The Ascension and Spiritual Gifts (Eph. 4:7-16)

Posted on June 4, 2025 by salooper57

Watch here or read below.

This past Thursday marked forty days since Easter, making it Ascension Day, when the church celebrates Christ’s ascension to the throne of heaven. Ever wonder what is he doing up there? Lots of things, but I’ll mention one in particular: he is giving people gifts (sometimes called spiritual gifts) for the purpose of building up the church. Jesus is absolutely committed to the church.

But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says: “When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train and gave gifts to men.” …It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.  (Ephesians 4:7-8, 11-16)

The ascended Christ has gifted every one of his people to serve his church. You, if you are Jesus’s person, have been given a gift and it is important to the church’s – and your – success that you use it. Your unique combination of personality, experience, and gift make your contribution irreplaceable. Other people may have more Bible knowledge than you, may be more outgoing, or more talented, but no one else can serve like you.

“Serve” is the operative word. Karen and I were in Israel in 2015, and we saw thousands of tourists there: people from just about every place in the world. You know how you can tell the tourists? They’re the ones sitting down. I never once saw a tourist serving meals or sweeping floors or taking out the trash.

It’s okay to be a tourist when you’re touring, but it’s not okay in the church. Yet church in America has become a kind of religious attraction featuring educational tours, entertainment tours, and self-help expeditions. But church members are not tourists.

The tourist mindset is all about self, but we connect to God best when we’re not thinking about ourselves. It’s a paradox: our needs are best met when we’re meeting the needs of others. We’re happiest when we’re not trying to be happy. In fact, just thinking about whether or not you’re happy will kill happiness every time. It’s only when we lose ourselves that we can be found. That’s the way it works. That’s who we are.

And God designed the Church to fit who we are. Or perhaps he designed us to fit how the Church is. The Church is not a stage on which professionals perform for tourists. The church not a cruise ship; it is more like a commercial fishing vessel. There are no passengers, just crew.

The journal Psychological Sciences published a study that suggests too much talent can actually hurt a sports team, especially in sports like soccer and basketball, which depend on teamwork. Franchises that spend tens of millions of dollars to stack their lineup with superstars usually don’t fare as well as teams that have only one or two star players. In basketball, for example, the number of assists and rebounds goes down as the number of superstar players goes up.

In reviewing that study, a writer for Scientific American concluded that successful teams have “a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual.”[1] That is certainly true of the Church. Our goal is beyond the reach of any one of us, no matter how talented we are. Paul writes about that goal in verse 13: It is to “reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

When the Church attains “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ,” Christ will be operating through his global Church without limit to his power. Then the lion will lie down by the lamb, there will no longer be any curse, and God will be all and in all. But the Church will never reach “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ,” on the strength of celebrity preachers or rock star worship leaders. It will take every one of us using our combined gifts. Every one of us, if we belong to Christ, has received a gift. That is Paul’s point in verse 7: “But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.”

Ancient Greek has different rules for sentence structure than modern English. In English, I might write, “John throws the ball” – subject-verb-object. That’s the way we like it. I would not write, “The ball John throws” – object-subject-verb – but in Greek (which can sound a lot like Star-Wars-Yoda-speech) that would be perfectly acceptable. In a Koine Greek sentence, any word can go almost anywhere, and word placement is used to adds emphasis. To place a word first in a sentence is like putting it in italics and bold print. Paul puts the word “one” at the beginning of verse 7. He wants to drive home the fact that the ascended Christ had given each and every one of us a gift for the sake of the Church.

And every one of those gifts is needed; God did not send the church spare parts. When I was in college, I bought a timer that plugged into a wall outlet, and then plugged my stereo into the timer, so that I could wake up to rock and roll. And that worked great, except for one thing. The timer developed a humming – almost a grinding – sound that drove my roommate crazy.

So, I took the timer apart, looking for whichever gear wasn’t meshing or whatever else might be wrong. But I didn’t find anything, so I decided to put it back together and hope that it would somehow work better. When I got done, I had two little pieces left over.

I looked at the pieces. I looked at the timer. I thought: “Maybe they’re not important.” So, I plugged the timer into the wall and flames shot out of the outlet. They melted the prongs on the plug, blackened the wall around the outlet, and probably blew out every fuse on my wing.

Who would have guessed? Those little pieces were important. And so are the gifts that God gave to each of us. You can say, “My gift is probably not important,” but Jesus gave that gift to you for a reason, and gave you to us for a reason. Without your gift in place, we could have a meltdown.

Now look at verse 11: “It was he” – the ascended Christ – “who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers…”

 In verse 7, Christ gives grace-gifts to each and every one of us for the sake of the Church. Verse 7 is about Christ gifting individuals with spiritual gifts. Verse 11 is about Christ gifting the Church with gifted individuals: apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor-teachers.

Why did Christ give these gift-people to the Church? Verse 12 tells us: “to prepare God’s people” – that’s you and me – “for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up…”

Let me read that to you again, but this time from the King James Version, which had a corner on the Protestant Bible reading market for hundreds of years: “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” I love the King James, but that translation has led to a centuries-long misunderstanding of these verses and an unbiblical paradigm for church ministry. It seems to be saying that God gave apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor/teachers to the church for three distinct purposes: (1) the perfecting of the saints; (2) the work of the ministry; and (3) the edifying of the body of Christ.

That fit perfectly with the church paradigm of the day: the gifted individuals of verse 11 are clergy and everyone else is laity. And it provided the clergy with a job description: whip the saints into shape (the perfecting of the saints), do the ministry (things like preaching, teaching, and visiting the sick), and build up the Church. Church clergy are active: they do the work. Church members are passive: they get worked on

So, the clergy has three responsibilities: perfect the saints, do the work of the ministry, and build up the Body of Christ. But in the original language, there are prepositions at the beginning of each of those three clauses, and the first is different from the other two. That’s important. That first preposition indicates that Christ gave the Church apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors/teachers for a purpose: to prepare (NIV) or equip (NASB) or perfect (KJV) the saints for (same word in English, different word in Greek) “the work of the ministry.” It’s the saints who do the ministry.

Now by “saints,” we are not talking about Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, or one of the other great people the Catholic Church has canonized. For Paul, the saints are simply the people who belong to God – that is, everyone who has faith in Jesus. The saints, in other words, are us: ordinary men, women, and children. The saints go to work every day. They get married and they get the flu. They make RVs and they make babies. They have migraines and they have a sweet tooth. The saints are us.

The word translated as prepare or equip is the noun form of a verb that is used thirteen times in the New Testament and is translated by the NIV in eight different ways. Its basic idea is to get something into working order. For example, the first time the verb appears, it is used of the commercial fishermen getting their nets in order for another night of fishing. There were holes that needed to be closed, knots that needed to be retied, snarls that needed to be untangled. They were getting the nets into ship-shape, which is to say they were mending, restoring, and getting them ready for use.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus says, “The student who is fully trained will be like his teacher.” The word translated fully trained is the same verb. The disciple is, in other words, someone who is being restored, mended, equipped, and got ready to be like his teacher.

The noun form of the word (which is what we have here), was used in medical parlance for putting a patient back together after an injury. Maybe your bones need to be set. You need to learn to walk again. If that is going to happen, you will need to be restored, mended, and got ready.

That is what the gift-people of verse 11 do for the gifted people of verse 12: Restore them, train them, and get them ready. How do they do that? In many ways. They pray. They preach God’s word. They teach. And because the saints often bear wounds, they mend. And the gift-people of verse 11 help the gifted people of verse 12 – the saints – find ways to use the gifts Christ gave them.

They get them ready for (there is that change of preposition) works of service. Paul’s ministry model was very different from the one that has dominated the western Church, in which the clergy does the work, and the members pay them to do it. In Paul’s model, the clergy’s job (though clergy is not even a biblical term) is to get each and every church member restored, mended and ready to minister. That’s the model. Every person using the gift God gave him or her. The pastors and teachers of verse 11 can preach spellbinding sermons and be on-call around the clock, but they fail at their job unless they are readying church’s members for, and releasing them to do, ministry.

When the gift-people of verse 11 prepare the gifted people of verse 12 to do the ministry, the Body of Christ is built up (this is verse 13) “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

When the church is moving toward that goal instead of some other goal – higher attendance, bigger media footprint, larger endowment – people grow personally and spiritually. Respect for one another soars. Miracles take place. The world takes notice. And this happens because every Church member is engaged, using the gifts that Christ gave him or her. “The whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Verse 16).

If you’re hearing this and thinking, “I should find out how Christ has gifted me and do something about it,” I couldn’t agree more. You absolutely need to find your spiritual gift and use it.

I’m not going to walk that back a bit. But I want to add this: we don’t usually find our spiritual gift by looking for it. We find it by seeing what needs to be done, and doing it. When we see a need – and it’s often one that others overlook – and get busy meeting it, that’s when we are most likely to discover how God has gifted us.

Let me illustrate that point with a story from World War II. When the Americans thought the war was all but over, Germany sent 200,000 troops and hundreds of tanks west and overran the American defenses. It is known as the Battle of the Bulge, and it was costly. The U.S. suffered 80,000 casualties and 19,000 deaths.

In the chaos, American commanders asked for volunteers to try to stop the German tanks that were wreaking havoc on them. A 19-year-old draftee from Baltimore named Albert Darago said he would go. His superiors gave him a bazooka – he had never held one and hardly knew which end was which – and sent him down a hill under heavy German fire. Albert snuck up behind some bushes and found himself a short distance from four tanks. He aimed at one of the tank’s rear engines, as he was told, pulled the trigger, and to his surprise, scored a direct hit.

When he got back to his own lines, his commander asked him to go again. And he did. Another direct hit. Seventy years later, when The Washington Post interviewed Albert for a commemorative piece on the battle, he said: “It was something that had to be done and we did it. I never considered myself brave. Somebody had to do it, and I was there.”[2]

Albert could have been talking about the way people find their spiritual gift: “Somebody had to do it, and I was there.” Spiritual gift inventories can be helpful, but only if we’re there,caring, involved, and willing to make sacrifices. In the process of doing what needs to be done, we discover our gifts. We also discover what we’re not gifted at, which is very helpful. Most importantly, we discover that God will work through us.

But discovering a spiritual gift, like most other discoveries, happens over time, after multiple trials, and not a few missteps. And we probably won’t find it sitting in our Lazy Boy; we’ll find at the church’s point of need.

One last thing: I’ve spent many hours preparing this sermon, translating the Greek text, looking for main points, choosing helpful illustrations. But what you do in the next moment is more important than what I did over the last week. If you decide to find and use your spiritual gift, your life will change for the better, you will grow in the knowledge of God, and our church will benefit. But it is your decision.

[1] Roderick I. Swaab, “The Too-Much Talent Effect,” Psychological Science (6-27-14); Cindi May, “The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent,” Scientific American (10-14-14)

[2] Adapted from Michael E. Ruane, “In 1944 Battle of the bulge, Albert Darago, then 19, took on a German tank by himself,” The Washington Post (12-15-14)

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Church, Church Life, Encouragement, Faith, Mission, Sermons, Spiritual life, Theology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jesus and the Fishermen

Posted on May 31, 2025 by salooper57

Watch here or read below.

