Luke 6:35 “But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.  Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

Why return love for evil?  Isn’t that the way the Lord has been dealing with us since the dawn of time?  He has been returning love for evil.  God had warned our first parents nothing less than death was waiting if they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  What Adam and Eve deserved was the same fate that Satan and his angels received for their rebellion.  That is exactly what each of us deserves for the sin that we commit, too.  But the Lord does not treat us as our sins deserve.  In fact, he has just the opposite in mind.  Jesus reminds us that the one who made us his sons and daughters “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

As Christians, we know God’s love.  That love promises our “reward will be great.”  That reward, Jesus has told us, is worth more than all the wealth and power in this world.  It never rusts or wears out or fades.  It never goes out of style.  It won’t get monotonous or boring.  This great reward is something into which God has poured his very self.  He will surround us with his presence, and in his presence we will always feel his love and his power.

That reward includes our status as “sons of the Most High.”  He considers us his own family.  When you look at statistics about families today, it is painful to see how families are torn apart by child abuse, domestic violence, and even darker sins.  Even the most stable Christian homes can’t provide all the love and nurture we need.  But as Christians, we know God’s love because he has made us “sons of the Most High.” He has made us members of his own family.  What we as parents can’t always provide for our children, and what our parents couldn’t always provide for us, our heavenly Father can provide.  His care gives us a perfect haven to which we can escape, to which we can run from the pressure and betrayal and hatred our world throws at us.  Our heavenly Father’s guidance is always right on the mark.  As sons of the Most High we know that our Father will give us just the support, and sometimes just the discipline, we need.  As his sons, we are also heirs, heirs of the great reward he has promised.

Why return love for evil?  Because we know God’s love and mercy to us.  Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”  He never demanded that we prove our love to him first.  We never offered him anything to suggest that we might be worth saving.  And yet he sympathized with our plight.  He showed compassion and mercy and sacrificed the only Son he had so that wicked and ungrateful people could be his children, too.  Our merciful Father doesn’t pay back our sins with vengeance of his own.  He paid for those sins with the blood of his one and only Son, the Son whom he loved.  He returned love for our evil.

As members of his family, let’s follow in our Father’s footsteps.

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Habakkuk 2:4 “The righteous will live by his faith.”

The book of Habakkuk gives us a conversation, a dialogue, between the prophet and the Lord.  In his part of the conversation, Habakkuk had some complaints about the adversity he sees in his life and among his people.  “How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?  Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not save?  Why do you make me look at injustice?  Why do you tolerate wrong?  Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds.”  Habakkuk saw that it was hard for people to get justice.  In fact, unjust things were happening all around.  There was violent crime, but nothing was done about it.  There were strife and conflict in the courts, but no guarantee that justice would prevail.

As concerned as he was about what was happening, his complaint was even more about what was not happening.  When he cried out to the Lord about the violence, it seemed as if the Lord did not save.  He had to ask the Lord, “Why do you tolerate wrong?”  Habakkuk prayed, but he got no answer.

When he finally did get an answer, it was the wrong one.  The Lord’s first answer to Habakkuk just didn’t make any sense.  God told him he was going to send the Babylonians to take care of the violence and injustice in Judah. Habakkuk could only respond, “O Lord, you have appointed THEM to execute judgement!?”  The Babylonians were more immoral, more violent, more ungodly than the Jewish people ever were even at their worst.  What God was proposing just didn’t make sense.

For Habakkuk to live with the injustice, and to live with what the Lord had told him, he needed to live by faith.  The same is true of us.  Like Habakkuk, we see violence going on around us all the time.  So often we feel like real justice is never done. We feel helpless to stop it.

What concerns us about this state of affairs even more is this:  It is no longer a matter of people doing what is wrong.  We are concerned because, in so many areas of life, what God has clearly labelled as wrong is now called right, and what God has clearly labelled as right is now called wrong.  The whole thing has been turned upside down.  People are told they should feel ashamed for simply defending what God has always considered good and moral.  We may worry that our children or grandchildren will be taken in, that they will believe the lie.  Like Habakkuk, we may have a hard time understanding why God seemingly tolerates all this.

