1 John 5:1 “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his children as well.”

Christians are people of faith. By ‘faith’ we don’t mean ‘optimistic wishfulness,’ or ‘the anticipation of possible success,’ or even ‘educated guesses,’ or ‘informed opinions.’ Christian faith is about certainties. The things which we believe are things of which we have become convinced, no less than I am convinced that I am alive, or that this chair in which I am sitting is made of wood, or that the grass outside is green.

This makes us… odd. To some who don’t share our faith we will seem backwards and naive because the things we believe are things we have never “seen” and cannot prove in the ordinary way. To some we will seem arrogant, because in being so certain about the teachings of our faith, we are discounting and denying the things that they believe.

One of these certainties we have by faith is the fact that we are God’s children, spiritually born into God’s own family. How do we know? What makes us so sure? I can think of  reasons that might give us doubts. Usually children resemble their parents in some way. If you looked at my four children, and you knew only my wife, you might think of the old Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong. Can you tell which thing is not like the others, by the time I finish my song?” One of my children gets his looks more from me, I believe. I leave it to those who know our family to decide which is which.

If we are born of God, do we look like him? Does our behavior suggest a family resemblance? Does it distinguish us from everyone else? We have to admit that many times it is hard to tell any difference based on how we act.

We worry about money, health, and safety just like people who don’t know God as their kind and loving Father in heaven. We don’t live every moment in absolute peace about the way in which he will provide and protect. Our lifestyles can be just as self-indulgent as those who don’t believe Jesus is anything special.

So how do we know? How do we know that God has given us birth, that we are his children? John says, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” It doesn’t start with behavior. It starts with faith. We believe that Jesus is the Christ. For us he is not merely “Interesting Historical Figure,” “Founder of a Famous Religion,” “First-Century Philosopher,” “Mesmerizing Middle-Eastern Mystic.” Jesus is the Christ, our God and Savior. Everything we celebrate about Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead, we believe. We believe it as something far more than a sad and tragic miscarriage of justice followed by a miraculous return to life. This death is God’s own payment for our sins. We are forgiven, freed from guilt, liberated from the debt in which we were trapped. This living and glorified God-man, this empty grave, is a preview of our own bright future. Like Jesus our bodies are going to be revived and glorified. We will leave our tombs behind us, and live and walk with God in a land where there is no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the old order of things has passed away, and God has made everything new.

This message, this promise, is the womb in which our faith is formed, the means by which the miracle of spiritual birth takes place. It is the power by which we believe that Jesus is the Christ. Person after person has fallen under its spell–sinners and skeptics, doubters and deniers: fully armed and ready to debunk the Christian story, but in the end, won by his love, and confessing Jesus Christ as Lord. That faith, born of those truths, is how we know that God has given us birth, that we are the children of God.

Hebrews 13:5b “God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’”

This promise covers everything. If you would remember nothing but this promise of God, you would be equipped for anything you might face in life. The words are the words of God himself. In the whole history of the world, from creation until this day, he has never been known to break a promise. Not one. You can be certain that every day of your lives this promise he gives will still be valid. Any other gifts you might receive will wear out or lose their luster with time, but not this one. This gift from your Savior will be there until the day you die.

What he promises is nothing less than to be your helper in any and every situation. He will never leave you. When it looks like your ship is sinking, your dreams have been dashed, your fortune lost, your life and health ebbing away, he will always be with you to hold you up and give you care. He will never forsake you.

Even at times when our hearts have been cold and hard, and we have turned to follow our own ways instead of his ways, he doesn’t abandon us. He patiently calls us back to himself. He forgives us no matter how great the guilt. He takes care of us, no matter how great the problem.

Think for a moment about how all-encompassing this promise truly is. When God first spoke these words, it wasn’t here in the book of Hebrews. He used Moses to speak them to the children of Israel before they entered the Promised Land. There he was assuring them that, even though war and bloodshed were staring them in the face, he would never leave or forsake them. They could trust him when their very lives and the lives of those they loved were in such danger.

Here this promise is applied to our daily needs. Even when it looks like we have come to the end of our resources, the cupboard is bare, the well is dry, the purse is empty, God promises to uphold you and to provide. His resources never run out, and we can trust him for our daily bread.