If I told you that Jesus is here right now, would you believe me? Most of you would, or would at least want to. You’d remember that he said, “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matthews 18:20) and take his presence here on faith.

So, let me ask you: if he is here, why doesn’t he do something to let us know? If he is with you on Thursday at work, why doesn’t he let you know? When you are going to the hospital for a test, why doesn’t he reveal himself. Couldn’t he at least make it so that when you turn on the radio, you’d hear the lyrics, “Fear not, I am with you”?

Why do we go through days and weeks without sensing him? As an atheist once said to me, “If he really exists and wants everyone to believe in him, why doesn’t he write us a message across the sky that everyone can see?”

If God’s goal was to prove that he exists, perhaps that is what he would do. But if his goal is to transform human beings into genuinely free, authentically good people who can intelligently engage with him in his plan for creation, that might not be helpful. An appearance a minute on his part, or even an appearance at the last-minute to save the day, would not accomplish what he’s after and might even delay it.

But if he isn’t going to show himself – at least not in the way my atheist friend suggested – where does that leave us? Are we just supposed to pray and read the Bible all the time? Do we dare do something just because we enjoy it? What are we supposed to be doing?

The apostles must have wondered the same thing after Jesus’s resurrection. He was no longer with them all the time, as he had been. Over a period of 40 days, he came and went, but mostly he went. What were they supposed to be doing when he wasn’t there?

They had not seen him for a while when (verse one) “Jesus appeared again to his disciples, by the Sea of Tiberias.” There are three things to note in this sentence. First the word “appeared.” A literal translation would be – but we don’t talk this way in English – “Jesus appeared himself.” It means to “make visible what would otherwise be unseen.” The idea is that Jesus was with the disciples even when they didn’t see him. When he made himself visible to them, it was at his discretion and for their good. That he wasn’t always visible to them was a new kind of good. Remember, he had told them, “It is for your good that I am going away” (John 16:7).

Over that forty-day period when Jesus appeared and, just as importantly, disappeared,he was teaching his disciples to trust that he was present even when they didn’t see him. They would need to know that in the days ahead. We need to know that too.

The second word to notice is again. This certainly refers to the previous appearances – one week apart – in the upper room. But John, who loves double meanings, might also be referring to an earlier time when Jesus revealed himself to his disciples on this same body of water. When they were caught out on the lake in a terrible storm, Jesus calmed the wind and the waves with a word. That’s was a revelation to the disciples. St. Luke writes, “In fear and amazement, they asked one another, ‘Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.’”

The third thing to notice is the name of the lake: Tiberias. Herod Antipas founded the city of Tiberias on the shores of Galilee in 20 A.D. in honor of the emperor. That’s when the name of the lake was officially changed, but locals continued calling it “Galilee.” In the New Testament, only John ever calls the lake by its official name. I think that’s because he was writing fifty or sixty years later to people living in modern-day Turkey, who would know the lake (if they knew it at all) as the Sea of Tiberias. When you think of it, this is supporting evidence for the authenticity of this gospel.

Verse two gives us the names of the disciples who were together. First, Peter. That is no surprise: he is always mentioned first in every list of the apostles. But notice that Thomas is mentioned second—the only time that ever happens. Then Nathaniel. Then James and John, the sons of the commercial fisherman Zebedee. And then there are two unnamed disciples.

Peter, who had failed miserably – and publicly – a few weeks before, is still a part of the group. In fact, he is still its leader. When he says, “I’m going fishing,” the other six chime in, “We’ll go with you.”

Preachers often fault Peter for going fishing. One says that Peter “was turning back to his old life,” and lists four evidences that the disciples were in the wrong. He says that, (1) the darkness indicated “that they [were] not walking in the light; (2) they had no direct word from the Lord; (3) their efforts met with failure; (4) they did not recognize Christ when He did appear, showing that their spiritual vision was dim.”[1]

I think that preacher misread the situation. (1) When Jesus appears, he does not rebuke Peter and the others for fishing; and, in fact, (2) he helps them. And (3) while they had no direct word from the Lord, neither do we on many occasions. And (4) Jesus went on to commission Peter right then and there, with the others as witnesses. I don’t think Peter and the others were doing anything wrong.

But whether the fishing trip was blameworthy or commendable, one thing is clear: it was not successful. Verse 3: “That night” (nighttime was the prime time to fish on Galilee) “they caught nothing.”

Now, verse 4: “Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.” The preacher I mentioned faulted the disciples for not recognizing Jesus, but would they recognize him from a hundred yards away in the gray light of dawn? I doubt a man would recognize his own father under those conditions.

So, Jesus stands in the half-light on the shore and, verse 5, calls out to them: “Friends, haven’t you any fish?” The Greek reads, Children rather than Friends. It would be like an Englishman calling out, “Lads, you don’t have any fish to eat, do you?” (That’s the way the question is phrased in the original language.)

Their reply is a terse “No.” When you have been fishing all night and you haven’t caught even a little one, and somebody says, “Well boys, you didn’t catch anything, did you?” you don’t feel very talkative.

Today, people would criticize Jesus for being insensitive to their feelings. I think Jesus asked the question because he knows that until we admit that what we’re doing isn’t working, we won’t try something else. So, he draws the admission from them, however reluctantly. Then, when he tells them to throw out their net on the right side of the boat, they were willing to give it a try. When they did, they made a huge catch of fish.

Everyone sprang into action, pulling nets, shoving oars and equipment out of the way, making room in the boat. They tried hoisting their catch over the gunnel, but it was too heavy. While they were debating what to do, the beloved disciple, whom most scholars think was the Apostle John, had an “Ah, ha!” moment. The man on shore was Jesus! He was sure of it.

Everyone else was so excited about the catch that they hardly gave a thought to the man on shore (which, by the way, happens in churches, too. We can get so caught up in church work that we ignore the church’s Lord.). But when the beloved disciple said to Peter, “It is the Lord,” Peter knew he was right. Every church needs people like the beloved disciple, people who are quick to recognize the Lord. They are often not the first to act, but they are the first to perceive, the first to recognize that some leading is from the Lord.

Once Peter knew it was the Lord, he wrapped his outer garment around him and jumped into the water. Now, if I was going into jump in the water, I would take my outer garment off. Why did Peter put his on?

He wanted to be dressed when he greeted Jesus. In Judaism, a greeting was a religious act, just as it is today in Islam. Even the Greeks would not greet one another when they were not suitably clothed. For example, no one exchanged greetings in the public baths.

Whatever was the case with Peter, he did not wait for the others. He wanted to see Jesus. And that is just like what we know of Peter. Always the first to act. Always the leader. The others followed in the boat. Unable to hoist the net over the gunnel, they had decided to pull it behind the boat until they got to shore.

When they arrived, they found a charcoal fire with some fish cooking on it, as well as some bread. Jesus said to them, verse 10, “Bring some of the fish you just caught,” and Peter (once again) took the lead. He climbed aboard, untied the net, and dragged the fish to shore. Some commentators see this as a miracle. They say Peter was given supernatural strength to lift the net. I’m not so sure. For one thing, dragging the net is a very different thing than lifting it. For another, just because Peter responded first does not mean that others did not join in. I doubt they would just sit there and watch their friend do all the work.

John tells us that the net was full of large fish, and he mentions a specific number – 153. That number has fascinated Bible readers ever since. Some have found great significance in it—or at least, they assume there is great significance in it – and they have come up with some novel theories to explain it.

The church father, Jerome, claimed that the total number of species of fish in the world is 153, and that one of each was in the disciples’ net. (Jerome was only off by about 37,000 species.) Other people added the numerical value of Simon’s name, 76, to the numerical value of the Greek word ἰχθύς (fish), 77, to come up with 153. Still others see the number 100 as representing the Gentiles, the number 50 as representing the Jews, and the number 3 as representing the Trinity. There are other ideas out there besides.

I think they are all suspect and some are just plain silly. I think the real reason John said there were 153 fish was because – don’t be shocked – there were 153 fish. John has a penchant for being precise, which we see throughout this gospel. If he were here today and you asked him the time, he wouldn’t say, 10:50; he would say 10:51. That was just the kind of guy he was.

And he was another kind of guy, as well, which we mustn’t forget. He was a fisherman – and a commercial fisherman, at that. I once went on a fly-in trip to a remote Canadian lake. One day, my friends Dave and Bill fished for pike and caught 70 of them. How do I know? If you were a fisherman, you wouldn’t need to ask. Fisherman keep track, especially of big catches. If I were to call Dave up today, twenty years later, and ask how many fish they caught that day, he would know. If universities required biblical exegesis majors to take an immersive study abroad in fishing, it would make for better biblical scholarship.

So, what does all this mean for us? First, what we have here is a visual, real-life commentary on John 15:5: “Apart from me you can do nothing.” The professional fisherman caught nothing until Jesus joined them. We, too, need him to join us: in our marriages, our parenting, at work, at school, and especially at church. When he joins us, it makes all the difference. You can work (for instance) on your marriage. You might do everything you can think of, but if he is not in it with you don’t expect too much. But ask him to join you – better yet, ask to join him in his plans for your marriage – and watch what happens.

Next, the beloved disciple was the first to recognize Jesus. Every church needs its beloved disciples – the people who discern the Lord in the events of everyday life. How did he know it was the Lord? I think he put together the sound of his voice (remember – my sheep hear my voice) with what resulted from following his directions.

Those are keys for us, too, if we want to recognize him. First, we need to learn to distinguish his voice when he speaks to us. We can start by familiarizing ourselves with its tones. The principal way we do this is by spending time – significant time – in the Scriptures. (Anyone who ignores his voice in Scripture yet expects to hear him speak in time of need is just fooling himself.)

Here are some truths about his voice: He speaks with authority. He never whines. His voice is never grating. A person struggling with guilt need never think the voice that says, “You stupid jerk!” is his. That is not how he speaks. If you want to be like the beloved disciple, want to alert the rest of us, “It is the Lord,” you must learn to recognize his voice. That means spending time with the Scriptures.

Secondly, when the effects are greater than the effort, the Lord is near. When John saw the great catch of fish, he immediately discerned the Lord’s hand in it. When the American evangelist D. L. Moody went to England to preach, Dr. R. W. Dale made a point of attending the meetings. He wanted to discover the secret of Moody’s effectiveness. After two or three days he made an appointment to see Moody, and this is what he told him: “The work here is plainly of God, for I can see no relation between you and what is being accomplished.” In other words, “How could an uncultured, uneducated yokel like you accomplish what is happening here? It must be God.”

