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.

Luke 16:22-23 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side.”

Heaven is not a reward for work performed. If it were, how could Lazarus have possibly made it? He was a beggar, not a philanthropist. He had no great fortune from which to contribute to medical research or famine relief. He was disabled. He couldn’t build houses for Habitat for Humanity. He didn’t volunteer at the local soup kitchen. His open sores would have disqualified him.

In life Lazarus was good for one thing. He could sit and beg. He could take gifts from others. I can hear others suggesting that he was a parasite on society, and that his death did the world a favor. But that is the blindness of unbelief talking.

Before Martin Luther went to see Jesus, the last words he said were, “We are all beggars, this is true.” Like Lazarus, we are beggars, if we want to see things clearly. Any gift, any talent, any discipline, any work-ethic I might have now, any success I might enjoy, are all gifts God has given me purely out of his goodness, not because I earned or deserved it.

The love God has shown me, the forgiveness he has extended for all my sins, the sacrifice he was willing to make when he sent Jesus to be crucified in my place for the crimes I have committed–this is all pure charity on his part. I didn’t contribute even a little to the grace he has given me. All was a gift. Like Lazarus, my place in heaven, our place in heaven, has been assured and secured by the God who is our help.

We can look forward to the day when the angels will come and carry us to be reunited with our fathers in faith. But not because we have earned it. Jesus teaches us that God gives heaven to beggars who know that they are beggars, and nothing more; not to beggars posing as rich men who think that even heaven can be bought for a price. “We are all beggars.” Thank God this is true.

Luke 16:19-21“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.”

Jesus paints a picture of two men. Can you tell which man was rich and which man was poor? Can you see which man was living in God’s blessing and which man was not? That seems easy, we might think. Doesn’t everyone want the first man’s life? Money, nice clothes, a life of luxury–that’s what sells lottery tickets, isn’t it? That’s why kids think they want to grow up to be celebrities. From all appearances, it looks like God was smiling on the first man Jesus introduces.

And notice that Jesus doesn’t say the man did anything particularly wrong. He didn’t make his millions as a mafia crime boss. He didn’t pay his workers slave-labor wages to line his own pockets. He didn’t get rich from fraudulent government contracts, charging the Pentagon a thousand dollars for a toilet seat or two hundred dollars for a hammer. He was just rich, that’s all. And he enjoyed it, just like we expect a rich person to do. It’s what we would do if we had the money.

There is just one hint of something missing in his life. At the entrance to his estate there was often a beggar sitting. The rich man hardly noticed him. The beggar was “longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table.” But the implication is that the beggar didn’t even get that from him. The beggar might have been happy to eat some of the food the rich man threw in the trash, but the rich man didn’t think to give the beggar his leftovers. The rich man didn’t abuse the beggar or mock the beggar. But his heart was empty, or we might say it was full only of himself, so he didn’t consider the beggar. The rich man lacked love. And love is the product of faith. And without faith it is impossible to please God, the book of Hebrews tells us, no matter how much it might look like God is smiling on our lives. But the rich man couldn’t see it, and neither can much of the world in which we live, because unbelief makes us blind to such things.

The rich man was just “a rich man.” The poor man had a name. He was known to God. His name was Lazarus, which means “God is my help.” One look at his life could drive us all to our knees praying that we don’t end up like this. Lazarus was a cripple. Someone had to carry him to the rich man’s gate and lay him down there. Lazarus was starving. The food the rich man threw away would have been an upgrade to his diet. Lazarus was sick and alone. The dogs came and licked his sores, and remember that for the Jews, dogs were disgusting, unclean vermin like rats or insects. Things couldn’t get much worse for Lazarus, humanly speaking, and there was no chance, short of a miracle, that it was going to get any better.

So you see why Lazarus is the more blessed of the two men in Jesus’ story? No? It is not because his poverty was a virtue any more than the rich man’s wealth was a vice. Those are just conditions by which a blind and unbelieving world draws all kinds of false conclusions. It becomes clearer in the second part of Jesus’ parable, but Lazarus was clearly the richer of the two men because, as his name suggests, God was his help. In spite of all the misery and hardship in his life, he clung to God in faith. He didn’t curse God for his condition. He didn’t abandon God when it didn’t change. He trusted him until the very end. Eternally, that makes all the difference.

Do you hear Jesus warning? Most of us find ourselves in the middle between these two men–not so rich, not so poor. On any given day our current condition may lean more towards wealth or more towards poverty, more towards success or more towards failure, more towards health or more towards sickness, more towards happiness or more towards depression and disappointment. These things are not the measures of our lives. They are certainly not the measure of where we stand with God. God is our help, too. The One who tells this parable is the great proof of that. You can trust him in the present. You can trust him for eternity.