For Habakkuk, living by faith meant this: God knew what the Babylonians were like.  But he promised that after he had used the Babylonians to carry out justice in Israel, he would also see to it that justice was done to the Babylonians. In the meantime, God said, “the righteous will live by his faith.”

God has made a promise to us that “the righteous will live by faith” that far outshines the promises he made to Habakkuk.  In the books of Romans (1:17) and Galatians (3:11) Paul quotes Habakkuk’s phrase to show how God gives us real life–eternal life.  We live, we have eternal life as our possession right now, because God has made us righteous by faith.  God’s promise to us centers in all that Jesus has done for us.  God promises Jesus Christ lived a righteous life for us.  God promises Jesus died on a cross to take away our sins.  God promises that Jesus can now present us to God as perfectly righteous, pure, and sinless creatures.  You and I can’t go back and prove any of this.  The cross and the empty tomb are past history.  The resurrection and life in heaven are waiting in the future.  All that we have now are God’s promises–clear and certain promises that make us righteous, give us faith, and give us life.

That same confidence that God has made us righteous and gives us eternal life allows us to step out in faith and live right now.  Maybe we can’t understand why God deals with our world the way he does.  Maybe we don’t have the answer to all the questions we would like to ask.  But we do know how much he loves us.  We know what he has prepared for our future.  God has brought us to real life by faith.  By that same faith we can daily put our lives in his hands and watch what he can do.

“The Lord will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your fathers, if you obey the Lord your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this book of the Law and turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” (Deuteronomy 30:9-10)

Keeping the commandments impacts our prosperity. We have a clue to how this works in the fourth commandment.  “Honor your Father and your Mother, that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”  Want to live a longer life?  Do what your parents tell you when they warn you not to play with matches, or to look both ways before you cross the street.  Want to live a life free from deadly disease and broken relationships?  Don’t commit adultery, keep yourself pure until you are married, and follow God’s commands governing your sexuality.  Want to feel content and secure with the things you own?  Don’t steal from others or covet what they have.  The Lord knows his commands make our lives healthier, happier, more prosperous.

There is just one problem: Sin.  Look at the people to whom Moses wrote.  The Lord freed Israel from slavery in Egypt. He led them to the promised land, flowing with milk and honey.  Yet their whole history was a never ending litany of turning their backs on their Lord and embracing sin. In response he disciplined them by letting their enemies overrun them for awhile.  The farther they wandered from the Lord, the less prosperous they became.

Look at us.  We all choose the path of sin instead of the path of God.  What do we get for it? Don’t we rob ourselves of peace and joy?  Don’t we lie to cover our tracks?  Don’t we become defensive and oversensitive? It shouldn’t surprise us if one way the Lord deals with sin is by taking away our prosperity. At the very least, he takes away our ability to enjoy it.  We deal with our children the same way.  If they defy the rules of the house, we don’t let that go.  We take away their privileges.  We apply some pain to their backsides.  We take away their “prosperity” to shape them up.  If the Lord does the same for us, be thankful. Beyond discipline lie death and hell.

Let’s not misunderstand Moses. He wasn’t a preacher of the modern day “prosperity gospel.” He isn’t saying every downturn in our earthly well-being can be linked to one single sin.  He isn’t suggesting that we can line up the members of our congregation from richest to poorest and conclude the richest are the most godly, and the poorest are the most sinful.  He does mean that God disciplines people for sin, all sin, even sin in general (Hebrews 12:4ff).  The prosperity I lack is one of the many curses I suffer because I am sinful.

There is only one solution to sin, and that is our Savior.  That is why Moses urges, “…turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”  Moses taught his nation about “the Lord, the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7). We know this Lord as Jesus. His death on the cross is the answer to sin and everything about it.  It takes away all our guilt.  There isn’t one spot of sin left.  It takes away the curse.  Since Jesus’ sacrifice restored peace between God and man, the Lord no longer has any reason to be angry with us.  The curse of sin is gone, and we can prosper.

God measures prosperity differently than we do. Martin Luther once said, “Earthly riches are the smallest gift God can give to a man.” Don’t overlook the real treasure God has given. Forgiveness is our possession now.  Peace with God is our possession now.  A mansion in heaven is our possession now.  No matter what our lot in life, we have prosperity because our treasure is in heaven.