(Moody, by the way, was not offended in the least. He laughed and said that he would be very sorry if it were otherwise. He knew that when the results are incommensurate with our efforts, the Lord is at work.[2]) 

Cal Road needs its beloved disciples, the people who are quick to recognize the Lord. Will you be one of them? Will you learn his tones, discern his hand? But we also need men women like Peter, who jump right in, people who lead the rest of us in following Jesus. Maybe God is calling you to be one of those people. If so, don’t let anything get in your way.

Peter could have let his recent failure – he had denied his master, betrayed his trust, and disgraced himself – get in his way. Yet he rushed to be with Jesus. Why? Because he knew the kind of person Jesus is: forgiving, loving, great to be around, always a faithful friend. Perhaps he had been hesitant to see Jesus before, but not now.

Maybe you are hesitant to come near to Jesus because something in your past is holding you back. If you only knew the kind of person Jesus is, you’d come. He is forgiving – he won’t look down on you, whatever you’ve done. He’ll welcome you. If you ask his forgiveness, you’ll have it, and he won’t keep bringing up your fault. He wants you to be with him.

One last thing. On three different occasions, Jesus said something like, “Whatever is concealed will be revealed.” We take that as a warning that our secret sins will be exposed, and that may be the case on one of those occasions, but the principle is broader than that. We’ve been talking about how Jesus is concealed now, at least from most eyes most of the time, but it will not always be so. Now, when we don’t see him, we still believe in him, as St. Peter said. But the day is coming when we will see him, and just one look will change us forever.

God grant us that look, and may we be glad of it.

Blessing/Sending (Psalm 67; John 14)

May God be merciful to you and bless you. May He smile with kindness upon you, that His ways may be known throughout the earth, and His saving power among people everywhere. Now go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

[1]Wiersbe, W. W. (1992). Wiersbe’s Expository Outlines on the New Testament (p. 269). Victor Books.

[2] From Dallas Willard, Hearing God, IVP © 1999 p. 49

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John 3:16: The Bible’s Most Popular Verse

Posted on May 30, 2025 by salooper57

In 1993, while working for Calvin College, Nick Hengeveld founded Bible Gateway. In the 32 years since, the Bible Gateway site has been visited billions of times. It attracts almost 90 million visits a month from countries all over the globe. While more searches are initiated by Americans than any other country, over three million searches a month are performed by Filipinos. Colombians and Mexicans add another million searches each.

According to Bible Gateway, the Bible verse that is most often searched is John 3:16, with over 2 million searches every month. John 3:16 is the world’s most beloved Bible verse, but what does it mean? Why does it start with the word “For”? Does perish refer to hell? Does eternal life refer to heaven? What does it mean that God gave his Son?

The word “For” at the beginning of the verse signals that an explanation (in this case, of the claim that “the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life”) is being offered. In typical Johannine style, the phrase “the Son of Man must be lifted up” has a double meaning: the Son of Man must be exalted and the Son of Man must be crucified. John sees no conflict between the two. In fact, he sees the crucifixion as the fullest revelation of Christ’s glory.

John tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” Sadly, as N.T. Wright has pointed out, much evangelical preaching sounds as if “God so hated the world that he gave his one and only Son.” Nothing could be further from the truth. God loves the world. He loves winners and losers, saints and sinners. He loves the believer and the atheist, the ardent church-goer and the guy who has never darkened a church door.

Because God loved the world in this way – a literal translation might go, “God loved the world thus” – he gave his only Son. “Thus” clearly points first to the lifting up of the Son (the crucifixion), but the giving of the one and only Son did not start there. Perhaps creation itself is the result of another giving of the Son (see John 1:3, 10 and Colossians 1:16), and he was certainly given to the world in the incarnation (John 1:14).

The word “whoever” (repeated in verse 18 and throughout this Gospel) is important. Whoever includes “everyone believing in him,” as a literal translation might go. I’ve known two different drug dealers who prayed from their jail cells for mercy. Their prayers arose from troubled souls through drug-distorted minds and went something like this: “God, if you’ll get me out of this, I will believe in you.” Both men got out of their trouble in remarkable ways, and both men believed. Decades later, they are still believing. Whoever means whoever.

The words “believes in him” deserve careful attention. A strictly literal translation would go, “believes into him.” This is a Johannine phrase, used only in this Gospel and in the First Epistle, but used more than twenty times. What does it mean to “believe into” Jesus, and why did John latch onto this preposition?

This preposition (εἰς) implies motion toward or into something. I suspect that John wanted to convey the idea that the life of faith is not static. You don’t believe in Jesus from a distance. Belief moves you into him, into fresh experiences of his wisdom, kindness, and grace. Into a fresh awareness of your sins and weaknesses, and fresh dependence on his righteousness and strength. The life of faith is always calling us, as a line from C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle put it, “further up and further in.”

Jesus frequently spoke of believers as followers. The chief thing about followers is that they follow. They don’t just sit, not even in a pew. Their motto is, “Further up and further in.” If we stop moving forward, we can be sure that a distance will grow between us and our savior since he has not stopped moving.

Those who believe into Jesus will not perish. That word can mean “kill” in the active voice. In the passive and middle voices in can mean to perish, to be lost (it is used of the lost sheep in Jesus’s parable) and to be ruined. It can have the idea of loss or ruin through one’s own actions (the execution of a priest’s daughter who had taken up prostitution, for example) or neglect, by “trifling away one’s life.”

Hell is not mentioned in connection with the word “perish,” nor is heaven mentioned in connection with “eternal life,” though it is possible that Jesus had both in mind. But perishing (or being ruined) begins long before hell, just as eternal life begins before reaching heaven.

Setting “perish” in apposition to “eternal life” recalls Moses’s offer more than a millennium earlier: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life …” John understood that the way to choose life is to believe into the Son whom God had sent.

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Is There an Old Testament Confession of Faith?

Posted on May 24, 2025 by salooper57

Is there anything in the Old Testament that could be called a confession of faith? Of course, the Shema (see Deuteronomy 6:4-9) would qualify. But there is another confession of faith that appears in every part of the Old Testament: the Pentateuch, the historical books, the wisdom literature, and the prophets. Interestingly, the first person to make this “confession” about God was God. In Exodus 34:6-7 God proclaims his name (YHWH) to Moses: “YHWH, YHWH, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

This proclamation of his name includes a description of his character. YHWH is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. This, the ancient Hebrews confessed, is the nature of our God.

God’s proclamation of his own character resounds throughout the Old Testament by those who found it to be true. Forms of it appear three times in the Psalms (86:15; 103:8; 145:8), in Joel 2:13, in Jonah 4:2 (where the unhappy prophet is complaining that God is like this even with hispeople’s enemies), and in Nehemiah 9:17.

I once took a class from a teacher who described the God of the New Testament as loving and forgiving, but the God of the Old Testament as angry and vindictive. He had not read the Old Testament carefully enough.

Someone might respond, “But surely the God of the Old Testament is often spoken of as angry.” Yes, this is true. But he has much to be angry about. He is angry about injustice, abuse, and oppression. He is angry at the things and the people that are ruining his beautiful creation, but he is slow to anger. On the other hand, he is quick to forgive, to help, and restore.

This Old Testament confession of faith was around before Israel became a nation, and it was still on the lips of faithful Jews after Israel ceased to be a nation, went into exile, and then returned to as a remnant.

When we come to the New Testament, we see this confession in another setting—or rather, in another person. While Old Testament people made the good confession in prayer, like Nehemiah and Jonah, or in song, like the Psalmists, or put it in writing like the prophet, in the New Testament the nature of God is expressed in a person: Jesus.

This is what St. John had in mind when he wrote, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). What the Old Testament put into words about God, Jesus put into a body. He is the walking, talking, weeping, loving exposition of the Old Testament confession. In Jesus, the Infinite and Eternal was embedded in space and time.

The Old Testament confessed that YHWH is compassionate. Jesus demonstrated what that compassion is like by healing the diseases of the “harassed and helpless” (see Matthew 8:35-36). When Jesus and his apostles went across the lake for a little R&R, people found out where they were staying and crashed their vacation—by the thousands. Instead of being angry, Jesus “had compassion on them” and made sure that they all received a good meal (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:3-44). When a widow lost her only son, Jesus felt compassion for her (NIV, “his heart went out to her”), and he raised her son back to life.

The confession proclaims that God is gracious. St. John went so far as to say that God’s grace came to humanity through Jesus Christ (John 1:17), who was “full of grace” (literal translation, John 1:14). This grace was demonstrated in Jesus’s willingness to go to a Gentile’s home to heal his servant, his readiness to take time from his busy schedule to stop and bless little children, and his gentle way with people excluded from society (Luke 5:12-15; 7:36-50; John 4:4-26). That grace was epitomized in Jesus’s decision to lift us out of our poverty by becoming poor for us through the incarnation (2 Cor. 8:9).

To Moses, God revealed himself as being “slow to anger.” This was, of course, demonstrated to Moses himself when God called him (Exodus 3), to Israel as it grumbled and rebelled in the wilderness (see Nehemiah 9:29-31 for a comment on this), and with the people of Ninevah in the days of Jonah (Jonah 3:9-4:2).

That God is slow to anger does not mean that he never gets angry. When an adult abuses a child, God is angry. When a nation refuses to turn from its idols, God is angry. When the rich oppress the poor, God is angry. Jesus perfectly demonstrated this. He was slow to anger, putting up with ignorance and error and calming childish fears. But he could become angry, as he did when a synagogue of hard-hearted people ignored a man’s needs because they were more concerned for their rules (not God’s) than they were for their fellow man (Mark 3:1-6). Jesus was angry at his own disciples when they turned people away, thinking Jesus (and themselves) too important to waste time with children (Mark 10:13-16). He overturned the tables of the money changers and drove the merchants out of the temple, where they had usurped the place of Gentile worshipers and turned the temple into a market (Mark 11:15-17).

In the Old Testament confession of faith, it is acknowledged that YHWH is forgiving. Jesus embodied this forgiveness in everyday life. He forgave the young man who was paralyzed – how liberating his words of forgiveness must have been (Mark 2:1-5). He forgave a woman whose sordid life had been the subject of gossip in the community (Luke 7:36-50). He demonstrated forgiveness to a scheming, unpatriotic, greedy tax collector named Zaccheus (Luke 19:1-10). The forgiveness he expressed toward each of these people – and more besides – scandalized those who were present.

The quintessential example of forgiveness comes when “wicked men” handed Jesus over to be crucified. As the soldiers drove spikes through his hands/wrists and feet, he prayed: “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.” Such mercy, expressed in forgiveness, boggles the mind.

The point, of course, is that this is exactly what YHWH the creator God is like. Jesus perfectly demonstrated his Father’s nature (John 14:9-10) by being “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness … forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” He is “the image of the invisible God,” the “radiance of God’s glory, and the exact representation of his being.”

God Most High is exactly like Jesus? He is. And that is good news for the entire human race.

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A Change Is Coming

Posted on May 22, 2025 by salooper57

This sermon from 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 explores some exciting themes: death, deathlessness, and the transition from this life (everything we have known) to the life to come (everything we hope to be). This passage wraps up Paul’s brilliant exposition of the resurrection.

