John 14:25-26 “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”

Sometimes I’m a little dense, and my head is a little too thick to get what God is trying to say to me in his word. I understand all the words in a passage, but not what the whole group of them taken together consecutively is trying to say. I could tell you the details of a Bible story, but at the end of it I’m not sure what the point is supposed to be.

Didn’t the Twelve Disciples often need that kind of help? Jesus teaches them, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat…” And later on his disciples have to come to him and say, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.” They heard the story. They just didn’t get it. Now, Jesus promises, they will have the Holy Spirit to teach them what things mean and what they need to know.

Sometimes we may understand what the words say. We just don’t want to accept it. Here, too, the Holy Spirit is our teacher. Remember the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, or in the upper room the night of Jesus’ resurrection? They have all the evidence that Jesus has risen. But in the upper room, even with Jesus standing there in front of them, they are struggling to believe it. So Luke tells us, “Then he opened up their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.” There are things I believe from the Scriptures, not because they seem so right to me, or I like them, or my experience confirms them, but because that’s what the Bible says. Jesus gives us his Spirit, not just to break through hard heads, but hard hearts as well. The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, “will teach you all things.”

Then Jesus promises, “… and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” How do we know Jesus? How do we know what he did and what he teaches thousands of years later? Isn’t it because these men in the room with him that night wrote it down and taught it to others? But how could they remember the details of three years of Jesus’ ministry, and keep it all straight, so that today we have four gospels, four separate biographies of Jesus’ life in our Bibles, that fit together like this? It wasn’t plagiarism. It wasn’t the exceptionally gifted memories of the writers. It was the Holy Spirit, the Counselor, who reminded them of everything Jesus said to them.

You and I won’t be writing new books for the Bible anytime soon. But the Spirit has planted the words of Jesus in our hearts and minds. Maybe some passage has come spilling out of your mouth at an opportune time, something you didn’t even know you knew by heart, and you wondered, “Where did that come from?” You are comforting someone who just lost a loved one, and you find yourself reciting the words of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” not just a verse but the whole thing, or Jesus words to Martha before he raised Lazarus from the dead, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Maybe you are beating yourself up, struggling with your own guilt, finding it hard to believe that God can forgive you this time. Suddenly you find yourself thinking about Luke 15, and Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. You remember Jesus saying that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent. You think of that anxious Father looking down that road, waiting for his wayward son to come home, and then wrapping his son up in huge, forgiving embrace even before he can get out his words of apology. You recall Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” You are comforted and convinced that you are forgiven.

So do not let your hearts be troubled if you and I can’t see Jesus and go to him visibly now. He has sent you his Holy Spirit, the Counselor, who teaches you and reminds you of everything that Jesus said.

Acts 5:31 “God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior, so that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel.”

Political candidates campaign on promises they make to the voters. Once elected, many of them seem to lose interest in keeping their promises to the people who voted them in. Jesus is installed at God’s right hand in heaven as rightful ruler of the universe. Does our Prince and Savior have anything to offer us today?

Peter’s words answer that question. Today Jesus is at God’s right hand so that he can give us his gifts. The first of those gifts is “repentance.” Jesus doesn’t spread the Christian faith by adhering to the old marketing principle, “The customer is always right.” I have been a part of paid market research focus groups in the past. Companies interviewed me and others to learn our opinions. Then they tried to tailor their products to our tastes. They assumed the customer must be right, and they changed to suit us.

No, Jesus does something that seems counter-intuitive if you want to develop a following. He starts by telling you your ideas are all wrong. You and I have developed tastes and preferences that need to change. Our behavior and treatment of others is inappropriate. Our ideas about right, and wrong, and often God himself are backwards. He calls us to repent. He calls me to recognize that I am selfish, prideful, bossy, manipulative, dishonest, two-faced, ungrateful, lazy, lustful, greedy, impatient, and discontented. He calls me to stop defending it and rationalizing it, to feel genuine sorrow and regret for it.

But he does more than call us to repent. He gives repentance as a gift from God’s right hand in heaven. He exposes our sinfully wrong-minded notions in his word. He accompanies his word with his Spirit to convict us. He directs the events of our lives so that we are forced to come face to face with our true nature, to know ourselves in ways we never, ever wanted to know ourselves. He gives repentance to his people as a gift.