Today you can claim this promise for yourself. Life can be a roller coaster ride as we balance the competing demands of family, work, church, and community. But whatever the future holds, God’s promise still stands: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

Hebrews 13:5a “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have.

We don’t usually think of a warning as a blessing. But when a warning comes to us in love, it really is a blessing, isn’t it? If someone warns you that the water on the road up ahead is too deep to drive through, it could even save your life.

God is showing you such love when he warns, “Keep your lives free from the love of money.” There is nothing wrong with money itself. Like everything else, it is a good creation of God. He is the one who provides us with it.

But God never made our money or any of our valuables to be loved. He only gave them to us for their use. Ultimately, he wants us to use them to serve him, to use them to show our love for him and for others.

Sometimes we are tempted to turn this around. Money, wealth, possessions can become even more important to us even than the people around us, even than God himself. It seems as if we are in a relationship of love with our things, and that we use people to serve them instead.

But you can’t really have a relationship with your things or your money. You can give your affection, your attention, and your devotion to them, but they can never give it back. They are cold, emotionless, and unloving. That is not because they are bad. It is because the Lord made them only to be used.

When we try to build such a relationship with our money or possessions, our relationships with everyone else, including our Lord, tend to suffer. Those who keep track of such statistics will tell you that more marriages break up today because of arguments over the money than for any other reason. God gives you this warning, then, to be a blessing, so that worldly wealth will never come between us, and others, and our Lord.

He has given us something to love, after all. He has given us himself with a giving and a loving no money could pay for. His love is so great that he gave his life in love in payment for our sins. He has cleansed us from our greed and every other selfishness. Let his warning be a blessing, then: Keep your lives free from the love of money.

Luke 14:21-24 ‘Go out into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ ‘Sir,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, but there still is room.’ Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full. I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.’”

Jesus originally told this parable to a house full of Pharisees. You might think these men would have been the first to embrace Jesus. In a sense, God’s invitation had come to them first. They had spent their lives listening to God’s word and studying it. Most of them grew up in homes where parents were active in their synagogues. Their lives were morally straight and free of public scandal.

It turns out they weren’t so interested in a religion about the forgiveness of sins. Seeing their own spiritual sickness and deformities, humbly admitting their own shortcomings, receiving the medicine of God’s grace did not sound appetizing. They wanted God’s love based on their own worthiness. They did not want his pity on their need and incompetence. So they ignored the invitation.

I don’t know anyone who finds admitting their guilt and spiritual incompetence appealing. But these are the prerequisites for finding and receiving forgiveness. For some people, life and circumstances make their great spiritual need for grace easier to see, harder to hide. They have made a moral mess of their lives. They live every day with the consequences of their sinful choices. Then they start to hunger for the Master’s invitation to the banquet.

These are just people who answered Jesus’ call. He found the prostitutes, the tax collectors, and public sinners. They were “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” in Jesus’ parable.

Don’t misunderstand the picture. They did not continue to defend and embrace their sins and remain outside the banquet of grace, hungry. They repented. They were forgiven. They went in.

Now, don’t misjudge the guests. Sometimes Christians seem to be surprised at the shortcomings of their fellow guests at God’s banquet. People in the church can be mean, crude, selfish, off-color, inappropriate, morally weak. No one is defending bad behavior. But what did we think–we were going to be seated in a room full of prim and proper aristocrats with perfect manners?

Jesus invited the spiritually poor, and sometimes they still come up a few bucks short. He called the morally crippled and lame, and sometimes they still walk with a limp. He sought out the blind, and they still struggle with spiritual near-sightedness. That doesn’t mean there is not a place for them at God’s banquet.

And don’t misjudge who has potential to become such guests. In the parable the servant is sent to the roads and country lanes to bring those in who were far away. Two thousand years later on the opposite side of the planet, Jesus is still using us to bring people in. Don’t be surprised if the words Paul once wrote to the Corinthians apply to the kind of people we find: “Brothers, remember what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:26-27).

It is not impressive pedigree, spiritual or otherwise, that Jesus’ seeks. If the person has a pulse and a pile of sins, that’s a candidate. They are qualified to be guests at God’s banquet.