If you would rather read the sermon than watch it, the text is included below.

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I am neither a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I am going to die on June 23, 2031 – at least according to the website, http://www.deathclock.com. Years ago, I entered my birth date, height, weight, sex, and body/mass index, along with whether or not I have been a smoker or a drinker. According to the formula they use for such things, I’ve got 6 years left on earth. They have me dying seven days before our 52nd wedding anniversary. I first read that about 20 years ago, and 2031 seemed a long way off. Seems a lot closer now.

According to the same authority, Karen is going to outlive me by four-and-a-half years. She dies on February 17, 2036.

Of course, their calculations may be all wrong. Probably are. Karen and I have walked two miles a day, five or six days a week, for decades. We exercise. I played basketball until I was well into my fifties. We could live to be 90. Maybe a hundred. I might not die on June 23rd, 2031. I might make it to May 1st, 2041. Or Karen and I might crash our hover car and die together on August, 16th, 2052. Wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

But we are going to go.

In the sure and certain gloom of death, do our efforts to live loving, holy lives mean anything? Praying, reading Scripture, visiting the sick, practicing generosity—none of that is going to exempt us from dying.

The apostle Paul was just plain blunt about this. He wrote to the Corinthians: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”[1] If death has the last word, then our efforts are useless. Religion is meaningless. Preaching is vain.

But death, Paul insists, does not have the last word, as Jesus’s resurrection proved. The theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg put it this way: “The evidence for Jesus’s resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.”

That’s what we’re thinking about this morning: how Jesus’s resurrection changes the way we live. If resurrection is not changing us now, there is reason to doubt that it will change us in the future. And we need that future change. Paul says in verse 50, “I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”

Those of our species who will survive death must be changed in the very makeup of their bodies and their souls. We’re talking about an evolutionary leap that dwarves anything Darwin ever imagined. Because “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” we need to be changed.

But isn’t there a problem here? Jesus said that people can enter the kingdom of God in this life, in this “flesh and blood.” He said that prostitutes and tax collectors were already entering the kingdom of God while he was on earth.[2] Is Paul contradicting Jesus? The Lord says we can enter the kingdom as flesh and blood people, but Paul says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.

There is no contradiction. Think of it this way: You can enter the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. In fact, you are invited to do so (for a fee). You might even get a job there. But entering or working at the Biltmore is far different from inheriting the Biltmore. Anyone can enter the kingdom of God who chooses to do so. In fact, everyone is invited to do so (and the fee has already been paid). You can even get a job in the kingdom; everyone who enters does. But that is not the same thing as inheriting the kingdom. Flesh and blood cannot do that. To inherit the kingdom, you need to be a family member – one who shares the life of Jesus Christ – and even then, before you can come into your inheritance you will need to be changed. And that, verse 51, involves a mystery.

Mystery is one of the great Pauline words. Three out of every four times it is used in the New Testament it comes from his pen. A mystery, in Paul’s sense of the word, is something hitherto unknown about God’s plan, something that, apart from divine revelation, no one would ever guess. But God has made it known.

In the Bible, there are many such mysteries – things once hidden, but now revealed. For example: the mystery of Christ’s indwelling;[3] the mystery of the union of Gentiles and Jews in the church;[4] the great mystery of God in a human body.[5] In our passage, Paul gives us yet another one: “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.”

We’ll think about the nature of that change in a moment, but before we do, I need to say something. It’s true that the Bible has unveiled many mysteries, but God has not let all his secrets out of the bag (Deut. 29:29). Some people seem to think that what we have in the Bible is not only all we need to know, but all there is to know. It is true that we have all we need to know in order to be included in his salvation; but it is hardly all there is to know.

The secret things belong to the Lord, and he is not telling all his secrets—perhaps only a tiny percentage of them. We are surrounded by mystery. We are a mystery. Apart from God himself, we may be the biggest mystery of all.

But in verse 51, we have a mystery that has been, at least in part, revealed. Remember that flesh and blood must be changed in order to inherit the kingdom of God, and that change happens after death. There are currently no direct flights to the age to come. We are all booked for a layover at the terminal we call death.

I read a few years ago that one airport has been consistently voted the worst in the nation: Newark, New Jersey. If you can avoid Newark, you will. But say you want to go to Bermuda, your favorite place on earth, and every flight goes through Newark. You’d put up with Newark if it meant Bermuda. That is like death. We don’t like it and we’ll do our best to avoid it, but if it is only a layover on our way to glory, we can put up with it.

But here Paul lets us in on a secret. He unlocks a mystery for us: not everyone will enter heaven that way. God is going to book some people on a direct flight without a layover in death.

“We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” Sleep here refers to death. In fact, fifteen of the eighteen times the word occurs in the New Testament, it refers to death. Do you see what that means? The early Christians were not overawed by death. They thought of it like we think of falling asleep. It’s not a big deal – at least, not for someone who is connected to Christ through faith.

But Paul says, “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” It is possible that some of us in this room are going to be changed without dying. In the New Testament, the word change is often used in the sense of “exchange.” To make it in the age to come, we will need to exchange this flesh and blood body for what Paul calls a spiritual body. Some Christians will make that exchange without passing through death.

(By the way, “spiritual body” does not mean a body made of spirit, just like an electric car does not mean a car made of electricity. A spiritual body is powered by spirit, not by flesh and blood. It’s not a ghost; it’s not anything like a ghost.)

Do you understand what Paul is saying here? Some people are booked on a direct flight for the age to come. They will be changed, but they won’t die. That was hitherto unknown and unexpected; it was a mystery.

Verse 52: “In a flash…” The Greek word is atomos, from which we get our word “atom”; it signified a thing that could not be divided. Here it refers to a moment of time so brief as to be indivisible. “…in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” Darwin would have said that such a leap forward would take millions of years. God will accomplish it in a nanosecond.

This change Paul speaks of is not only a major step for us, but for the entire universe because we are not the only ones being changed. The author of Hebrews, uses this same word when he writes that God will change the heavens and the earth “like a garment.”[6] God is not only going to reclothe us with a spiritual body; he is going to reclothe the universe.

This same word for “change” is also used of the demonized man of Gadara. That poor man saw the world in a daze, through a fog. Everything was unclear to him, and hateful. Then Jesus changed him. We read that when the townsfolk next saw him, he was “sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind.”[7] I think the change from flesh and blood to spiritual body will be something like that: it will be like waking up from sleep—for some people, from a nightmare. When we are clothed in our new, spiritual body, the bad dreams will be over. We will be awake to realities we never knew existed.

Paul says that the change, verse 53, will be from perishable to imperishable. The word perishable has the idea of a thing that is subject to corruption, to falling apart, becoming worthless. That describes us now, when “the outward man wastes away”; but when we are changed, that will no longer be the case. We will be imperishable.

Before the change, we are mortal (the Greek word means, characterized by death) but after the change we will have immortality (or literally, deathlessness.) Flesh and blood are death-full. Everyone dies! Maybe not on June 23rd, 2031, but (apart from the mysterious exception of verse 51) none of us gets out alive. As the Book of Common Prayer puts it, “In the midst of life, we are in death.” But it is even worse than that: death is in us, and has been ever since Adam’s rebellion. But the enormous change of verses 51 and 52 will transform us from death-full to deathless beings.

That has been God’s plan all along. Isaiah the prophet foresaw this a millennium before Paul, and Paul quotes him in verse 54: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” In Paul’s Greek it is actually, “Death has been swallowed down.” You know who swallowed it, don’t you? The Captain of our salvation, the Lord Jesus himself. He swallowed death, and it went down hard. He took death into himself so that he could take it out of us, so that it would be possible to transform human beings from death-full mortals to deathless immortals.

Christ has taken the victory away from death and given it, verse 57, to us! There was a time when victory belonged to death. Itreigned asthe undefeated champion of the world.

Death was winning all its matches, though according to the Scriptures, there were a couple of forfeits: both Enoch and Elijah were called away before their match could take place). But then death met Jesus Christ, and he swallowed it down. He took, verse 55, its sting.

A father was riding in a car with his young son, who was deathly allergic to bee stings. When a bee appeared in the car, the boy panicked and started swatting at it. The father saw it was a honeybee, and that his son was going to get stung if he didn’t do something. So, in one lightning-fast motion, he grabbed the bee out of the air.

He winced, then opened his hand and the bee flew away. The boy began to squirm again and whine, but his father assured him that the bee could no longer harm him. He had taken its sting. We were afraid of death, and we had good reason to be. Humans are deathly allergic to it. But Jesus took its sting.

The scholar Jaroslav Pelikan edited a four-volume work he called, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. Among the creeds, he included one from the Masai tribe of Nigeria. In their creed, Masai believers say that Jesus “was always on safari, doing good.” They declare that Jesus was “tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died, he lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grave. He ascended unto the skies. He is Lord.”[8]

Pelikan says that when a Nigerian student translated that creed for him, he got the shivers. “The hyenas did not touch him.” Death met Jesus, and he swallowed it down, and gave the victory to us.

That is why I can look at June 23, 2031 (or whatever date it might be) and say, “I know it’s on the calendar, but that’s alright. Death is not my destination. I’ll just be passing through.” And who knows? I may not even do that. Perhaps I, and you with me, will be spared that nasty layover. Because of Jesus, Death does not have the last word.

And because death does not have the last word, our commitment to Jesus is not in vain. Because I am connected to Jesus through faith, he imparts his life to me, and that life makes possible the change from mortal to immortal, from perishable to imperishable. But understand: the change begins as soon as the connection is established. You can’t have Jesus’s death-defeating, God-obeying, devil-defying life and not be changed.

Because death does not have the last word, “we know that our labor in the Lord,” verse 58, “is not in vain.” What we do for the Lord makes a difference, if not in the world, then in us. So, we stand firm We let nothing move us. We always give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord.

But how? How do we stand firm or, as the Greek has it, “become firm”? How can we become unmovable (which is a literal translation of the phrase, “Let nothing move you”)? I once heard about a Kung Fu master who positioned his body just so, then his disciple tried to push him down. Then two disciples. Then three, and four, but they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t push him down. It was like pushing an oak.

That is something like what Paul had in mind. We become unmovable like the deep-rooted oak, and we cannot be pushed out of the path of devotion to Christ. Are we more like the oak or like its leaf, which is blown here and there? Paul wants us to be unmovable, rooted and grounded in Christ.

If that is going to be true of you, you’ll need to send your roots deep, and send many of them. You will need to draw life and nourishment daily from Christ himself, through prayer and the reading of Scripture. If you haven’t learned how to do that, talk to me after the service. If you need to be somewhere – it is Mother’s Day – call me, or email, or text. But don’t procrastinate. This is important.

But sending your roots deep is not enough; you also need to send them wide. Learn to draw life from Christ through worship (there’s more to it than just coming to church), through spiritual disciplines like solitude and silence, giving, and service, through community, spending regular, meaningful time with other Christians. Let your roots become a rich and complex system that connects you to Christ in a thousand different ways. That’s how you become firm and unmovable. Sunday mornings alone cannot provide that.