“Some gift,” we might think. But it is a gift, a gift of inestimable value. We will pay a doctor a great deal of money to uncover the physical deficiencies that are causing us pain and threatening our lives. Only then can we get the medicine right that puts us on the path to health again. How much more valuable is the diagnosis that uncovers the spiritual deficiencies that have condemned our souls!

Then we are ready to receive the other gift he gives from God’s right hand, “the forgiveness of sins.” However we have offended God, however we have hurt each other, however we have twisted God’s good gifts like sex or money and made them sick and grotesque, he does not hold against us. He does not say that it was okay. It wasn’t. But he does not hold them against us. He does not let our past determine how he will treat us in the future. Every day, every moment, we start off with a clean slate–as though we were as pure and as holy as an angel in heaven.

This, too, is more than an offer. It is a gift he gives–the gift he thought so valuable that he suffered death by crucifixion to make it happen. It’s more than a neat idea, a happy concept. Jesus’ sacrifice forms the real historical basis for God to forgive our sins.

Now from his Father’s right hand he distributes it to us. He sends it around the world as he spreads his word through preachers and laymen alike. He washes us in it at our baptisms. He feeds it to us in his supper. His Spirit fans the flames of this good news so that it grows in our hearts and catches on in the hearts of more and more people. All this he does with the power and authority he enjoys from God’s right hand in heaven. Truly it is a gift to us that Jesus occupies such a place!

Acts 5:31 “God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior.”

After a team wins the Superbowl, where does the Most Valuable Player from the winning team get to go? Cue the music for When You Wish Upon a Star.  “I’m going to Disney World,” right? When a college or professional sports team wins a championship, there is usually a trip to the White House involved, too. Some place where you can enjoy a little R and R, a place of honor in the spotlight–those are the right places for the victors.

If you have worked your way to the top of your field, if you have proven yourself the best person to lead in your area of expertise, what do you get? A corner office? A chair in the boardroom? Again, those are the right places for those who have distinguished themselves in their careers.

If you have redeemed the entire world from their sin, if you have drained all the fear and all the power out of death, if you sacrificed your life to do so but then took it back again, where is the right place for you? Of course, only one person has ever been able to pull off a feat like that. And there is only one appropriate place for him to be– at God’s right hand in heaven.

That’s where we find the one we call our “Savior.” That title–Savior–isn’t just a badge of honor. It is a term of endearment. It says such wonderful things about him. Before I need to know anything else about him, I need to know that his unfathomable love for me led him to rescue me from hell and save me for all eternity.

The Apostle Peter, the man who said this about Jesus, often referred to him as “Rabbi, teacher,” while he was on earth. And Jesus was that. He still is. He has much to teach us about life and love, and God and our future. But we do not follow him primarily as the wise sage or guru who shows us some superior philosophical system of living. He is our Savior.

The crowds of Jesus’ day sought him out as a Compassionate Healer, a miracle-working troubleshooter who could make sickness go away, settle the weather, and feed their empty stomachs. And Jesus still has the power to make our earthly existence a little less painful. We still pray for his merciful intrusion into our physical needs. We pray for health. We pray for rain. We pray for enough money to cover the bills and put food on the table, and rightly so.

But for us, Jesus is not mainly the distribution manager of heaven’s warehouses. He is our Savior. When you come to understand how utterly helpless you are to make amends for all your sins; when you come to realize how spiritually poor and penniless you are to pay for their guilt; when you come to see how relentlessly death is pursuing you, is there anything else you want him to be but your Savior– the one who rescues you from the eternal doom from which you cannot rescue yourself?

There is no higher pedestal on which our Savior could be placed than God’s right hand in heaven. There is no one who deserves it more. There is no one we could possibly prefer to rule our world.

Acts 5:31 “God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior.”

No Christian doubts that Jesus is royalty, royalty of a sort that far surpasses all the nobility in all the world.

But Peter’s understanding of the term “Prince” in his day does not include some of the notions that word may suggest to us nearly 2000 years later. The stress is not on making and enforcing of laws. That Jesus does this is, of course, true. But that is not his main concern with us. When we Christians see Jesus mainly as heavenly law enforcement, we wind up with all kinds of distortions in our relationship to him and our service to him. We feel less cared for and more watched. We experience less peace and more fear. We serve less freely, less joyfully, and more driven. A big, threatening, otherworldly cop tapping his billy club in his hand is not the picture of Jesus Peter wants us to see as we look to God’s right hand.

