Psalm 136:1 “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love (or mercy) endures forever.”

The goodness of God for which we give thanks does not come only because we need what he does for us. A little over 15 years ago, when I was still in school, my car ran out of gas on my way to work one night. I was traveling along I-43 in Milwaukee, WI. It was a cold night in January. I wasn’t sitting on the side of the road long before a policeman stopped to see what was wrong. Since I really didn’t have many other options considering the weather and the distance to a gas station or pay phone, he gave me a ride to get some gas for the car. He took care of what I needed, but I could tell from the way he talked to me and his whole demeanor that he considered this some sort of imposition. He was a little bit irked about having to bail me out this way. He was doing it only because I needed it.

Could you or I get by for a minute without our Lord’s help? Our gas tanks are perpetually stuck on empty when it comes to our needs, both spiritual and physical. Our Lord never fails to stop and give us whatever we need, but he doesn’t see it as an imposition. In fact, he has command us, “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.”

So it is that all the good things he does for us are tokens of his love and affection. You know, when we give to God, we don’t do it because he needs anything from us. He tells us in Psalm 50, “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills.” Still, the Lord desires our gifts as tokens of our love. He wants them to be expressions of our hearts.

The fact is that we do need God’s gifts, but that doesn’t change the fact that his gifts are still tokens of his affection for us. Those gifts, whether spiritual or physical, express the love in his heart that never changes. The gifts of forgiveness and faith, the promise of heaven and the hope that it gives us right now, are not cold, unfeeling functions he performs. They are expressions of love no less than the flowers, candies, gifts, or surprises shared between lovers. He does not supply us with food, family, and friends like some cosmic paymaster, some other-worldly company bookkeeper, disinterestedly, dispassionately processing the payroll for the millions and billions of employees here on earth. These are God’s personal expressions of love and mercy.

That love and mercy extend back through the centuries. They gave Noah reason to build an altar, David and Solomon reason to build a temple, Jesus’ disciples reason to spread a message, the Pilgrims reason to start a holiday, and us reason to set aside some time and offer the Lord a prayer of thanksgiving today. That love and mercy, which have always been there for us, will endure forever, and that is what we pray on Thanksgiving Day.

This prayer is not unique to this psalm. It is repeated in Psalm 100, 106, 107, and 118. It was used as a part of every Passover feast. Jesus would have spoken these words at some point during the Last Supper. King David used them in his prayer when he brought the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem and made that city Israel’s official place of worship. How fitting that we pray them at Thanksgiving, because the Lord has been good to us, and his mercy endures forever.

Revelation 1:5-6 “To him who loves us, and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father–to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.”

Are you proud to be an American? Maybe you take exception to some decision or other our leaders make from time to time, but for the most part we like being part of this nation. I once spent part of a day with a visiting pastor from China. We were comparing our two countries. One difference he pointed out: “You Americans love your country.” We are proud to belong to the most powerful nation on earth, the nation strives to stand for what is good in this world, which provides its citizens with the highest standard of living, that expends its resources to try to bring freedom and a better life to others. There is a sense of privilege that goes along with being a citizen of the United States.

The citizenship Jesus has given us in his kingdom is a far higher one. He makes us all royalty. Even now you are a “blue blood,” a part of the nobility of heaven. The Apostle Peter echoes these same words in his first letter when he calls us a “royal priesthood.” Now everything serves you, because God promises that in all things he works for your good.

Do you like to trace your family tree to know who you are? By faith you are now part of a royal family that can trace its roots through Adam and Abraham, David and Daniel, Peter and Paul, and especially our dear brother Jesus. That’s your lineage, your heritage, your ancestry by faith. Jesus has ennobled you and me by making us part of his kingdom.

In that kingdom we all serve God as his priests. That is a privilege because it means we have direct access to God. Sometimes people come to me as pastor, and they want me to pray for them because they believe I have some kind of “in” with God. They suspect that I have God’s ear in a way that others do not.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to pray for you. But pastors have no special access to God. John doesn’t say that Jesus made a few of us priests. He made a whole kingdom full of priests. Every one of you enjoys this direct, individual, personal relationship with God. When you come to God he’s not going to say, “Who sent you? What are you doing here?” He welcomes you as one of the priests whom Jesus has called and ordained by faith.

This is also a privilege because God has entrusted his sacrifices into our hands. They aren’t bloody. We don’t sacrifice animals. Jesus made the sacrifice for sin once for all. But God has entrusted us all with sacrifices of praise. We offer our bodies as living sacrifices when we use them to serve. We share our faith with others. We let our hands and feet become God’s tools for loving those he has placed in our path. This sacrifice of praise continues as long as his kingdom: “to him be power and glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

Revelation 1:5-6 “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.