This is verse 58 “Give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord.” In the original language this phrase is, “overflowing in the work of the Lord.” Every Christian needs to be involved in the work of the Lord. If you’re not, it is time you got started. If you don’t know where to start, we’ll figure that out together, and we’ll do it in a way that fits who you are. Too many people try to do as little as possible for God and still get by. Let’s not be like that. Let’s be like Jesus, and give all we can.

When death comes to people who are overflowing in the work of the Lord, they will find no terror in it. When Christ comes (which will make the coming of death seem trivial), those who are overflowing the in the work of the Lord will find no terror in him. That cannot be said for those who are not. I’d rather not be found among their company.

How about you?

[1] 1 Corinthians 15:19

[2] Matthew 21:31

[3] Colossians 1:27

[4] Ephesians 3:6

[5] 1 Timothy 3:16

[6] Hebrews 1:12

[7] Luke 8:35

[8] Timothy George, “Delighted by Doctrine,” Christian History and Biography (Summer 2006)

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Should Church Sanctuaries Be Coffee Shops?

Posted on May 17, 2025 by salooper57

There I was, sitting in the church’s auditorium for our denomination’s regional conference. The meeting had been going on for hours by this time. It began when the regional director called the meeting to order. The newly elected regional director was then introduced, and he shared his vision for the future. The denominational president and other leaders cast vision and shared reports, and the treasurer for the region talked about income, expenses, and investments.

At some point during all this, I happened to notice the back of the chair in front of me. It was, like many found in church auditoriums, steel-framed, with a padded seat and back. Below the seat, a narrow steel dowel ran from one back leg to the other, and attached to it was a round cup holder.

There was hardly anything new about this. The church I served previously had similar chairs, with similar cup holders. The difference, though, was that the cup holders in our previous church (like many others I have seen) was made to hold small glass or plastic cups, the kind Protestants frequently use in Holy Communion. But the cup holders in these chairs were not made for communion cups – at least not Holy Communion cups. It was made for coffee cups.

Not surprisingly, there was a coffee bar in the lobby, and people were welcome to bring their cups into the meeting. On Sundays also, when people enter the auditorium to worship, the cup holders are convenient for those who bring their coffee into the service. No one wants to raise their hands in worship when they are holding a coffee cup. Someone may think that they are promoting Starbucks.

Something about this struck me as incongruous and significant. Incongruous because the church is not a coffeehouse but a place of worship, where people gather to exalt and adore God, not to hang out and sip Iced Cinnamon Dolce Lattes. Significant because it seems to symbolize a change in the way the church (the evangelical church, at least) thinks of its gatherings.

When I first came to faith and began attending church, “fellowship time” was planned. It generally took the form of church picnics, fall festivals, or summer swim parties. Occasionally, people would go out after the evening service to share a light meal. In those days, taking a cup of coffee into a worship service would have struck the vast majority of evangelicals (or any other Christians) as bad form, and maybe even sacrilege. Would someone carry a cup of coffee into a meeting with the King Charles or Pope Leo XIV? And if they would not do that, how is it that they think nothing of carrying a coffee cup into an encounter with God?

Or have we stopped thinking of worship as an encounter with God and started thinking of it as a concert followed by a lecture or a pep talk? Perhaps worship etiquette has changed because we have come to think differently about what is happening during the time we are gathered. And for this reason, the coffee cup holders on the back of those church chairs seems significant to me.

When I first became a Christian, I had no real understanding of worship, what it was or why we offered it. This, I think, was an oversight on the part of our church and its leaders. But I did understand that worship was not designed for me. Perhaps others thought differently, but it never occurred to me to judge the success of a worship service or base its value on whether my favorite songs were sung or the preacher maxed out my emotion meter. As our society has become ever more consumeristic, worship has been tailored to the worshiper rather than to the Worshiped. The music industry has had the Billboard Hot 100 since 1958, and woe to the radio station that didn’t include a high enough percentage of the Hot 100 in their playlist. It may have taken 50 years, but the worship industry now tracks their biggest hits with the CCLI Top 100, and woe to the church that does not include enough of the Top 100 in its worship services.

So, is taking a cup of coffee into a worship service a spiritual faux pas? I don’t think so. A person can carry a cup of coffee into a worship service without denigrating God’s character or his worth. Still, I fear that we have turned the worship service upside down. We have taken the place of God by making ourselves the recipients of worship. We often act as if the music, the sermon, and the prayers are presented for us rather than him.

I, who have planned worship services for decades, have not been guiltless in this. I have sometimes forgotten that God’s satisfaction with our worship is what matters most. I have sometimes judged the success of a worship service by whether people seemed engaged and emotionally moved. If no one said, “Great service!” or “Good sermon!” as people streamed out, I was apt to feel our time together was a flop.

Coffee cups in the sanctuary are not a problem. Religious consumers in the sanctuary are, whether they drink coffee or not. I don’t know how to solve the problem – if I did, I would have done it already – but I am sure it will require big changes. The spectator version of the faith that dominates the Western church, nurtured by a gospel that makes Christians passive receptors rather than active disciples, must come to an end.

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The Work of the Lord: Am I Making Any Difference?

Posted on May 15, 2025 by salooper57

Watch this hopeful message from 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 or read it below.

I am neither a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I am going to die on June 23, 2031 – at least according to the website, http://www.deathclock.com. Years ago, I entered my birth date, height, weight, sex, and body/mass index, along with whether or not I have been a smoker or a drinker. According to the formula they use for such things, I’ve got 6 years left on earth. They have me dying seven days before our 52nd wedding anniversary. I first read that about 20 years ago, and 2031 seemed a long way off. Seems a lot closer now.

According to the same authority, Karen is going to outlive me by four-and-a-half years. She dies on February 17, 2036.

Of course, their calculations may be all wrong. Probably are. Karen and I have walked two miles a day, five or six days a week, for decades. We exercise. I played basketball until I was well into my fifties. We could live to be 90. Maybe a hundred. I might not die on June 23rd, 2031. I might make it to May 1st, 2041. Or Karen and I might crash our hover car and die together on August, 16th, 2052. Wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

But we are going to go.

In the sure and certain gloom of death, do our efforts to live loving, holy lives mean anything? Praying, reading Scripture, visiting the sick, practicing generosity—none of that is going to exempt us from dying.

The apostle Paul was just plain blunt about this. He wrote to the Corinthians: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”[1] If death has the last word, then our efforts are useless. Religion is meaningless. Preaching is vain.

But death, Paul insists, does not have the last word, as Jesus’s resurrection proved. The theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg put it this way: “The evidence for Jesus’s resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.”

That’s what we’re thinking about this morning: how Jesus’s resurrection changes the way we live. If resurrection is not changing us now, there is reason to doubt that it will change us in the future. And we need that future change. Paul says in verse 50, “I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”

Those of our species who will survive death must be changed in the very makeup of their bodies and their souls. We’re talking about an evolutionary leap that dwarves anything Darwin ever imagined. Because “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” we need to be changed.

But isn’t there a problem here? Jesus said that people can enter the kingdom of God in this life, in this “flesh and blood.” He said that prostitutes and tax collectors were already entering the kingdom of God while he was on earth.[2] Is Paul contradicting Jesus? The Lord says we can enter the kingdom as flesh and blood people, but Paul says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.

There is no contradiction. Think of it this way: You can enter the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. In fact, you are invited to do so (for a fee). You might even get a job there. But entering or working at the Biltmore is far different from inheriting the Biltmore. Anyone can enter the kingdom of God who chooses to do so. In fact, everyone is invited to do so (and the fee has already been paid). You can even get a job in the kingdom; everyone who enters does. But that is not the same thing as inheriting the kingdom. Flesh and blood cannot do that. To inherit the kingdom, you need to be a family member – one who shares the life of Jesus Christ – and even then, before you can come into your inheritance you will need to be changed. And that, verse 51, involves a mystery.

Mystery is one of the great Pauline words. Three out of every four times it is used in the New Testament it comes from his pen. A mystery, in Paul’s sense of the word, is something hitherto unknown about God’s plan, something that, apart from divine revelation, no one would ever guess. But God has made it known.

In the Bible, there are many such mysteries – things once hidden, but now revealed. For example: the mystery of Christ’s indwelling;[3] the mystery of the union of Gentiles and Jews in the church;[4] the great mystery of God in a human body.[5] In our passage, Paul gives us yet another one: “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.”

We’ll think about the nature of that change in a moment, but before we do, I need to say something. It’s true that the Bible has unveiled many mysteries, but God has not let all his secrets out of the bag (Deut. 29:29). Some people seem to think that what we have in the Bible is not only all we need to know, but all there is to know. It is true that we have all we need to know in order to be included in his salvation; but it is hardly all there is to know.

The secret things belong to the Lord, and he is not telling all his secrets—perhaps only a tiny percentage of them. We are surrounded by mystery. We are a mystery. Apart from God himself, we may be the biggest mystery of all.

But in verse 51, we have a mystery that has been, at least in part, revealed. Remember that flesh and blood must be changed in order to inherit the kingdom of God, and that change happens after death. There are currently no direct flights to the age to come. We are all booked for a layover at the terminal we call death.

I read a few years ago that one airport has been consistently voted the worst in the nation: Newark, New Jersey. If you can avoid Newark, you will. But say you want to go to Bermuda, your favorite place on earth, and every flight goes through Newark. You’d put up with Newark if it meant Bermuda. That is like death. We don’t like it and we’ll do our best to avoid it, but if it is only a layover on our way to glory, we can put up with it.

But here Paul lets us in on a secret. He unlocks a mystery for us: not everyone will enter heaven that way. God is going to book some people on a direct flight without a layover in death.

“We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” Sleep here refers to death. In fact, fifteen of the eighteen times the word occurs in the New Testament, it refers to death. Do you see what that means? The early Christians were not overawed by death. They thought of it like we think of falling asleep. It’s not a big deal – at least, not for someone who is connected to Christ through faith.

But Paul says, “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” It is possible that some of us in this room are going to be changed without dying. In the New Testament, the word change is often used in the sense of “exchange.” To make it in the age to come, we will need to exchange this flesh and blood body for what Paul calls a spiritual body. Some Christians will make that exchange without passing through death.

(By the way, “spiritual body” does not mean a body made of spirit, just like an electric car does not mean a car made of electricity. A spiritual body is powered by spirit, not by flesh and blood. It’s not a ghost; it’s not anything like a ghost.)

Do you understand what Paul is saying here? Some people are booked on a direct flight for the age to come. They will be changed, but they won’t die. That was hitherto unknown and unexpected; it was a mystery.

Verse 52: “In a flash…” The Greek word is atomos, from which we get our word “atom”; it signified a thing that could not be divided. Here it refers to a moment of time so brief as to be indivisible. “…in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” Darwin would have said that such a leap forward would take millions of years. God will accomplish it in a nanosecond.