Revelation 3:8 “I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”

Success for Jesus is more than a matter of numbers. Many years ago I heard a missions administrator remind the pastors at a conference that when the board is interested in the numbers of people with whom we share the gospel, and the numbers of people who join our churches, they aren’t just looking for an excuse to take pride in good statistics. Behind every number there is a person, a soul. Someone is hearing about his Savior and believing in him. That is a matter of great importance and a reason for great joy.

We can’t make people listen to us. We can only offer to tell them. And we can’t make people believe. We can only share the faith-giving message. The rest is up to Jesus.

What Jesus asks us to do, with his help, is keep his word. We can preserve the content of its message among us so that it can do its faith-giving work. We can believe it for ourselves. We can conform our lives to it and let it shape the way we live. We can do this in a world that considers us strange, or worse, for fussing so much about holding on to an ancient book and its archaic teachings.

In spite of their criticism or skepticism, it is just that book and those teachings where we have met our God. There we found his forgiving love. If we hold on to it, if we keep it, then we will be a successful church in spite of the challenging times in which we live.

I still like to watch It’s A Wonderful Life at Christmas time. George Bailey so struggled to measure his life’s success. Do you remember how the movie ends? In the front cover of a copy of Tom Sawyer, Clarence the angel has written George a note: “Remember no man is a failure who has friends.”

Friends may be a better measure of success than money. But only one friend can bring us spiritual success. He is the Savior whose gospel opens heaven’s door. His strength covers our weakness. Keep holding to his word.

Revelation 3:8 “I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”

“Little strength” doesn’t sound positive. Was Jesus commenting on the numbers of people who belonged to this congregation? I know something about churches without very many people. I pastor a little mission church of about 50 people. Another pastor described how hard it can be for a start-up church to get past the “kook” stage. Until you have more than thirty people in worship, the whole thing feels a little “kooky” to the visitors. When you’re so small, they might not be inclined to come back.

Is Jesus talking about the congregation’s finances? Were they poor? I know something about churches that can’t support themselves. When my congregation began, it received over half of its operating funds from our denomination’s mission board. We were living on a kind of church welfare.

Ten years ago my wife and I visited Rome, Italy. We walked into churches that looked rather humble on the outside. But once through the door there was gold mosaic, marble statuary, and paintings by great artists that must have been worth millions of dollars. It seemed that every street corner had a church like this on it. Compared to that, we may think we have “little strength.”

Was Jesus referring to the condition of the people in the congregation? If we are honest, we must admit that we are spiritually broken. We have made messes of our lives. They must be grave disappointments to God in many ways. We are sin-sick. We are weak. We have little strength.

But as believers, we aren’t dead. There is a little life, a little strength in us. In the letter immediately preceding this one, the letter to the church in Sardis, Jesus had John write, “I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.” “A little strength” is better than being dead. Where there is life, there is hope.

It is a matter of our Savior’s grace that he has preserved our faith and maintained a little strength among us. As long as we remember that this is our condition, it can even be a great blessing. We in our little churches aren’t the most impressive people in the world. We have nothing to boast about.

But do you remember what the Apostle Paul once said about the weakness he described as his “thorn in the flesh”? “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me…for when I am weak, then I am strong.” If we will remember our weak position and continue to rely on our Savior for strength, there is no limit to the good things he can do for us. Isn’t that why Jesus told us, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you”?  

Our faith may be so small, but the Savior we trust is so big, that even a little strength is reason for optimism in the churches we call home today.

Revelation 3:7 “These are the words of him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open. I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut.”

If people can’t even get into your building, if the doors are always closed and locked, how could your church be successful? There could be no ministry going on inside without letting people in. But you already sense that Jesus does not mean an “open door” in such a hyper-literal way.

He means more than a metaphorical “open door” to the people in your community, too. We want to be inviting, welcoming, engaged with the people who live around us, whether they are members or not. Their culture, their values, their morals may not be the same as ours, yet. But how is that going to change if we don’t make it possible for them to approach us, or if we aren’t willing take the initiative and approach them? Yet, this is not what Jesus means by an “open door,” either.

By “open door” Jesus means even something more than an opportunity to do mission work. The Apostle Paul uses the words “open door” in his letters to the Corinthians this way. But Jesus has something bigger, and more fundamental, in mind.

The words are an allusion to Isaiah 22. In that chapter God warns an unfaithful manager of the palace treasures who had been skimming money that he is going to remove him from his office. He will give it to a faithful man named Eliakim. Then Eliakim would hold the “key to the house of David.” With it came the power to open or shut access to its treasures.