Finally, don’t misjudge the guests that you and I are. We are the same as everyone else. We are no better. We struggle with the same temptations. We have failed our Lord in the same ways. But we, too have been invited. Jesus specifically sought us, forgave us, and brought us in. Only his invitation qualifies us to be his guests.

Luke 14:16-21 “A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said, ‘I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’ Still another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’ The servant came back and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry…”

I have been involved in hosting two grand-sized banquets in my lifetime. At each we fed about 150 people. We rented rooms almost as big as my whole house. The food was catered. We had music and dancing. Guests came from all across the country, some from more than a thousand miles away. People stayed and ate and laughed and danced past midnight. One of them was the reception at my own wedding. The second one was the reception at my daughter’s wedding.

We laid out more money for these events than our family brought home in a month, maybe even two. We printed formal invitations and sweated over the guest lists. Who would or would not be able to come? Who would be offended if they didn’t receive an invitation? How many people can we actually afford to feed?

But what if no one had come? I have had to send my regrets when invited to a wedding before. What if there were a perfect storm of bad scheduling and no one could make it? What if we just didn’t rate that high in the priorities of our guests?

There are a number of reasons people decline an invitation. The people in the parable seem to have reasonable excuses. What is wrong with their choices? Why does the host of the banquet get so angry?

There are a number of things that go into the value we place on an invitation. What is being offered? The banquet in the parable is the feast of salvation. This banquet is the forgiveness of our sins, peace with God, the comfort and power that come with faith, life after death, the resurrection of our bodies, and all the eternal joys of heaven. This isn’t some chintzy appetizer plate or cheap slop. It’s all you can eat and gourmet all the way. Compared to eternal freedom from guilt, and pleasures that never end, what are a few farm animals or acres of land?

But we understand the temptation to misjudge the value of the banquet, don’t we? We are tempted to decline God’s invitation to grace and life for much less–a few extra hours of sleep each Sunday, a few fleeting moments of pleasure in someone else’s arms, a few more rounds of golf or casts for fish at the lake, a few more hours at work to make a few more dollars on the next paycheck, a few more sunburns sitting in the bleachers watching the kids show off their athletic ability. There’s nothing wrong with most of these things in and of themselves, any more than there is anything wrong with fields or oxen–until they get in the way of God’s invitation to come home for the feast that never ends.

The Lord put no small amount of effort into preparing that feast. My two family wedding receptions cost thousands of dollars. The Lord sacrificed the life of his one and only Son, he let him die for the sins of the guests he invited to his banquet, to make that banquet happen. Don’t misjudge the value of what is being offered.

And it’s not just about the spread, what the host puts on the table. It’s about the host himself. People didn’t come to our wedding receptions for the culinary experience, or because the entertainment was so good. Believe me, you did not miss that much. They came because they loved us. We invited them, because we loved them, too.

The host in the parable is the God who made you, and everyone and everything you love. He is your Savior. He paid the ultimate price to rescue you, to rescue us, from the most horrible fate you can imagine. Yes, he deserves a spot, he has earned a spot, on our list of priorities, in the treasures of our hearts, even above our sweethearts, our children, or our parents. It’s not prideful or arrogant for him to claim such a place, or expect us to recognize it, when he offers us a place at his banquet.

Deuteronomy 5:12-14 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work…”

We don’t hear as much about this commandment as some of the others. With so much attention given to what God says about sex or what God says about the taking of life, the third commandment doesn’t get much press. It is worth noting, however, that before the Lord gave us those commandments that govern our relationship with each other, he gave us three commandments that deal with our relationship with him. “Remember the Sabbath Day” is one of them. If more attention were given to keeping this one, then breaking those others wouldn’t be so much of a problem. Let’s take a closer look at just what he is prescribing for us.

Understanding what God was asking of his Old Testament people here is easy. Six days of the week could be spent climbing the corporate ladder, or ploughing the back forty, or doing whatever else it took to pay the bills and put food on the table. But one day a week the work had to stop, and that was Saturday, the seventh day, the Sabbath day. The word Sabbath itself means rest or stopping, and that is exactly what happened on that day. The people rested, just as God prescribed.