Nor Peter does not choose the term “Prince” to suggest that Jesus is something less than the King. He is not junior royalty, royalty in training, something less than the Ruler of heaven and earth. Many times we would be happy to demote Jesus to that kind of figure head position. Then we feel free to take issue with him on some pet desire of ours or another. I have heard otherwise sober Christians challenge a direct quote from Christ when they didn’t want to give up some selfish practice or let go of some cherished misbelief. It’s as though we would presume to be Jesus’ teachers, instead of his students; to explain to him how things really work and what is really right.

No, Peter’s description of Jesus as Prince wants to bring to mind another function of royalty that has been mostly forgotten in our time. In medieval times people believed that God had created three estates on earth: the clergy to pray, the nobility to fight and defend, and the peasants to produce food. The idea that the nobility had the responsibility to fight for and protect the people they ruled was not unique to that time, but stretches at least as far back as the Kings and Judges of Israel. Every year King David went to war to protect his people against attackers.

It is in this sense that Jesus is our “Prince,” a hero or champion who will fight to defend and protect his people. He didn’t leave us in the struggle with sin alone. He didn’t even give us a part in overcoming the debt created by our guilt. He took the whole battle on himself when he took responsibility for our all our sin and let it kill him in our place.

He didn’t sit back and watch the futility with which we attack death. The whole human race puts their collective heads together. They gather all their technology and medical know-how, and what do we accomplish? We drive death back a few months here, a couple of years there. Over the last ten years, the life expectancy for an average American has grown from 76 and a half years to just shy of 78 years. Most recently they say we have even lost some ground. When he rose from the dead, Jesus didn’t merely extend our life expectancy. He destroyed death altogether. Now the life expectancy of the average Christian is infinity, because our Prince defeated our enemy and gives us life that never ends.

Can you think of a better place to see Jesus as our Princely Protector than at the right hand of God’s power, where he has all the weapons he needs to continue to defend our faith? With Jesus at God’s right hand in heaven, we can see the Prince who is fighting on our side.

Psalm 67:5-7 “May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. Then the land will yield its harvest, and God our God will bless us. God will bless us, and all the ends of the earth will fear him.”

Do you like farming, or gardening? If you do, you look forward to a harvest. You expect a harvest. It is why you started this whole process in the first place. But the harvest is the one part of the process we don’t directly control. We can choose good seed. We can plant at the proper time. We can water and weed and fertilize. But after that we wait. Like Jesus said in the parable, “A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain–first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”

Jesus wasn’t interested in farming so much, and neither is this psalm. Our harvest is a harvest of souls. We can plant the message of God’s grace in people’s minds and hearts. We can pray for God’s grace to give them faith. After that it is up to God to give the harvest.

Though we don’t control the harvest, that doesn’t mean we don’t expect one. Notice how this part of the prayer reads: “Then the land will yield its harvest.” More souls saved, a bigger family of faith, more and more children of the heavenly Father is God’s will for our mission work, not just ours. When the Lord himself teaches us to pray for something, we expect him to give us what we ask.

Those souls, those people, those family members in faith are the reward for our work. They are the content of the promise that “God, our God, will bless us.” My sins were forgiven, and heaven became my own, over a half a century ago when God claimed me as a child by faith through baptism. That was a settled issue long before I ever thought to tell anyone else about the Jesus who has done so much for me.

But since that time through the preaching of God’s grace the Lord has given a harvest. He has grown the family of faith around me. I am sure that my houses haven’t loved me, especially the way they have treated me. My last home spit sewage all around under the crawl space and made me crawl on my hands and knees underneath to clean it up.

My cars don’t love me, either. When I get old, and weak, and move into a nursing home someday, my cars won’t care about me enough to come and see me. They won’t call me and see how I am doing. They will just sit in the driveway and ignore me, or worse yet, abandon me to drive someone else around town.

