to me. There were many other examples, equally remarkable, and the thing is, Karen and I never told another soul about our need – except our Father in heaven.

What do you think that did for our faith? It was better than winning the lottery. Those days were sometimes hard and scary, but they gave us great confidence in our Father in heaven. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

Let’s apply what we’ve seen. First, your Father in heaven loves you too much to answer your prayer for daily bread in a way that makes dependence on him unnecessary. He knows that you need him more than you need bread. Any provision that enables you to get along without God is not daily bread but deadly poison. Reflect on your prayers: are you asking for daily bread or deadly poison? If you got what our praying for, would it bring you closer to God or cause you to drift away?

Secondly, you will not be able to pray for daily bread with faith (and faith is necessary) if you cannot pray sincerely for God’s will to be done. If we don’t trust God’s will to be good, you need to take care of that issue first. Share your struggle with God and with a wise Christian friend.

Finally, remember that this prayer, including the request for daily bread, rests on the foundation of the fatherhood of God. If you cannot call God, “Father,” your experience of the Christian life, including the reception of daily bread, will be far below what it could be. The way to call God “Father” is through confessing Jesus “Lord.” He is the cornerstone – “the precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts in him will never be dismayed” (Isaiah 28:16). If you have questions about what that entails, talk to one of our prayer helpers today or talk to me at any time – just don’t wait. It is too good to miss.

[1] Charles L. Allen, God’s Psychiatry (Revell, 1988)

[2] From Stott, J. R. W., The message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture (p. 149). InterVarsity Press.

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Scientists Long for Meaning Too

Posted on October 15, 2022 by salooper57

(Approximate reading time: four minutes.)

If I understand him correctly, the theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, who teaches at Stanford, contends that matter entering a black hole is preserved in the form of data. Should a black hole consume our world, all it’s information – which is in a sense what matter is – will be compressed and preserved on the surface of the black hole’s horizon.

If this is true, it leaves open the door for some advanced alien race to reconstruct everything that has ever existed, including you and me. It is a kind of eternal life that Susskind foresees, and with it, an eternal meaning for the human race.

Susskind is not the only scientist looking for an escape hatch from the heat death of the universe. Freeman Dyson suggested that humans may in the eons to come shed their physical bodies and become, for lack of a better description, thinking, communicating clouds of gas, preserving the universe from collapse.

It is possible that Dyson changed his mind about the survival of human consciousness, for he told science writer John Horgan in 2018 that his 1979 paper had become obsolete. Whether he gave up on his theory or not, one cannot help but wonder if existence as a thinking cloud of gas is all that desirable. We all know people for whom that is a fairly apt description, and no one wants to be them.

Roger Penrose has proposed a new model of the cosmos he calls “conformal cyclic cosmology.” In this model, the dying universe produces a singularity which gives birth to new universes, one after another. This is not unlike Einstein’s and Friedmann’s “oscillating universe,” only Penrose has found a way to preserve the accumulated data of previous universes in leftover cosmic microwave radiation.

David Deutsch of Oxford, a strong advocate of the “Many Universes Theory,” has written: “…unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there … Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into … activity…”

Deutsch allows for no final “end of all things,” whether in the hellish heat death of the universe nor in a perfect heaven, for he rejects the idea of completion. Deutsch sees humanity forever at “the beginning of infinity,” which is the title he chose for his 2011 book. 

Alan Lightman of MIT owns up to his longing for “eternal youth and constancy,” but calls himself “sentimental.” He writes, “Perhaps I could accept the fact that in a few short years, my atoms will be scattered in wind and soil, my mind and thoughts gone, my “I-ness” dissolved in an infinite cavern of nothingness. But I cannot accept that fate even though I believe it to be true.”

He accepts the fact but not the fate. Something in him, as in Penrose, Dyson, Susskind, and Deutsch – all eminently brilliant people – longs for meaning, “constancy,” eternity. “Accepting the fact” of universal futility does not exempt even a scientist from desiring something else. How odd that this desire, thought by Lightman to have no basis in reality, should be so universal. It has been experienced by people of every religion and by people of no religion throughout history.