That rest wasn’t relief for spinning heads and aching backs alone. This was a day of rest for the soul. The Lord wanted the day to be kept holy. This was a day to be a Sabbath to the Lord. On Saturday ancient Israelites were to direct their attention to God and his gracious gifts for them.

It’s no secret that New Testament Christians don’t use Saturdays the same way today. When Jesus came he fulfilled the Sabbath law for us. The Saturday part of the Sabbath law, the seventh day command, was part of God’s ceremonial law. It was in the same class with commands God gave forbidding people to eat pork or shellfish, or requiring people to offer doves and lambs as sacrifices. The Apostle Paul makes that clear when he says in Colossians 2, “Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.” All these things guided the lives of God’s people for a while. They helped prepare them for the coming Savior. They helped them look forward to Jesus’ day.

But once Jesus arrived, they had served their purpose. People were not to be judged by whether they observed these laws, these shadows. The important thing is believing in the One to whom they were all pointing: Jesus Christ. God no longer requires that we make the seventh day our day of rest.

That does not mean that the Lord threw out the whole concept behind the Sabbath Day. Jesus once reminded his disciples and the Pharisees, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The Sabbath served people. It made sure they paid attention to their Lord, and that was something they needed.

Your God still prescribes plenty of rest for you today, plenty of time spent with him. It isn’t limited to a single day. Jesus invites us, “Come unto me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” He says in another place, in John 6, “Whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” We still find relief from the sickness of sin, from consciences aching with guilt, in the spiritual rest only the Lord can provide.

Jesus gives you the freedom, and the opportunity, to find that rest in his word any time you open your Bible and begin to read. But there remains no better place to find this rest than gathered with God’s people to hear God’s grace preached, and to taste and touch it in Jesus’ Supper. Find your holy day, your “holiday,” of rest at church this week.

Mark 3:20-21 “Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat.  When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’”

Why would anyone think that Jesus was insane, much less his own family? Jesus hadn’t grown up with the kind of formal training most would consider necessary to be a great Rabbi. He grew up in a working class home and learned a trade. He knew how to be a carpenter. Now he not only had made this little preaching and healing career his whole life. It had become an obsession. He wouldn’t stop long enough even to eat, rest, and take good care of himself. It didn’t make any sense to a family who didn’t yet believe in who he really is.

Some still look at devotion to God’s kingdom like this as madness. When a person makes God’s word and serving the Lord the number one thing in his life, many feel he is just wasting his time. It doesn’t seem to have any rewards from an earthly point of view. Parents who are thrilled if their children show an interest in the ministry are harder and harder to find. People who would actually change their schedules or rearrange their priorities so that God’s word could be number one in their lives are somewhat rare.

But you know him well enough to know better. Jesus was not insane, and neither are those who follow him. Instead, he is giving us something wonderful. “Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.’ ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’” (Mark 3:31-35)

Jesus was busy at work giving people a place in his family. Those who are truly closest to Jesus, those who really live in his love and all the blessings he gives, are closer than blood relatives to us. They are those who gather around to hear him and believe his words. In the next line Jesus says, “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” What is God’s will? Jesus says in John 6, “My Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.”

As we look to Jesus, as we gather around him, hear his words, know his love, and receive his forgiveness, we become a part of the family of God. Jesus makes us his own brothers and sisters, and God’s own children. Nothing could be more sensible than that.

Mark 3:22-27 “And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.’ So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: ‘How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house.’”

Matthew’s gospel tells us that Jesus had just cast a demon out when the teachers of the law made their accusation. They couldn’t deny the miracle. That was plain for everyone to see. Because they didn’t want people to put their trust in Jesus, they needed to come up with some other explanation for why the demon left. Saying that Jesus was possessed, saying that he was in cahoots with the Devil, was the best that they could do.

Jesus, on the other hand, made it crystal clear why their accusations didn’t make any sense, why anyone who knew him would know better. What Jesus was doing here was not an isolated incident. It was not a single case where Satan told one of his demons to take a hike and let go of a person. When you read the gospels, you see that Jesus was casting out demons right and left. They were fleeing from him by the hundreds, maybe even the thousands. Satan was being forced to release his hold on these souls.