We don’t keep the commandments to manipulate God into blessing us.  Even if they had no impact on our prosperity, gratefulness for our salvation is reason enough to obey. No matter how much or little we have in the bank, in God’s saving work we prosper.

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“‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’ Jesus asked the Twelve. ‘Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.'” (John 6:67-68)

“Where do you go…?”  That is a question Robin and I ask over and over after we have just moved.  “Where do you go for groceries?”  “Where do you go for an evening out?”  “Where do you go to get your license plates changed?”  “Where do you go?”  Peter asked a similar question.  “Lord, to whom shall we go?”  He asked because others had decided to stop going to Jesus.  “On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching.  Who can accept it?…From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (John 6:60,66).

When these disciples called Jesus’ teaching hard, they didn’t mean that it took a lot of work to understand. They understood what Jesus was saying only too well. They were in the same camp as Mark Twain centuries later: “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” That was the problem.

By hard they meant the opposite of soft.  It was hard, and rough, and unpleasant.  This teaching had no give to it, there was no room for compromise.  Jesus was too dogmatic in the way he presented his ideas, too unyielding as far as they were concerned.

You see, sometimes we want to find a little room in our faith for some contribution we can make to our own salvation.  When Jesus teaches about the law, that is fine.  That is something we can do. But don’t tell me I have nothing to contribute. At other times we would like some room to pick and choose from the things Jesus taught.  That we should put our faith in Jesus only, that we must accept him in total, that is a “hard teaching.” For many it is a deal-breaker. They “no longer followed him.”

Not for Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Peter realized you can find the word of life in no one but Jesus.  That’s not merely a message Jesus possesses. It is the story of his own life, and work, and meaning. The Bible is God’s account of how the whole history of the entire world revolves around Jesus of Nazareth, the “Holy One of God.”  It introduces us to the God-man who paid for our sins.  We believe it, not as a possibility, but with the conviction that Jesus is both Lord and Savior.  We know him, not just as we know the other famous figures of history. We have met Jesus in this word, and he has become a personal friend, an intimate part of our lives.

That is an astounding truth considering that Jesus Christ is the promised Messiah, the one God set apart to obey the laws we can’t keep, pay the penalty for sin we can’t pay, and overcome the death for which we have no other cure.  For knowing God, for having life, Jesus is where to go.

Acts 13:39 “Through him everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses.”

The laws God gave to Moses stretch across four books of the Bible, about 125 pages in my personal Bible. When God revealed his law to Moses, he never intended it to be some kind of self-help book. Endless lists of things that made people ceremonially unclean, and purification rights to go with them; detailed instructions about some of the most minute details of how they lived and worshiped; this was more than any reasonable person could do. It should have led them to see the futility of working your way into God’s graces. It should have led them to seek help, not to self-help. But this is just the way that Moses was misused.

Why? For the same reason we find ourselves doing the same thing today. Rather than coming to grips with sin’s hold on us, we choose to live under the illusion of personal goodness. The name on the laws we are trying to follow to a better life may not be “Moses.” But the law of Osteen, Dobson, Warren, or Lucado–or of the pastor who serves you personally, for that matter–will not be able to justify us, either. Come to your own pastor for counseling, and he may be able to apply God’s word to your situation. He may be able to tell you where you have broken God’s commands. He may help you with applications that improve your lives and make it tolerable to continue. He may have insights into what to do. It may be a good and wholesome thing for you to make those changes. But all by itself, this will not draw you closer to God. It won’t cancel your sin. It won’t justify you. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to do our best, but we find no peace that way.

God has provided a better way. “Through him (Jesus) everyone who believes is justified.” Jesus is superior to Moses, because Jesus actually provides what Moses could only describe–a perfect life. Justification and its companion word, “righteousness,” aren’t everyday words for us, at least in the way they are used by Paul. When we use “justify,” we are defending something or making a case for it. When Jesus justifies us, he is not defending us based our good behavior. He is defending us based on his good behavior. He isn’t looking for perfect performance that isn’t there. He is getting us off the performance treadmill. He is giving us credit for his perfect performance from the stable to the cross. He pronounces us righteous, he declares us free from sin through the forgiveness he has led us to believe.