But the people, the people who have become my brothers and sisters by faith, show their love for me every day by supporting my ministry, and working alongside me in God’s mission. They are my friends in the ups and downs of everyday life. Someday they, and other members of the family I have never met, may care enough about me to come and see me when I am sick, or old and weak. And all of us are going to share an eternal home with Jesus where we will love each other perfectly without end.

The people are God’s harvest. They are God’s blessing to me. They are an answer to our prayers.

Psalm 67:1-4 “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples justly and guide the nations of the earth.”

The psalmist is seeking a very specific application of God’s grace when he asks God to be gracious to us. Here we are, able to cope with life now, and on the last day we will rise to live forever, because we have this gracious God who loves and saves us. Can we keep this secret to ourselves? We aren’t in a competition with the rest of humanity. Letting them in on the secret takes nothing away from us. How can we let them be lost?

So we pray like a missionary. We pray for God’s grace and blessing so that his ways–his loving, saving way of dealing with us– can be known everywhere, among all nations. We pray for God’s grace because this task is bigger than us. There are billions of people to reach. We seem so few. We get distracted by all the other things we think are important. But is anything more important than the eternal fate of souls Jesus purchased with his own blood? We pray like a missionary when we pray for God’s grace to reach all the nations.

Once that word is out, we don’t want it to fall to the ground with no effect. We pray some more. We pray for God’s praises to come from the nations. “May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you.”

Do you see the implication that is sitting between God’s salvation becoming known among all the nations, and all the peoples praising this same God? You don’t praise God for something you don’t believe in. You don’t praise a God whom you don’t believe in. Praying for the peoples to praise God assumes that the message of grace has given them a living faith.

Faith and praise are the responses that fit God’s saving grace. I suppose that it is possible to force words of praise from people without faith, but is that really praise at all? Maybe you remember the character Max from the movie The Sound of Music. He is the family friend who helped the Von Trapp family escape the Nazis. After Austria falls to Germany, the whole nation is expected to take up the greeting “Heil Hitler!” The true converts do it with gusto, but not Max. He weakly raises his hand to say it, and the words barely stumble out of his mouth. He has no real praise for his new dictator.

Jesus does not conquer the nations with a military machine. He does not force the peoples into subjection. He wins them with his grace. He overwhelms them with his love. Every word of praise, then, oozes with sincerity and joy.

And why shouldn’t it? Why shouldn’t the praises be sincere and come straight from a heart of faith? “…for you rule the people’s justly and guide the nations of the earth.” Jesus’ brand of justice has no hint of graft or corruption. We sometimes call our elected officials “public servants,” but Jesus truly is. He rules and leads as the one who made himself our servant. Everything he does is about us–our forgiveness, our salvation, our life, our eternity. We pray like a missionary, then, when we pray that the peoples will see it, and believe it, and then God’s praises will come from the nations.

Psalm 67:1 “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us.”

There is a whole world view in the words with which the psalmist begins this prayer. In Christianity, everything begins with grace. Asking God to be gracious to us is more than a request for God to be kind to us, to do something nice for us. If you ever listen to radio personality Dave Ramsey greet his callers, when they ask him “how are you?” his stock answer is “better than I deserve.” Better than I deserve. That’s God being gracious.

A Christian doesn’t approach God and say, “Just give me what I’ve got coming to me.” That would be insane. What I’ve got coming to me is really, really hot, and really, really uncomfortable, and lasts forever and ever. I have offended God with my life, and with my attitudes, not the least of which is the idea that somehow I deserve better than I’ve been getting. Asking God to be gracious is a way of saying, “I get it. I haven’t been banking all kinds of favors that you owe me, and now I am calling some of them in. It’s a blessing that you haven’t decided to squish me yet, because every day I am giving you more reasons to.”

But there is a more important part of this world view behind our prayer for God to be gracious. It is our complete confidence that he is! We don’t approach him in utter terror. We don’t come to him as a last resort because we are just that desperate. This is the God whose every dealing with us is always, only love. He doesn’t just send us a Savior. He comes here himself to rescue us. He doesn’t just put up a stiff fight to deliver us from our sins, and dig deep into his pockets to finance the operation. He dies in our place, he lays down his life as the payment that sets us free from all our sins deserved.