If this were Satan casting out these demons, then he was certainly divided against himself. He would be fighting against the very thing he loves to do. He lives to take control of souls. One way he does it, especially in Jesus’ day, is by possessing people. That is how he fights back at God. If he were simply going to let those souls go, he may as well give up the battle.

On the contrary, Jesus was giving the people then, and now, every reason to trust him with their souls. “In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house.” Satan is a strong man. Generally, that is good for us to remember. It reminds us that he is no one for you and me to fool around with. 

But sometimes he tries to use that information to his advantage. Most of the time it is not part of his strategy to make himself look weaker than he is. He wants us to know that he is strong. In fact, he wants us to think he is so strong that there is no way that we can escape his grasp.

There is a grain of truth in this. One on one we can’t stand up to him. He wants us to believe there is no way we could ever resist this temptation. He wants us to believe that it is impossible for us to escape being condemned along with him and everyone else. He keeps stirring up our guilty feelings and promises he won’t let this sin slip past the Lord’s attention.

But we know Satan well enough to know better, because we know Jesus well enough to know better.  Jesus has tied Satan up. Satan might be stronger than we are, but Jesus is stronger than he is. That was painfully clear at the time of Jesus’ temptation when Jesus resisted every temptation in the wilderness and Satan went away defeated. 

That is most clear at the cross, where Jesus took all our sins upon himself so that Satan had nothing left to use to condemn us, and at the empty tomb, where Jesus’ resurrection shows we are free from death forever.  Throughout Jesus’ ministry he showed that he was the one who could tie Satan up and overpower him as the little demons went whimpering away wherever he confronted them.

If you want to be free from Satan’s power, if you want to go to heaven, and I believe you do, then here Jesus is making it as clear as he can that he is the one to trust. 

Luke 16:23-31“In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire. But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your life-time you received good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’ He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ ‘No, Father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

No one teaches us more about hell and its horrors in the pages of the Bible than Jesus does. I don’t believe I need to go on and on about it for his warning to do its work and send us running to the cross for his grace and forgiveness. The first thing to note is the reality of the place. Jesus considered the existence of hell a given.

The second thing to note is the agony. You may have heard people joke that they don’t mind going to hell because that is where all the “fun” people are going to be. Make no mistake. No one in hell is having fun. “Torment” is not fun. Longing for the tiniest drop of water to cool your tongue is not fun. It’s not as though the rich man ate too many jalapenos at the fiesta.

The third thing to note is the permanence. The rich man’s situation could not be changed. No one could bring him relief. There was no escape from his fate, no undiscovered route to freedom, no end to his sentence. For the rich man it was too late. But Jesus is warning us before it’s too late, while we have time to know the love that forgives all our sins and trust the Savior who shows us such love.

The last thing Jesus’ parable teaches us is the reason why, the reason why the rich man and his kind end up in such a tragedy, and the way that we can avoid it. People in hell don’t become believers. They remain unbelievers. They can’t deny the reality of God, his ways, and the whole other spiritual world they never cared about before. But they aren’t suddenly filled with trust in God. They don’t even begin to agree with him. That is clear in the rich man’s reaction to his situation.

For him, Moses and the Prophets (a summary way of saying “the Bible,” the “Word of God” in Jesus’ day) was not enough. In life the rich man either didn’t pay attention to this word or he didn’t agree with it. Now, nothing has changed. He has no idea of the life-giving power in that word. He has no confidence that the record of God’s love for his people, the story of his ongoing rescue of the world, the promises of grace and forgiveness and life in his Son, will have any impact on his brothers. He wants a miracle, but he remains an unbeliever in what God has to say.

Miracles are of little use in overcoming unbelief. If Jesus’ ministry was filled with anything, it was filled with miracles. He spent entire days performing them, one after another after another. Still, his skeptics could see him at work, then look at him with a straight face and say, “Show us a miraculous sign to prove that we should listen to you.” Show us a sign? Just pick one! But the skeptic will always have an explanation for why the miracle isn’t real. Suspending the laws of nature doesn’t change hearts.

Listening to the words of the man who really did rise from the dead is the only thing that will. Today those words aren’t just our warning. They are our salvation. They are the light that opens our eyes. They speak the love that melts our hearts.

So listen to Moses and the Prophets, and Jesus and his Apostles. Then we will see. Then we will believe.