This change Paul speaks of is not only a major step for us, but for the entire universe because we are not the only ones being changed. The author of Hebrews, uses this same word when he writes that God will change the heavens and the earth “like a garment.”[6] God is not only going to reclothe us with a spiritual body; he is going to reclothe the universe.

This same word for “change” is also used of the demonized man of Gadara. That poor man saw the world in a daze, through a fog. Everything was unclear to him, and hateful. Then Jesus changed him. We read that when the townsfolk next saw him, he was “sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind.”[7] I think the change from flesh and blood to spiritual body will be something like that: it will be like waking up from sleep—for some people, from a nightmare. When we are clothed in our new, spiritual body, the bad dreams will be over. We will be awake to realities we never knew existed.

Paul says that the change, verse 53, will be from perishable to imperishable. The word perishable has the idea of a thing that is subject to corruption, to falling apart, becoming worthless. That describes us now, when “the outward man wastes away”; but when we are changed, that will no longer be the case. We will be imperishable.

Before the change, we are mortal (the Greek word means, characterized by death) but after the change we will have immortality (or literally, deathlessness.) Flesh and blood are death-full. Everyone dies! Maybe not on June 23rd, 2031, but (apart from the mysterious exception of verse 51) none of us gets out alive. As the Book of Common Prayer puts it, “In the midst of life, we are in death.” But it is even worse than that: death is in us, and has been ever since Adam’s rebellion. But the enormous change of verses 51 and 52 will transform us from death-full to deathless beings.

That has been God’s plan all along. Isaiah the prophet foresaw this a millennium before Paul, and Paul quotes him in verse 54: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” In Paul’s Greek it is actually, “Death has been swallowed down.” You know who swallowed it, don’t you? The Captain of our salvation, the Lord Jesus himself. He swallowed death, and it went down hard. He took death into himself so that he could take it out of us, so that it would be possible to transform human beings from death-full mortals to deathless immortals.

Christ has taken the victory away from death and given it, verse 57, to us! There was a time when victory belonged to death. Itreigned asthe undefeated champion of the world.

Death was winning all its matches, though according to the Scriptures, there were a couple of forfeits: both Enoch and Elijah were called away before their match could take place). But then death met Jesus Christ, and he swallowed it down. He took, verse 55, its sting.

A father was riding in a car with his young son, who was deathly allergic to bee stings. When a bee appeared in the car, the boy panicked and started swatting at it. The father saw it was a honeybee, and that his son was going to get stung if he didn’t do something. So, in one lightning-fast motion, he grabbed the bee out of the air.

He winced, then opened his hand and the bee flew away. The boy began to squirm again and whine, but his father assured him that the bee could no longer harm him. He had taken its sting. We were afraid of death, and we had good reason to be. Humans are deathly allergic to it. But Jesus took its sting.

The scholar Jaroslav Pelikan edited a four-volume work he called, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. Among the creeds, he included one from the Masai tribe of Nigeria. In their creed, Masai believers say that Jesus “was always on safari, doing good.” They declare that Jesus was “tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died, he lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grave. He ascended unto the skies. He is Lord.”[8]

Pelikan says that when a Nigerian student translated that creed for him, he got the shivers. “The hyenas did not touch him.” Death met Jesus, and he swallowed it down, and gave the victory to us.

That is why I can look at June 23, 2031 (or whatever date it might be) and say, “I know it’s on the calendar, but that’s alright. Death is not my destination. I’ll just be passing through.” And who knows? I may not even do that. Perhaps I, and you with me, will be spared that nasty layover. Because of Jesus, Death does not have the last word.

And because death does not have the last word, our commitment to Jesus is not in vain. Because I am connected to Jesus through faith, he imparts his life to me, and that life makes possible the change from mortal to immortal, from perishable to imperishable. But understand: the change begins as soon as the connection is established. You can’t have Jesus’s death-defeating, God-obeying, devil-defying life and not be changed.

Because death does not have the last word, “we know that our labor in the Lord,” verse 58, “is not in vain.” What we do for the Lord makes a difference, if not in the world, then in us. So, we stand firm We let nothing move us. We always give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord.

But how? How do we stand firm or, as the Greek has it, “become firm”? How can we become unmovable (which is a literal translation of the phrase, “Let nothing move you”)? I once heard about a Kung Fu master who positioned his body just so, then his disciple tried to push him down. Then two disciples. Then three, and four, but they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t push him down. It was like pushing an oak.

That is something like what Paul had in mind. We become unmovable like the deep-rooted oak, and we cannot be pushed out of the path of devotion to Christ. Are we more like the oak or like its leaf, which is blown here and there? Paul wants us to be unmovable, rooted and grounded in Christ.

If that is going to be true of you, you’ll need to send your roots deep, and send many of them. You will need to draw life and nourishment daily from Christ himself, through prayer and the reading of Scripture. If you haven’t learned how to do that, talk to me after the service. If you need to be somewhere – it is Mother’s Day – call me, or email, or text. But don’t procrastinate. This is important.

But sending your roots deep is not enough; you also need to send them wide. Learn to draw life from Christ through worship (there’s more to it than just coming to church), through spiritual disciplines like solitude and silence, giving, and service, through community, spending regular, meaningful time with other Christians. Let your roots become a rich and complex system that connects you to Christ in a thousand different ways. That’s how you become firm and unmovable. Sunday mornings alone cannot provide that.

This is verse 58 “Give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord.” In the original language this phrase is, “overflowing in the work of the Lord.” Every Christian needs to be involved in the work of the Lord. If you’re not, it is time you got started. If you don’t know where to start, we’ll figure that out together, and we’ll do it in a way that fits who you are. Too many people try to do as little as possible for God and still get by. Let’s not be like that. Let’s be like Jesus, and give all we can.

When death comes to people who are overflowing in the work of the Lord, they will find no terror in it. When Christ comes (which will make the coming of death seem trivial), those who are overflowing the in the work of the Lord will find no terror in him. That cannot be said for those who are not. I’d rather not be found among their company.

How about you?

[1] 1 Corinthians 15:19

[2] Matthew 21:31

[3] Colossians 1:27

[4] Ephesians 3:6

[5] 1 Timothy 3:16

[6] Hebrews 1:12

[7] Luke 8:35

[8] Timothy George, “Delighted by Doctrine,” Christian History and Biography (Summer 2006)

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Generational Challenges and the Unity of the Spirit

Posted on May 10, 2025 by salooper57

My wife and I had dinner with a young woman and her boyfriend this past week. I think I heard her say that she is almost 21. He is 24. We’ve gotten to know them over the past year, and we like them. They are friendly and smart, and both of them are committed Christians.

At some point in the dinner, the subject of aging came up. I cannot remember the immediate context for her comment, but the young woman, speaking of when she is older, said: “I want to be the cool grandma, the one with a nose ring.” (She wears a ring on the left side of her nose.)

The idea struck me funny. Perhaps a grandmother today who had a ring in her nose and, say, purple hair, is cool. Just possibly, her teenage grandchildren say to their friends. “You should meet my grandma. She is really cool!” But by the time our young friend is a grandmother, I suspect that only old ladies who are forty years behind the times will be wearing nose rings. Everyone else will have abandoned the practice decades ago. Nose rings will be painfully uncool. (Saying “cool” will probably also be “uncool.”)

I thought all this in a flash. I spoke it more cautiously. “You know, by the time you’re a grandma, it’s possible that people won’t be wearing nose rings anymore. They might not be cool by then.”

I don’t think she had ever considered the possibility that nose rings might go out of fashion. She seemed surprised by the idea and, for a second at least, nonplussed. Could it be that what is cool now will be totally lame in ten years?

It may be that in ten years no one will be wearing skinny jeans. Pants that don’t cover the tops of a person’s shoes may be thought an embarrassment (as they were when I was young, and people mockingly referred to them as “highwaters”). When scrolling through old photos on their phones, adult children might be saying, “I can’t believe my mother made me wear jeans that had holes in the knees. That has got to be the stupidest fashion trend in history.” It may be that no self-respecting male will be caught dead with a man-tote, and shoppers might have to search shoe stores in all fifty states (or will there be fifty-one by then—or perhaps 49?) to find one that still sells torpedo shoes.

Photo by Kampus Production on Pexels.com

Time seems to roll across the continuum of existence in waves, and we all ride on a particular wave. The ideas, images, terminology, values, fashions, and amusements of the wave my generation rides will be somewhat different from the waves ridden by the generations that precede and follow my own. To know this enables me to be generous with people from other generations and to be humble about my own.

I spent most of a day last week in a conference with other pastors and denominational officials. One of our leaders (from a younger generation than my own) addressed the conference. He was wearing “skinny pants” and a shirt that came right out of a trendy clothing catalog. Later, another leader also spoke. He was wearing pants that were inches shorter than I would ever wear mine.

At the time, I thought these two were trying to be hip to win acceptance by the cool kids. But upon reflection, I think these men are simply riding a different wave than me. They wanted to dress appropriately, and this is what they, and people of their generation, deem appropriate. I was wrong to attribute to them any other motive.

The temporal seascape has seen an unbroken succession of waves. In the past, those waves were well spaced and moved more slowly, but the winds of change have picked up considerably, and the waves are passing quickly. It is silly to expect other people, younger people, to want to ride my wave or to concede that it is somehow better or more permanent than their own.

The waves advance and recede, though from my perspective one remains forever at the center: my own. (Of course, this is a delusion. If any wave occupies the center at all, it is the one Jesus rode during his earthly ministry.) But whatever wave we ride on, all the waves belong to the same sea.

St. Paul tells us to “keep the unity of the Spirit.” This cannot be done atop the crest of the latest wave of ecclesial practice or theological emphasis. Nor could it be done atop the ecclesial practices and favorite theological emphases that carried my generation along. To keep the unity of the Spirit with God’s people from other generations – older or younger – we need to be aware of our own strong preference for our generational distinctives.

We must go beneath the waves into the generation-spanning love of God, expressed preeminently when Christ emptied himself and died for people who cared nothing for him. The deeper we go into God’s love, the less difficulty we will have in keeping unity. If we go so deep that the pressure of Christ’s love reshapes us into conformity to his selfless sacrifice, unity will be natural. But if we stay shallow, stay where the waves of theological and ecclesial fashion toss us hither and thither, we will not find unity, only contempt and distrust.

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There Is Love: The Amazing Promise of the Resurrection

Posted on May 7, 2025 by salooper57

This great passage, properly understood, is one of the most encouraging texts in all the Bible. Enjoy the video (and share it, if you can think of someone who would benefit from watching it) or read the text of the sermon (always a little different from what I actually say) below.

(1 Corinthians 15:19-28) If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.  (NIV)

I think it was Dr. Johnson who said, “Men live in hope, die in despair.”

I was in college when I first heard that quote—not in an English lit class but in the Student Union, while I was playing ping-pong. (I changed my major from billiard science to ping-pong my junior year.) The professor of ping-pong was my roommate and great friend George Ashok Kumar Taupu Das – I called him “the doctor.” Looking back, I’m amazed at his patience. In our first games, he beat me 21-3 or 21-4 and, even then, I only scored points when he was goofing around or not paying attention.