You see, what Jesus wants more than that you try harder is that you repent and give your sins to him. Lay your burdens down in front of him. Stop trying to save yourself. Jesus will do what all your efforts could never do. He will make your very real sins disappear. He will give you relief from all your guilt. He will give rest to your troubled soul. Jesus is infinitely superior to every other avenue to peace, because his way is the only way that actually works.

Mark 2:5 “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

For Jesus, forgiveness comes first. Paralysis, blindness, unemployment, loneliness, drought– none of these things ever damned anyone. But despair that God doesn’t love me because he holds my sins against me–that is deadly to faith. Who can trust God when you don’t think he loves you? Jesus looked at the man lying in front of him, and he saw that this man was paralyzed. But the Doctor of our souls also sees the heart, and whether this man was conscious of his greater spiritual need at this moment or not, Jesus was. Forgiveness came first. Before anything else, Jesus made this paralyzed man sure that God loved him.

Is our need any different? I know that Jesus can help me with so many things I am concerned about in life. I know that he holds the answer to every question I can think to ask. And I know that sometimes we believe that if we talk about forgiveness too much, people will take it for granted. We fear it won’t seem so special anymore. The Bible is a big book with lots of information. The forgiveness of sins is just one part of that message. Maybe we don’t believe we can take so much time to focus on one single issue.

But I also know that what I need more than anything is not more advice on how to go to school Christian, or how to work Christian, or how to date Christian, or how to raise a family Christian, or how to vote Christian, or how to diet Christian. What I need more than anything is to know that God loves me. There is nothing that my heart longs more to hear than how much he was willing to do to save me, how much he was willing to give to have me, how much he was willing to sacrifice to make me his own. Nothing so changes me as when Christ is held before me in all his grace, compassion, and forgiveness. You know, they have been telling me to stop sinning for as long as I can remember, and it hasn’t stopped me yet (not that I didn’t need to hear that!). But one thing changes my taste for sin, and fills me with the desire to live a life of love. That is hearing about Jesus and his love. And his love always begins with forgiving my sins.

Jesus’ words to this man are exactly what we need to hear: “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Jesus calls this man “son,” literally “child” in the original. Does something inside of us rebel at being referred to that way? “Child” can make us feel incompetent, dependent, and needy. “Child” makes us feel like we can’t take care of ourselves.

But that is how we need to feel. Spiritually, that is what we are like. Then we are ready to receive what God is giving. I have often thought that 4 years olds have life about as good as it gets. So little is expected and so much is received. When I was 4 my parents took care of everything. They paid the bills, put the food on the table, put the band-aids on my owies, and tucked me into bed at night. They watched me to make sure that I was safe, and carried me when I was tired, and held me when I was scared. I was the object of their affection and the center of their concern. Being 4 years old was a great gig.

Children of God, you are the objects of God’s affection and the center of his concern. As children in his family, you can be sure that he is there to take care of everything. How can you be so sure? Because forgiveness came first. Your sins are all forgiven. This same Jesus has taken every one of them with him to the cross. You enjoy your Savior’s unchanging and unlimited love because no sin stands between the two of you anymore. He loves you no matter how many hurts and heartaches lay you flat on your back in front of him. And you can be sure that in his own time and way, he is going to take care of those things, too.

Philippians 3:8-9 “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ–the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.”

My father is the quintessential “do-it-yourselfer.” I remember going for a walk with him once and meeting one of our neighbors for the first time. As my father tried to describe to him who we were and where in the neighborhood we lived, the man remarked, “I know who you are. You’re that guy who always has the piles of dirt, sand, or gravel in your yard.” He was right. There was always a project going on at our house.

When it comes to home improvement, there is nothing wrong with being a “do-it-yourselfer.” If you are any good at it, you can make sure things get done the right way. The same holds true for many other areas of life. Maybe you can sew your own dresses, or grow your own food, or manage all your own investments, or fix all your own cars, and make sure it gets done the right way.

But there is one area of life for which this never works, and that is in our relationship with God. Here we are all tempted to believe that we have to do it ourselves. But as long as we are trying to do it ourselves, we will never be sure where we stand with God.