This, then, is the meaning of the metaphor of the open door: Jesus had opened up to this congregation access to the full treasures of the gospel. Their sins were fully forgiven. Their salvation was free and complete. The door to heaven stood wide open in front of them, opened by Jesus himself by his death and resurrection. No one could shut it against them. Grace was theirs to live in now and forever. Grace was theirs to use, to handle, to share, to proclaim. They had this awesome power at their disposal. They could apply all they wanted to themselves and live in God’s love. They could distribute it to anyone without limits. The door was open and the gospel treasure was theirs.

This great open door was a great gift to that church in challenging times. These churches in Revelation lived under constant spiritual attack. The culture around them embraced a variety of sexual sins. It was materialistic. These sins were making inroads into the churches that neighbored the church in Philadelphia. The Christian faith suffered official government persecution from the Roman Empire. Former brothers and sisters in the faith, at that time people who declined to leave Judaism for Christ, joined in persecuting the Christian congregations. Put it together–an immoral culture, a hostile government, people of other faiths who rejected them–and it sounds eerily similar to the times in which you and I now live.

But they had the open door. The full treasure, the unconditional gospel was their secret weapon not just to survive, but to thrive.

Don’t despise the treasure. Our great temptation may be to yawn at the gospel of full and free forgiveness. We have heard it enough. We are bored with it already. Years ago a man told his pastor that coming to his church was like a man crawling through the desert in desperate search of water. He is just at the edge of death, when he peers over a sand dune, and there is a peaceful oasis with a beautiful pool of water. He gets up and goes tearing down that sand dune, jumps into the water, and in his joy he is splashing around and laughing at the great find he has made.

But all around him are people who have lived at that oasis their entire lives. They look at the man splashing in the pool and they think to themselves, “What? Are you nuts?”

Don’t be the people who take the oasis for granted. Don’t be the people who shrug their shoulders at the open door and full treasures of the gospel Jesus has set before them. Come and have your sins absolved. Come and hear the gospel preached. Come and receive your Savior’s supper for the forgiveness of your sins. Christ has set before us an open door to all the treasures of heaven. It is the one great possession of Christian churches in every age.

Ezekiel 36:27 “I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”

We used to have cats at home. It was never our plan to have pets. We have four children, and our plans for them required most of our resources.

One day a female tabby showed up at our door. At first we tried to ignore it. But my children thought it was cute, and it kept hanging around. Pretty soon they started feeding it. Then they gave it a name. They called it “Precious.” That’s when I knew we suddenly owned a cat.

Still, it hadn’t made its way into our house. Not long after it showed up at our door, it disappeared again. Then the faint sound of little mews could be heard coming from under our pier and beam house. Precious had kittens. We managed to give away three to people we knew. We ended up keeping one. That’s how we became pet owners.

By now, of course, the cats had moved indoors. But that meant there had to be some changes. They couldn’t continue to live like strays if they were going to be part of our family. They couldn’t run around the neighborhood at will. They would have to learn to stay indoors and close to home. Their diet had to change. Baby birds and mice gave way to store-bought cat food. They had to have shots and take pills. Rabies and flees are unacceptable for pets, especially indoor ones. They had to be spayed. We didn’t want every tom cat in the neighborhood crying at our door, and we didn’t want more kittens. These were our plans, our conditions, for taking the cats in.

God doesn’t charge us for saving us from the world and making us his own. He gave us Jesus as a free gift. He gives us forgiveness. He gives us heaven. His grace is ours without cost.

But it is not without effect. Grace changes people. A man I brought into the church once confided in me that he was no longer able to enjoy a sinful habit he had once indulged rather freely. “Now I feel guilty if I do it. You ruined it for me,” he said. I told him, “You are welcome.”

Following God’s decrees and keeping his laws isn’t so much a condition for God to take us back as it is the result of God taking us back. “I will put my Spirit in you and move you,” he says. It isn’t just a matter of feeling guilty, either. When the Spirit is living in us, he genuinely changes our tastes. I never much cared for plain yogurt years ago. No sweetener, slightly sour–it just didn’t appeal to me. Then I was exposed to it more and more. I learned how much better it is for you than the sweetened stuff. Now I prefer it. But my taste for it didn’t change overnight.

Nor does our taste for keeping God’s law. Some things get in line more quickly. Some take longer. But the Lord doesn’t wait for us to change ourselves. He lives in us by his Spirit. He moves us toward the behavior he desires. Slowly but surely he is transforming us into the kind of people he wants to live with himself.

I have a devotional book on my shelf titled Just Like Jesus. The subtitle reminds us, “God loves you just the way you are, but he refuses to leave you that way.” Ezekiel says the same thing. God makes us different people. That’s true of how we live, as it is of who we have become.