But after months of playing almost daily, I had become competitive. He was still beating me every game, but it was 21-10, then 21-14, then 21-18—and he had started paying attention.

It was during one of these contests – sometimes tied, sometimes the lead changing by a point or two – that the finish line came in sight for me. Just a couple of more points, and I would finally win. But the doctor got serious, shut me down, and handed me yet another defeat.

I must have said something about how I would get him next time. And that’s when our resident genius John Erdel, who was sitting there, idly watching the game, gave me a deadpan look and said: “Men live in hope, die in despair.”

What a dismal view of life! What a demoralizing view of death! “Men live in hope, die in despair.” Anyone who actually believed that would die in despair but could certainly not live in hope. But the resurrection of Jesus means that we can live and die in hope. The death and resurrection of Jesus has transformed the landscape. It is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the world, and whether you know it or not, it is the biggest thing that has ever happened to you.

Last week, we talked about what the resurrection means. This week and next, we will look at why it matters. (And if you missed last week’s sermon, you should go to www.californiaroad.org and watch it online. It provides the foundation for what I’m going to say today.)

The resurrection of Jesus Christ makes a difference in my life—in the way I think, and act, and in the way I will die. We need to drill down into this passage to see why that is true.

In verse 22, Paul writes: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” In verse 53, he announces the defeat of death: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” Then, in verse 54, he borrows the words of the prophet Hosea to taunt death: “Death, what happened to your victory? Where is your sting now, Death?” Paul wants us to know that the resurrection of Jesus has brought death’s reign of terror to an end. Death has tyrannized humanity since the time of Adam. The fear of death lies behind, and feeds, all other fears. We cannot even imagine life without the fear of death.

Susan Sontag, the brilliant atheist writer and filmmaker, was 71 when she died from cancer. The doctors and nurses tried to talk to her about death and help her prepare, but Sontag refused to listen. Death was too awful even to think about.  It terrified her.

For Sontag, this world had become a foul tomb, filled with the stench of decay—but she didn’t dare leave it. “She thought herself unhappy,” her son said, yet she “wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could.” Even though life was a nightmare, she was afraid of waking up. How different her life would have been if she’d had the hope of the resurrection.

We who have that hope expect to wake up to joy unspeakable that is full of glory. Because the death-defeating life of Jesus is, by the Holy Spirit, already in us, we can face death with courage and even joy. The author of Hebrews writes: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

Our friend Amy Snapp was the Kids’ Min Director at our previous church. She was diagnosed with cancer in her forties. Like Sontag, she improved with treatment, and the cancer went into remission for a while. Then it came back.

Unlike Sontag, Amy wasn’t hiding from the future. Toward the end, when I stopped to see her, she told me: “I’m good. Ready to go. I’m not afraid.” She said she expected dying to be an adventure, like Lucy going into – and through – the wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia.

When Amy mentioned Narnia, it brought to mind a favorite passage, which comes at the very end of book 7. The Lion Aslan, the Christ figure of Narnia, says to the children: “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”

(I am quoting.) “Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’

‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed?’

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream has ended; this is morning.’

And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus, gives his people hope in the face of death. In 1973, during the reign of Idi Amin, the Butcher of Uganda, the people of Kabale were ordered to come to the stadium to witness the execution of three men. Bishop Kivengere asked for, and was granted, permission to speak to the men before they died. He approached them from behind and was surprised by what he saw when they turned around. Their faces were radiant. They smiled. One of them said, “Bishop, thank you for coming … I wanted to tell you: Heaven is now open, and there is nothing between me and my God. Please tell my wife and children that I am going to be with Jesus.”

The bishop thought the firing squad needed to hear that, so he translated their remarks into the soldiers’ own language. It left the firing squad so flummoxed that they forgot to pull the masks down over the Christians’ faces before executing them. The condemned men were looking toward the people in the stands and waving, handcuffs and all, and the people waved back. Then shots were fired, and the three were with Jesus.

The next Sunday, the bishop preached in the hometown of one of the three men. As he spoke, the huge crowd that had gathered erupted into a song of praise to Jesus![1] The hope of the resurrection can free us from the fear of death, but it does so in exact proportion to our nearness to Christ. Even Christians remain fearful when they are far from him.

By his resurrection, Jesus Christ cut death down to size. The English poet George Herbert said, “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel” – he’s referring to the death and resurrection of Jesus – “has made him just a gardener.” But what a gardener! When he plants those who belong to Jesus, they rise with a splendor that is indescribable, unspeakable, and full of glory.

But our hope is greater than the hope that we will somehow survive death. The resurrection gives us reason to believe that we will be – that nothing can stop us from being – fulfilled, completed, perfected. Paul puts it this way: “The body that is sown” – gardener imagery again! – “is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power…” (vv. 42-43). And verses 52-53: “we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.”

Susan Sontag got it wrong. Earth is not a grave but a garden. This – weakness, sickness, inability, depression, aging, loss – is no more the whole story than the kernel is a whole stalk of corn or the acorn is a towering oak. God’s plan for humanity is not pain and suffering but joy and glory. It is not weakness but power. It is not sadness but joy. It is not the shame we know but a glory that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor human mind imagined. (1 Cor. 2:9).

You, if you have received resurrection life from Jesus through faith, will be happier than you can now conceive, stronger than you can now imagine, and overflowing with the vitality of love. The promise would seem too good to believe if we hadn’t already tasted this life, experienced its power, felt its love.

Listen: Jesus’s resurrection is evidence that the long, tortuous project known familiarly as Shayne Looper – substitute your own name if you have Jesus and he has you – will one day be finished and it will be good. Very good. Even Shayne Looper will be crowned with glory and full of joy, bringing glory and joy to God himself and to all the rest of us. This – nothing less, and certainly far more – is what awaits the people of God.

But the hope of the resurrection is more than the hope – as great as it is – that we as individuals will be fulfilled. It is the hope that all things in heaven and on earth will be made right, good, and glorious. The resurrection means that God’s plan is unstoppable, and that heaven will make right every earthly wrong. What has happened to Christ will happen to us, and something like it will happen to the world.

There are times when that has been hard to believe. I have stood in the ER with a family as the doctor performed CPR on their son and brother, whose body lay before them, torn by a hideous gunshot wound. The doctor eventually gave up. Too many times, I’ve sat with families – sometimes a young dad and mom, the mom holding her three-year-old or her baby in her arms – while the nurse removed life support.

I’ve cried with too many people whose image of themselves was shattered like glass by the terrible abuse they suffered as children. You’ve known them too. We’ve not only known them; we are them: the sufferers, the abused, the wronged, the fearful, the damaged. So, what if the future holds inconceivable glory? The past holds unutterable pain. Even if we someday attain joy, will we not always be haunted by the suffering?

No, we will not. C. S. Lewis was right: We “say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”[2]

Listen to these words of hope from the throne of God. “‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new!’”  

The singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson put it into words this way.

“After the last tear falls, after the last secret’s told
After the last bullet tears through flesh and bone
After the last child starves and the last girl walks the boulevard
After the last year that’s just too hard

There is love…

Cause after the last plan fails, after the last siren wails
After the last young husband sails off to join the war
After the last, ‘This marriage is over’
After the last young girl’s innocence is stolen
After the last years of silence that won’t let a heart open

There is love
Love, love, love. There is love.

And in the end, the end is oceans and oceans of love and love again
We’ll see how the tears that have fallen
Were caught in the palms of the Giver of love and the Lover of all
And we’ll look back on these tears as old tales

‘Cause after the last tear, falls there is love.

There is love because, after the last tear falls into nail-scarred hands, there is God.

Our hopes are audacious and unparalleled. The Marxist hoped for a better world. The Christian hopes for a perfect one: a new heaven and new earth, where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13). Karl Marx’s most enthusiastic hopes fade from sight in the shining hope of the resurrection, the way the light of a candle fades before the noonday sun.

Our hope is not just that our sins – worse than we remember and more than we can count – will not be held against us, though because of Jesus, they will not! Our hope is not just that our pains will be forgotten, swallowed up in bliss. Our hope is not just that our shame will be buried with us when we die and left in the grave when we rise. Our hope is not just that evil and injustice will be destroyed, never to return. Our hope is that God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).

This hope is not like the Buddhist hope of Nirvana, in which the delusion of selfhood is at last extinguished and there is only the Unity. No, when God is all in all, we will be more than we have ever been. We will have become us, more ourselves than ever before, made to be with God and to be filled by God.

What lies at the foundation of all existence is not some subatomic particle or the so-called four fundamental forces. What lies at the foundation of all existence is a relationship: the overflowing, joyous relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And what rests at the pinnacle of all existence is relationship: the overflowing, joyous relationship of Father, Son, Holy Spirit and, by the triumph of grace, us.

This long story of bullets and wars, of marriages ended and innocence stolen, is different than we thought and better than we’ve dreamed. It is the story of the perfectly joyful, perfectly beautiful Trinity making perfectly joyful, perfectly beautiful beings of us and inviting us to join their party. Emptiness is not our future, but fullness, “for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9).

Because of the joyful love of the Triune God, this is what awaits us. And it has been made possible, made real, by the loving sacrifice and glorious resurrection of our man in heaven, who is also “our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

This is why the resurrection matters. This is why we hope. Amen.

[1] Colin Chapman, The Case for Christianity

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce ©1946. HarperCollins Edition 2001. p. 69.

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First Stone in an Avalanche

Posted on April 30, 2025 by salooper57

The resurrection of Jesus signals more to come

Watch the sermon, First Stone in an Avalanche, or read the sermon below.

(1 Corinthians 15:20-26) But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

You’re on your way home from Chicago’s north side, and it looks to be a long drive. I-90 isn’t stop-and-go; it’s just stop. You turn on the radio and scan the channels, and you land on the Cubs’ game. Your dad was a Cubs’ fan, as was his dad, and you’ve been a Cubs’ fan for as long as you can remember. Pat Hughes is calling the play by play, and the Cubs and the Dodgers are scoreless.

You’ve been listening for about half-hour – and you’re not even to I-55 yet – when it occurs to you that Pat has not used the words “pitch,” “swing,” or “out.” How can you call a game without using those words? Maybe you just missed it. So, you start listening intently but there’s not a single, “Swing and a miss.” No, “And here’s the pitch…” And after two full innings, no mention of an out. You wonder what is going on. This has got to be intentional.

I had an analogous experience in reading the Gospel accounts of the life and death of Jesus. (This really surprised me when I first realized it, and it surprises me still.) No one ever uses the word “resurrection” to describe what happened to Jesus, neither the Gospel writers nor the people whose conversations they reported. They report that Jesus was alive after being dead but never use the one word you would expect them to use: “resurrection.” It’s as if they were trying to avoid it.