John begins this little word of praise with “to him (that is, Jesus) who loves us.” I want you to notice something about the word “love” right away. It is in the present tense. John says, “To him who loves us,” as in “right now.” He does not say, “To him who loved us,” as in “thousands of years ago when he was still alive.” Jesus is not merely a great hero from the past whom we study as a part of history. Jesus is just as alive as your living friends and family members today, only he loves you more. Even though we have never seen him with our eyes, he is someone that we know and love personally, only he loves us more. Jesus rose from the dead, body and soul, and is very much alive and well at this very moment, loving you more than anyone else ever has or can.

Of course, you knew this already. But let these words sink in. When the Apostle John first wrote them over 1900 years ago to Christians living in what is now Turkey, he was writing to people who might have wondered whether they were really true. The Church was going through some terrible times. The Roman Empire was rounding up pastors of churches in some parts of the empire and beheading them or sending them away to exile. John himself had been exiled to the island of Patmos. Under such conditions it would have been easy for Christians to wonder whether Jesus really was alive and in control. Even if he was, did he really love them anymore? They needed to hear, “Jesus loves you right now.”

What about you? Jesus loves you right now, but I suspect you could come up with (so-called) evidence to the contrary. A few years ago I received a phone call from a man who asked me, “Where can I find a gracious God?” “Jesus shows us God is gracious,” I told him. “But where can I find him”? He was convinced that God did not love him, that God’s promises applied only to other people who had happier lives. In a single year, his wife had left him and taken the children, he had lost his home and his job, and he was left with nothing. In his heart he was agonizing over whether Jesus really loved him anymore.

This is why your pastors come calling when you are in the hospital, or when there has been a death in the family. We need to hear that Jesus loves us right now, even when he has decided to take that child who seemed too young to die away from us, or that husband, wife, friend, or family member we always leaned on suddenly isn’t there anymore. Jesus still loves you, right now, even when the doctor tells you the pain isn’t going to go away. In fact, it’s likely to get worse.

Or how about after you or I have committed the “Big One”? Or how about the steady stream of ordinary sins we churn out like a factory running at full capacity. our assembly line steadily turns them out, each one an unimaginative copy of the other. Once again this week I deserved to go hell. Most of the sin looks a lot like last week’s. Shouldn’t God get tired of it? Don’t we make ourselves impossible to love?

But there is one thing steadier than my sin, and that is Jesus’ love for us. More than anything else it is that love– the same love with which he loved me yesterday, the same love with which he loves me today, and the same love with which he will love me when I have passed from time into eternity– it is that love which invaded my heart and conquered this piece of real estate for his kingdom. Jesus is our king because he loves us, today and always. Surely, he deserves our praise!

Romans 2:3-4 “So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?”

A biblical sense of right and wrong has fallen out of fashion in many places. Gossip is celebrated as a form of entertainment on a half-dozen or more TV shows dedicated to exposing every celebrity’s most private moments. It is defended as the public’s “right to know,” whatever that means. Fornication is embraced as a rite of passage, a harmless pastime, or a necessary experience to prepare for marriage. Obscenity is nothing more than a way to say it with an exclamation point. Defying authority is cool. In some circles, even violence earns you “street cred.”

But when Jesus says, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” everyone’s head nods in agreement. And how can we argue, if Jesus said it? “Judgmentalism” is something everyone condemns, mostly unaware of the irony of the position they have taken.

The first two and a half chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans is merciless in attacking human pride and rebellion. This is God’s judgment, not Paul’s. Chapter one concluded with a rapid fire exposé of humanity’s crimes: willful and knowing rejection of the truth, idolatry, homosexual perversion, envy, murder, malice, slander, arrogance, inventive evil, heartlessness and ruthlessness to give just a sampling. As we watch Paul’s assault on immorality, anyone with moral sense is tempted to stand in his corner, cheering him on. “You go, Paul! Let ’em have it!”

But we aren’t getting Paul until we see his fingers pointing at us. Survey after survey shows that we Christians are practically indistinguishable from our non-Christian neighbors. We destroy our marriages at the same rate as the world around us. We watch the same trash on television that everyone else does. We abuse alcohol and drugs at about the same rate as the unbelieving world. Research by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith suggests that there is little or no difference between the belief system (the belief system!) of a typical American Christian teen and his non-Christian counterpart.