One very old explanation for this universal longing, predating even the early theoretical “scientist” Democritus, is that the creator of the universe instilled a longing for eternity into the very fabric of humanity. Thus Solomon, nearly a millennium before Christ, wrote that God has “set eternity in the hearts of people.”

Eternity lies within us, which means that humans are bigger on the inside than on the outside. And because eternity is in our hearts, it doesn’t just call to us from “out there” but from “in here,” from the depths of our souls. We cannot escape it, not even if we are brilliant mathematicians or theoretical physicists, for we cannot escape ourselves.

The call of eternity rings within us, but it originates outside of us. It is our creator who places the call. If we will answer it and be connected to him, we will be connected to eternity, to meaning, and to the source of life itself.

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Loving People in a Loveless World (Matthew 5:38-48)

Posted on October 12, 2022 by salooper57
47 Minutes

This is the part of the Sermon on the Mount that people find most difficult, yet it yields great insights and real help for living the Jesus way in the world.

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Whose Side Is God On?

Posted on October 8, 2022 by salooper57

In ancient times, people had to decide which deity they would serve. There were many from which to choose. There was Yahweh the God of Israel, and the pantheon ruler Zeus, Egypt’s Amon-Ra, the fertility god Baal, the “detestable” Molech, to whom child sacrifices were made, and many more. The list of possible candidates was long.

The idea that one must choose between the gods is presented numerous times in the Bible. For example, Israel’s aged leader Joshua issued an ultimatum to his contemporaries: “…choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

Other examples include the famous prophet Elijah’s challenge: “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.” To this challenge, we are told, “the people said nothing.”

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul praises the Christians in Thessalonica who “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.” In each of these situations, ordinary people came to a decision about which God they would trust and serve.

But the choice between competing Gods is only one aspect of the decision that needs to be made. It is not enough to say that this or that God will be my God; I must go on to relate to this God as Lord – the one whose authority I acknowledge. The decision now is not about which God I will serve, but whether I will serve him, or he will serve me.

This decision predates the other, for it predates the gods. The Bible tells how Adam, the most ancient of humans, chose. His was not a choice between the Gods, for there was then only one. The choice was between the one God and himself or, put differently, between going God’s way and going his own. He chose badly.

This archetypal decision is made by each succeeding generation, and by each person in every generation. Though universal, the actual moment of decision can pass unnoticed. Rarely does someone think, “I will choose myself over God.” Instead, they think, “I must do this; I have no other choice.” The mind has camouflaged the true nature of the decision.

There is a fascinating biblical account that sheds light on this. The nomadic Hebrew people had gone to Egypt for refuge during a time of famine and had remained there for hundreds of years. When societal sentiment and public policy turned against them, they left Egypt in one of history’s largest refugee flights. Poised on the border of “the Promised Land,” their newly installed leader Joshua had a God encounter.

On the eve of the Battle of Jericho, Joshua was alone when he met a soldier with a drawn sword. Being a man of extraordinary courage, he immediately approached the stranger with the challenge: “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

The stranger, it turned out, was no mere soldier but the “commander of the army of the Lord” and, quite possibly, the Lord himself. He answered Joshua, “Neither.” It seems that God was not on Israel’s side nor their enemy’s. The question, as Joshua learned, is not whether God is on our side but whether we are on his.

Joshua learned the lesson that everyone must learn. The true God will not serve us or our cause, no matter how just or noble. But we can serve him—or not.

Yet throughout history, people have tried to indenture God and claim him for their side. They have expected him to render service, as if they were the God and he were the servant. When he does not comply, they are reduced to using him as propaganda in their crusade.

This makes it difficult for people to believe. They suspect that the God about whom they have been told is a fiction, a propaganda tool, for the people from whom they have heard treat him that way. How will they believe otherwise until we who claim to believe start acting like we do?

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Having Integrity in an Evil World (Following Christ Today)

Posted on October 5, 2022 by salooper57

I (Shayne) remember preaching through Matthew and coming to chapter 19 and the section on divorce. When I announced my text, and told people it was about divorce, you could hear a pin drop. I looked out to see friends who have been divorced dreading the condemnation they were certain was coming. But Jesus teaching on divorce is meant to spare us pain, not cause it. It fits directly into his brilliant instruction on the righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees – the righteousness of the heart.

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