Maybe you heard of a campaign for evangelical Christians to text “God is not dead” to all their friends at Easter a couple of years ago. It was inspired by a movie of the same title. It’s true that he is not dead. But at the cross he was dead when Jesus breathed his last. He was dead until Easter morning, all because God is gracious, all because God is so intent on loving me and saving me that there is no price too high for him to pay. In Christianity, everything begins with grace, like this prayer, which understands from the very first words exactly where we stand with God. It starts and ends with grace.

Psalm 66:16-20 “Come and listen, all you who fear God; let me tell you what he has done for me. I cried out to him with my mouth; his praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened; but God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer. Praise be to God who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me.”

Notice the pronouns the psalmist is using. In earlier verses he talked about “we” and “our” and “us.” Now he switches to talking about “I” and “my” and “me.” This is his testimonial. Because the Lord had tested him, and then preserved him, he had a story to tell. And so do you. And so do I.

Our story is the stuff of real praise because it is not so much our story as it is his story. Praising God is more than repeating acceptable slogans and phrases like “Praise the Lord,” or “Hallelujah” or “Hosanna.” It involves telling the story. Have you ever seen the Disney movie Finding Nemo? The little clownfish Nemo has been captured by an Australian dentist to be added to his aquarium. His father Marlin swims half-way across the Pacific Ocean to try to rescue him. He fights off sharks and jelly fish and hungry sea gulls along the way. Toward the end of his journey, Marlin’s story of adventure and perseverance gets picked up by some sea turtles. They tell it to other sea creatures. Pretty soon Marlin has become a living legend under the sea.

Our story is important not because we are the hero or the legend. We are more like little Nemo, stuck in the fish tank, waiting to be rescued. Our story is important because Jesus has come to the rescue—from sin, and death, and a whole host of lesser problems scattered across our lives. There is no higher or sincerer way of praising him than telling the story in which he is the hero every time that it’s told. “But God has surely listened and heard my voice in prayer. Praise be to God, who has not rejected my prayer or withheld his love from me!”

Does the story always have a happy ending? Maybe not when viewed through merely human eyes. Sometimes Israel lost its battles. Sometimes the Apostles died for their faith. Sometimes our circumstances go from bad to worse. Jesus’ own body was taken lifeless from the cross.

But we live every day and all of life in the light of Jesus’ empty tomb. His empty grave promises there is more to the story than meets the eye, and that our story, like his story, isn’t over yet. We worship the God who raises the dead. Praise the God who hears our prayers and never withholds his love!

Psalm 66:12-15 “…but you brought us to a place of abundance. I will come to your temple with burnt offerings and fulfill my vows to you–vows my lips promised and my mouth spoke when I was in trouble. I will sacrifice fat animals to you and an offering of rams; I will offer bulls and goats.”

The prosperity preachers tend to suggest that you can buy God off. If you just bring a big enough gift, the Lord will practically be forced to give you what you want. First comes your offering. Then comes God’s response.

The psalmist says it works the other way around. God’s goodness comes first. Our offerings are the response. We can’t pay God off. We have nothing to offer that isn’t already his. He needs nothing from us. Our combined treasures wouldn’t be worth a drop of Jesus’ blood, or a moment of his love, or an extra second added to our lives.

But God has already poured out streams of Jesus’ blood from the cross, and we live under the endless umbrella of his love every moment of our lives. He has forgiven all our sins and given us lives that never end. That inspires a response. I would like to give him something. What we bring is really just a token, just a symbol, that we are giving God the only thing he ever really wanted from us: our hearts!

The psalmist shows this with the gift he selected. The offering he brings to the temple is a whole burnt offering. This was the one kind of Old Testament sacrifice that was completely reduced to ashes when it was placed on the altar, kind of like when you get distracted and forget about the burgers on the grill. Most of the sacrifices at the temple merely cooked the meat, which was then eaten by the priests, or in some cases eaten by the worshipers themselves. The whole burnt offering was a sign of total dedication to God. It said, “Here, Lord, you get the whole thing–not just this animal, but my head, my hands, and my heart as well.”

That’s what the Lord wants us to bring him in response to his grace. In the first verse of Romans chapter 12, after exploring all the ins and outs of God’s saving grace for eleven chapters, Paul concludes, “Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship.” Again, first God acts with his saving mercy. Then we respond with our offering: our whole bodies, our whole selves, given up in praise to the God who preserves his people.