The point is not to let us breathe a little sigh of relief because we aren’t worse than everybody else. The point is not to excuse or defend ourselves. Chances are that, if we take an honest inventory of our own lives, we don’t come out smelling so pretty. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the saying goes, and the same thing is true in God’s court. But at least my non-Christian neighbor could plead ignorance in certain cases. I can’t. “So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?”

Romans 2 convinces us that our sins deserve one thing: God’s judgment. But that’s not the life we have experienced. “Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?” The kindnesses of God in our lives are impossible to enumerate. When I take a breath, it is not the burning, sulfurous atmosphere of hell I inhale, but air that is pure enough and rich enough to sustain my life a few moments longer. I am surrounded by friends and family that care for me. I am served in a society filled with people who watch out for my safety, assist with my health, and produce the products I need to survive. I am not alone among jeering demons celebrating a misery I share with them. I have lived in a smallish, one bedroom apartment as well as 2000 square foot houses. Both were comfortable and pleasant enough places to live. Neither one was the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels Jesus describes as the final fate of the lost.

Just for the sake of argument, take all of that away, and still God has been tolerant and patient with me in the extreme. Each new sin is still forgiven. I am a believer by God’s grace, but getting my heart and mind in line with God’s own has come slowly. Eruptions of anger, pride, lust, doubt, impatience, worry, greed, and envy are far more common than I care to admit. Still, God forgives. Still, he works with me. Still, he isn’t too disgusted or frustrated to claim me as his own child and let me claim him as my own Father. It seems as though his patience is inexhaustible!

When I compare these two things–the judgment of God against sin, and the goodness and forgiveness he continues to show me–there is only one conclusion, one “judgment:” I have been the recipient of a love I don’t deserve. This is the repentance to which Paul says God’s kindness wants to lead us–not just regret over our sins, but an awareness of the great grace we have been shown. Here we find an unshakable confidence in the God who has shown us such love.

1 John 5:9 “We accept man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God which he has given about his Son.”

It has become common to hear about some person falsely convicted, released from prison. At their trials experts testified about the evidence from the crime scene, and juries believed them. Witnesses testified about things they had heard or seen, and juries believed them. Lawyers led the jury along carefully guided logical paths. We accept man’s testimony. Now, however, DNA evidence may show that all the experts and witnesses were mistaken.

Science is useful, but it doesn’t offer the certainty many people believe it does. I have nothing against science. Often it is the best information we have to go on. But it doesn’t always get things right. Scientists were once convinced that heat passed from warmer things to cooler things in some mysterious vapor called caloric fluid. That theory has been discredited. Good medical science once believed that you could cure a fever by letting blood out of a person. Our nation’s first president died that way. In the 1800’s the American Medical Association forbad doctors to wash their hands before surgery. They said there was no evidence that anything so small it was invisible could make a person sick. “But science is better today,” we may believe. Don’t be too sure. It’s still done by fallible humans.

For all their faults, we tend to accept man’s testimony, John says. It doesn’t take a great deal of faith to reach John’s next conclusion, then. “But God’s testimony is greater, because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son.” Ironically, some people want to discount God’s testimony in favor of human ideas about some subject or another. This makes no sense.

Many years ago my friend’s dad disassembled an old mechanical adding machine to satisfy his curiosity about how it worked. I looked into his workshop. Spread all across the workbench and the floor were the parts of this machine. Who do you suppose would be in a better position to tell you how that machine worked: the inventor, who imagined it and built the prototype, or my friend’s dad, who tried to figure it out by taking it apart? Wouldn’t you go to the inventor?

God is the Inventor of everything. As the Inventor he knows more on every subject than fallible humans who try to figure his creations out by studying them and taking them apart. His testimony is always to be preferred. On no topic is that more true than the testimony he has given about his Son. This is the subject nearest and dearest to his heart. He may have created the world, but he did not give us a science book to explain it all. God invented social institutions like family and government. He provided no detailed instruction manual for their operation.

But the theme, the focus, the point of the testimony he has given us is his Son, the one he sent to save us. This is the topic God spoke about for thousands of years to patriarchs, deliverers, kings, and prophets. It wasn’t dumped on one man all at once, so you need not wonder if it was all just one man’s personal fantasy. As generations rolled along, he revealed a little bit more, then a little bit more, building on what had already been revealed, always supporting, never contradicting, what had come before.

Finally, God’s Son arrived to save us. He sent angels to announce his birth. He sent his Spirit to empower his ministry. On at least two occasions his own voice announced from heaven that Jesus was his Son. He confirmed Jesus’ ministry with an outbreak of miracles unlike anything the world has seen before or since.