That ought to raise a question in our minds: Why didn’t they use the word resurrection? The answer comes in two parts, the first of which is very straightforward: The Gospel writers did not use the word “resurrection” because the people whose story they were telling didn’t use the word. The fact that the writers refrained from using what is arguably the most important word in the vocabulary of the early church speaks volumes about their intention to faithfully recount what had happened.

Some biblical scholars think that everything theological in the Gospels – especially everything that points to the deity of Jesus and his status as the Messiah – was invented by the Church and written into the Gospels in an act of historical revisionism. Those scholars believe that the healing miracles, the transfiguration and especially the resurrection never happened. They think the Church fabricated it all as a way of elevating Jesus’s status and validating their faith.

Yet here we have the most important thing ever, the climax of all four Gospels and the core tenet of the Christian faith, and not one of the writers gives in to the temptation to describe it as resurrection. This is an overlooked and remarkably important evidence for biblical authenticity.

But that brings us to the second part of the question. Why didn’t the people in the story – Peter, John, the apostles, Mary Magdalene – refer to Jesus’s return from the dead as “resurrection”? The doctrine of the resurrection was profoundly important to most first century Jews. So, why didn’t any of the disciples, or after the fact, the fearful chief priests, ever mention the word?

I think the answer is once again straightforward, though it might surprise us. In the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s return from the dead, the disciples didn’t realize he had been resurrected. Now don’t misunderstand: they knew Jesus had risen from the dead. The evidence overwhelmingly supports that conclusion. They did not, as some have suggested, think that Jesus lived on in spirit or as a “life force” or as a powerful memory. They didn’t point to their hearts and say, “He’ll always be with me!”

No, the disciples believed that Jesus died—that he was stone-cold, dead as a doornail dead, and buried. And they believed that after three days he came back to life; he was alive—walking-talking-eating-drinking-alive! But it did not occur to them that he had been resurrected.

That may sound like a contradiction, or even heresy, but it is not. The disciples had seen three people (that we know of) raised back to life after they had died: the daughter of Jairus, the young man who lived and died in Nain and, most spectacularly, their friend Lazarus. These people had been dead – stone-cold, dead as a doornail dead – and Jesus had somehow brought them back to life. But the disciples did not think that they had been resurrected. The idea never occurred to them – and it wouldn’t.

When they heard that Jesus was alive and then saw him for themselves – after having seen him horribly killed – they believed their Master had come back from the dead, and they were overjoyed. But that did not signify to them that he had been resurrected. In their minds, and in the minds of their contemporaries, resurrection was a different thing altogether. It didn’t happen here or there, to this or that individual. When it happened, it would happen to everyone, and that would be on the last day. Resurrection would close this age and inaugurate the age to come.

So even though Jesus rose from the dead and his friends knew it, they didn’t make the connection between his rising and the resurrection. In their minds, when the resurrection happened, everyone who had ever died would be raised from the dead – the righteous to eternal life and the unrighteous to eternal death. It took time and instruction – most importantly from Jesus himself – for the enormity of what had happened in that garden tomb to sink in. Jesus had not only come back to life, as remarkable as that was; the resurrection – the coming to life of everyone who had ever died – had begun. That is stunning news!

By the time we come to the early chapters of Acts, Jesus’s followers are using the word “resurrection” right and left. What changed? After he rose, Jesus had met with them repeatedly over a forty-day period and explained to them from the Scriptures what had happened and what it meant. In Luke’s words, “[B]eginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). So, less than a month-and-a-half after Jesus rose, we find the disciples “proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 4:2).

They now understood that the resurrection – the coming back to life of everyone who had ever died – had commenced. That brought them to the remarkable conclusion that the “last days” had begun and “the renewal of all things” (those were Jesus’s words) was at hand.

On Easter, churches often focus on the fact that we will continue to live after we die. As true as that is, it’s important to realize that most people believed that before Jesus rose from the dead. They believed that humans continue to live in some form (as ghosts, or spirits, or as some kind of life force) after they die. The resurrection of Jesus signaled something more radical and far-reaching than that.

No one has explained the implications of Jesus’s rising more thoroughly than the apostle Paul. When he first heard people say Jesus was alive, he didn’t believe it. (We assume that people in the first century were gullible and would believe anything, but that’s rubbish. They were no more likely to believe that a man three days dead would return to life than we are.) Paul never doubted it was a hoax … until he saw the resurrected Jesus for himself. That changed everything.

From then on, Paul could not stop talking and writing about the resurrection. In his biblical letters, he used the noun “resurrection” approximately four times as often as the noun “forgiveness”. The verbs related to resurrection and forgiveness are even more out of balance. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the resurrection to Paul. As far as he was concerned, there is no “faith in Jesus” apart from belief in the resurrection.

Paul’s most comprehensive explanation of resurrection comes in 1st Corinthians 15. The entire letter was written around the idea that God is restoring all things, and the resurrection is at the center of his plan. And when I say “resurrection,” I am referring to the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all the rest of us. In Paul’s mind – and in the minds of the early Christians – the two cannot be separated. His resurrection initiates and is the guarantee of ours. Ours is the outcome and achievement of his. The bond between them is unbreakable.

Yet some people in Corinth were trying to break it. They couldn’t see how sophisticated, first century intellectuals could possibly believe in resurrection. Yes, they believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead, but they denied that the rest of us would be raised. They believed, as Plato taught them, that death unchains people from their weak and corrupt bodies and releases their spirits into the eternal world. The idea that the spirit would then be reunited to the body was repulsive to them.

Now look at 1 Corinthians 15. The central question in this passage comes in verse 12: “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” These educated Corinthians were affirming that Jesus had been raised but denying the resurrection of the rest of us.

In this chapter, Paul begins with the question of whether the dead are raised, then moves to the question of when the dead are raised, and finally to the question of how the dead are raised. It is a brilliantly organized piece of writing. We don’t have time to look at all of it, so we’ll focus on the relationship between the miracle of Christ’s rising and our own resurrection.

Photo by Lucas Suu00e1rez on Pexels.com

Now remember than some of the Corinthians denied there is a relationship between the two. Paul insists that there is. He carefully avoids speaking about Christ’s resurrection and our resurrection, as if they were two different things. Jesus’s resurrection is a part of the resurrection. Or it might be more accurate to say that the resurrectionflows out of Jesus’s resurrection. The two cannot be disconnected. There is one resurrection, but it happens in two phases. Christ’s resurrection is the first stone in an avalanche.

Why make such a fuss about this? Because Paul understood that the resurrection is about more than a spirit being united to a body following death. That is far too individualistic a way of looking at it. Resurrection is the pivotal event in God’s plan to “make all things new.” Resurrection inaugurates the last days, initiates the Great Renewal, and promises the glories of the kingdom of God. Resurrection is the threshold into the age to come. Most Jews believed that. What they didn’t know was that resurrection had already begun in Jesus. That was the astonishing good news the Christians had to tell. It was not just that people go on living after they die – everyone already knew that! It was that the new age had arrived when Jesus rose from the dead.

That is why, in verse 20, Paul calls Jesus “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (or died). In the first century, people understood the image of the firstfruits, but we might not. Each year, at the very beginning of the wheat harvest, the Israelites took their first ripe wheat as an offering to the Lord’s temple. It was called the Feast of Firstfruits. Seven weeks later, when all the wheat had been harvested, they went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. Just as Firstfruits announced the harvest had begun and promised more to follow, Jesus’s rising announced the resurrection had begun and promised more to follow. The two thousand years between Christ’s resurrection and today are but the interval between Firstfruits and the Feast of Weeks.

Behind this passage stands the idea that God is restoring creation. There are allusions to creation – as recounted in Genesis one and two – everywhere in this chapter. That is intentional. There are seeds and plants, like Genesis 1; men and animals; birds and fish; there is the sun, the moon, and the stars. And in case we still haven’t caught on, Adam himself shows up. Paul is thinking about creation … and recreation. The first creation floundered upon Adam’s rebellion and is dying. The new creation was established on Jesus’s obedience and is ready to rise. Look at verses 21-22: “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”

“But,” verse 23, “each in his own turn.” Here is where the Jesus-follower’s understanding of resurrection goes beyond the ancient Jewish understanding. It didn’t change it (Paul’s view is still thoroughly Jewish), but it added to it. The additional insight was this: There is an order to the resurrection. It happens in phases. That’s the thing Paul and his colleagues had not previously understood. When he did, it changed everything.

Christ’s resurrection was not simply proof that people continue to live after they die, though they do. It was not just proof that death had been defeated, though it was. It was proof that the new age had dawned, that the ancient promises – of a kingdom, a restoration, and a renewal – were being fulfilled. It was proof to the disciples, as Chesterton once put it, that the world had died in the night and that “what they were looking at was the first day of a new creation…”[1]

Judaism divided time into two ages: The present age and the age to come. The present age is a time of injustice and conflict. Paul refers to it elsewhere as “the present evil age” (Galatians 1:4).

The age to come, on the other hand, will be the time of God’s undisputed rule, characterized by peace and justice – a time of prosperity, reconciliation, and joy. And, as everyone knew, the line between this present age and the age to come was the resurrection.

And here is Paul, telling us that the resurrection has already begun. The claim is staggering. The resurrection began in a Jerusalem garden on a spring morning somewhere around 30 A.D. when Jesus came out of the tomb, and it will conclude when Jesus comes back from heaven. But if that is true, what has happened to the age to come? Is this … it? Is this all there is?

That is an important question, and no one contemplated it more deeply than Paul. He believed that the new age had already dawned and that everyone who confesses Jesus as Lord is already part of the new creation (“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” – 2 Corinthians 5:17). The new age had dawned but the old age would not conclude until the completion of the second phase of the resurrection, when King Jesus returns. The sun has already risen, but the moon still hangs in the sky. We live in the overlap between the arrival of the new age and the termination of the old one.

We think of the resurrection as proof that we will go to heaven when we die. Paul thought of it as proof that God’s kingdom has come to earth while we live. The new age had dawned or, to be more precise, is dawning. In the overlap time, we still have the sorrows, sins, and corruption of the present age. But we can already tap into the joy and peace and freedom of the age to come. The winds of that age are blowing across the borders of our time, and we can lean into them. We can experience “the power of the resurrection” even now, during the overlap period.

There are battles to be fought and won during the overlap. There is a way of life to be learned. There is work to be done. So, Paul says in the last verse of this chapter: “Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”

Easter – the resurrection – means more than life after death. It means that we can live a different kind of life before we die, as we draw on the resources of the age to come. Most people live out of the past. For good or ill, they are molded (and often shackled) by it. But through faith in Jesus Christ, people can break the mold and learn from him how to live out of their future. They can know, as Paul put it, “the power of the resurrection.”

If that’s what you want – a future-oriented, God-empowered, old-habit-breaking, hope-inspiring life – there is one place to find it: in a connection to the Resurrected One, Jesus—a connection established by faith. I invite you to believe on the Lord Jesus today. If you already have a connection to him, I invite you to learn how to draw your life from that connection. 

[1] The Everlasting Man. The entire quotes runs: “On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways, they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”

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