In the end he let his Son be captured, convicted, and crucified, so that by his blood he could fulfill all of the old promises. He satisfied the demands of justice for the whole world’s crimes, freed us all from debt we owed for our sins. He redeemed us as God’s own sons and daughters, reconciled and restored to a dear place in God’s own family. By raising Jesus from the dead God has given us proof of this and placed his approval on all that Jesus said and did.

So important is the testimony God has given about his Son, he had it written down in four separate accounts–four separate accounts! He further explained those in twenty-three books and letters. We call them the New Testament, the last quarter of our Bible. “Jesus love me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” our children sing. “We accept man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater, because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son,” is the way that John says it here.

We have God’s testimony, his word. It has been spoken from heaven, sent by his Spirit, embodied in Jesus’ life and death, and recorded on the pages of Scripture. It convinces me of his grace and love.

John 5:28-29 “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out–those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.”

This is what we usually mean when we talk about “the resurrection.” Dead bodies come back to life and leave their graves. The dust and ashes of the dead, no matter where they have been deposited, come back together to live and move again. The purely scientific sorts may object, “Dead bodies don’t come back to life.” We know. That’s why this is sort of a big deal. If this were common, why would Jesus bring it up as evidence of his divinity and power?

Note again what Jesus says will bring them out of their graves: they “will hear his voice.” The same power that turns dead unbelief into living faith turns dead human remains into living, breathing people. Jesus will give the command, and all will rise.

But they will not all rise to the same fate. Moments before (vs. 27), Jesus said that he had been given authority to judge. Now we see why that matters. Many of those he calls from the grave “will rise to be condemned.” The Bible’s warnings of Judgment Day, of people being cast away from God to be punished forever, are not just the bad dreams of sub-Christian religion. There are some who believe this was all made up by mean and grumpy men who practiced a legalistic Old Testament religion. They were trying to scare people into good behavior. Then Jesus replaced it with a New Testament religion of grace and love.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. You know, Hell is rarely mentioned in the Old Testament. Other than a few verses at the end of the Prophet Isaiah, we have very few descriptions of what it might be like.

Almost everything we know about hell and the final judgment comes from the lips of Jesus himself in the gospels. Time after time he talks about the flames, the darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth. Those are his own words. But he doesn’t talk like someone who relishes the chance to see people suffer. He talks like someone who knows about unspeakable horrors, and he sees people going there. It breaks his heart and he desperately wants to spare them of this.

He wants them to be “those who…will rise to live.” Those Jesus raises to the new life of faith now he will also raise to the new life of restored bodies, purged of every sin, healed of every disease or deformity, transformed and perfected for the endless life to come. To “rise to live” is not an endless extension of our current experience. It’s not more of the slow decay we know now, only slowed and stretched across eternity. It is finally only life, only health, only strength, all the time. It is life that is truly worthy of the name. On the last day, when he speaks, that life will be yours.

So today we listen. We hear his voice speaking to us in his book, and from the songs we sing, and from the mouth of the man who stands and preaches to you on Sunday morning. We hear it speaking to us in the gospel encouragements of Christian friends, and in our private moments of devotion and prayer. We hear his voice, and believe his words, and do what they say, because one day Jesus will speak, and people will live.

John 5:25-26 “I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.”

We might think that Jesus is talking about the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. But there is an important clue in his words that this is not so: “A time is coming and has now come.” Jesus is talking about something going on even on the day he was speaking. Dead people heard his voice. Those dead people lived.

But Jesus wasn’t preaching in the cemetery. We hear no reports of people crawling out of the ground or coming out of tombs, not on this day. Jesus was preaching in the city of Jerusalem during one of the Jewish holidays. Still, dead people were hearing his voice, and those dead people were living.

Jesus was using a very common picture of our natural spiritual condition. As we are born, as we exist before coming to faith, we are dead to God. There is a saying common in Mediterranean cultures that has found its way into TV and movies. “You are dead to me.”It’s a way of saying, “We have nothing in common, no way of getting along anymore, and no way you can fix it. It is as though you don’t even exist.”

Isn’t that what sin does to us? Adam and Eve ran and hid from God after they ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. They were afraid of him. They lost all trust in him. They didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. And they were helpless to fix this themselves, if they had even wanted to do so. They were dead to God.

Don’t you see that in the lives of people who have no faith? Isn’t that where our own sin is constantly threatening to take us back? Some have created deep misery for themselves with an ungodly lifestyle. Their vices have destroyed their health, consumed their wealth, and brought pain and separation to practically all their relationships. But they lack even the faintest desire for God’s love or grace, in large part because that would come with an admission that they were wrong all along, the humility of repentance. They can only pity themselves and resent their bad fortune. They are dead to God, dead in sin.

For some, spiritual death does not look so dramatic. They were born without such a strong taste for self-destructive pleasures. They have reasonably stable families. They are contributing members of society. They may not be overbearing or explicitly arrogant, but they are confident that they are good people. Maybe they betray just a hint of cynicism, or insecurity about the deep future, but they themselves may be mostly unaware of the vast spiritual emptiness inside of them. They may be no less spiritually dead than others, but their moderate, unassuming, unremarkable lives may make it even more difficult to see.

Jesus spoke to people just like this. He still speaks. And they live. “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.”

Jesus’ words didn’t rely on rhetorical tricks and clever strategies to raise the spiritually dead. They ran on divine authority. They brought miraculous power to bear. The power to create life has been part of God’s story from the very beginning. It is literally the first story in the Bible. God the Father doesn’t need help to create life. He doesn’t raw materials or willing subjects to create life. He “has life in himself.” He speaks, and there it is.

It is the same way when Jesus speaks to us. His words worm their way into heads and hearts, and they start changing everything. They create new ideas, new beliefs, new feelings, new realizations that never existed in that person before. Where there was nothing spiritual–no true knowledge of God, no true trust in God, no true agreement with God, no true presence of God–now there is. His words give birth to the miracle of spiritual life that we call faith or conversion.

This is all a feature of God’s grace. It is another example of God doing everything to save us because we could do nothing. How could we? We were dead in our sins. We had nothing to pay God for our sins, nothing we could do to make it up to him. You can offer tons of gold to the Almighty if you have it, but what good is that to him? In heaven, they pave the streets with that stuff. So, because we were dead in our sins and had nothing to give him, God himself paid the price. He gave his one and only Son. Jesus paid the full price for our sins and left not one thing for us to pay or do. It was all grace, all free.

Because of our spiritual death, we don’t even have the desire or ability to receive the gift. You can put a flower on top of a literally dead person laying in the casket and let gravity hold it there. But the dead person won’t reach out and grab it. He can’t. He’s dead. So with the spiritually dead Jesus speaks his words, and those words go in and create life. Eyes open and see. A heart beats with faith and believes. Jesus speaks, and people live.

1 Corinthians 12:4-6 “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.”

Paul looks at our spiritual gifts in three different ways to help us understand why God doesn’t give us all exactly the same thing. First, “There are different kinds of gifts.” The word for gifts in this passage is charismata, from which we get our word “charismatic.” It emphasizes that the gift is something God gives us for free.

Maybe that seems a little simple. Any gift that is truly a gift is free. But that reminds me I really have nothing to complain about if my gift is different than someone else’s, or if their gift somehow seems more appealing. Also, I have nothing to brag about if my gift seems better. They’re gifts, right? None of us earned them. We didn’t have them coming. We all have the big gift, which is Jesus. Anything beyond that is sheer generosity and goodness on God’s part, and better than nothing at all. Would we really want to complain because God gave us something more?

All of his gifts serve a purpose. They accomplish a task. They get something done. So Paul continues, “There are different kinds of service.” The Lord set up his world, and his church, with a need for many different things to get done. It makes sense, then, that he would distribute many different abilities to many different people. We can’t all be doing the same thing all the time. Imagine a world with no garbage collectors. Imagine a church with no cleaners. Eew! Who would want to be a part of that? So the Lord gives gifts that line up with all these many tasks that have to get done. Maybe like the Corinthians we would like to have some of the showier ones, the ones that seem more powerful or supernatural. But Paul tells them later that the Spirit’s power is just as much involved in making good teachers, administrators or simple helpers as it is in the miraculous ability to heal.

Finally, the Lord himself is active in all these gifts. “There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.” The word behind “working” and “works” is the word from which we get “energy.” Paul is saying that the Lord himself energizes his people to do all these different things. He is the one moving hearts and minds, and hands and mouths and feet. If God himself enters people, and then uses them to perform all these different functions, what is left for us but to accept that our gifts are different as the Lord himself sees fit to give them.

In doing it this way, perhaps we could say that God is giving us another gift: the gift to be individuals, the gift to be me. He hasn’t created an army of clones that came rolling off an assembly line and all look and think and function the same. I am unique, and so are you. He redeemed us from our sins all the same. He loves us as his children all the same. But because he loves us, we aren’t all the same. Our gifts are different. That’s what makes it possible for each of us to make a difference.