The true Christian faith is not a moral philosophy about how we must live. It is “knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” It is not just studying about Jesus like studying about some historic figure in a book. It is actually meeting Jesus in his word, being introduced to him, and living life with him as our Savior, our friend, and our brother.

When we know Jesus, then we truly know God. When you sit down on the hillside and listen to Jesus preach his sermon on the mount, then you see how high God has set his standards for keeping his law, and how far short of his perfection we have fallen. But when you follow him down from the hillside, and you see him actually reach out and touch the unclean leper to heal him, you know the depth of his concern for your suffering, and the extent of his power to fill your needs. When you stand with Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, and you see the tears burning down his cheeks, and you hear his voice commanding Lazarus back to life, you know the intensity with which he feels your pain, and the authority with which he controls your world. When you kneel at the foot of his cross, and the blood running from his hands and feet carries his life mingled with your sins away past your knees, and his dying breath cries out, “It is finished,” you know that in his unsurpassed love for you he has left nothing more for you to pay or do.

Do you want to be sure, really sure, that God’s love and grace are yours, that your sins are forgiven, that you will live again after you die? Then you need to be found in Jesus, wrapped in the righteousness of his holy life, cleansed in the blood of his innocent death. A righteousness of our own that comes from our own keeping of the law is only a so-called righteousness. We never live our lives completely guilt free, and as long as we are still producing sin, we aren’t righteous at all.

Then God comes and gives us a righteousness of his own making. He gives us an innocence that comes to us from the outside. He takes and he hides our sinful selves in the perfect love of Christ. He so covers over the content of our lives with Jesus’ life and death that he can no longer see us at all. We are all little Christ’s to him. Lutheran Christians celebrate this truth in the Reformation this time of year. A more well-known October celebration will see little children walking door-to-door with hidden identities, hidden behind costumes and masks. By bringing us to faith, the Lord has dressed each one of us up as Jesus, only our new identity is more than a flimsy costume, and we wear it every day for the rest of our believing lives.

This is our great find, not only to find and know Jesus, but to be found in him with the righteousness that comes from God. In Jesus we are the precious, holy, dear, innocent children of God himself.

Acts 4:32 “All the believers were one in heart and mind.”

It’s no secret that Christianity often looks disunited today. We are divided into so many different denominations–over 30,000 of them by the last count I heard. In Lutheranism alone there are over 25 different flavors, and attempts to get them together only seem to create more divisions. If you pay any attention to the news, you know that inside each church body there are often heated debates about teachings and morals. They go to their national conventions and fight about what the Bible really says about human sexuality or how the church should be governed. Some churches claim to be “non-denominational” and try to stay above the fray, but isn’t that really a way of saying we can’t get close to anyone but ourselves?

If you have been part of a local congregation, you know that they have issues, too. Sometimes they will divide over issues ranging from key Bible teachings to what color to paint the Sunday school classrooms.

Not the church in Jerusalem. “All the believers were one in heart and in mind.” Notice the key to their unity: one in heart, one in mind. This wasn’t an oversized club where everyone shared a common hobby. They were one in heart. They had the same heart, because they had the same faith. Each of them trusted in Jesus as Savior from sin. When trust in Jesus as your Savior from sin fills your heart, you don’t live with delusions of greatness and superiority. You are a sinner who has been rescued from the death and hell you deserved by Jesus’ forgiving grace and supreme sacrifice at the cross. What do we have to be proud of in this? But being so humbled, believing that you have been so loved by God that you owe him everything, has a very desirable effect on those who believe it is true. Love begins to grow. Love has been called “the great commandment,” but love isn’t just a rule we keep. Taking a picture from Jesus, it is like a fruit that grows out of us because we are attached to him by faith. It’s spontaneous. It just happens. Together, faith and love made this congregation in Jerusalem “one in heart.”

But there was more to the secret of their unity. They were also “one in mind.” They had more than a nice feeling about each other. They believed the same things. Go back two chapters in Acts and we see that they put a high priority on learning the truths of the Christian faith. “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching.” “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.” When people share the same set of beliefs, what is there to disagree about? Everyone was on the same page. Hearts and minds made one by faith, love, and good teaching gave this congregation a genuine peace and unity. It made them a pleasant community attractive to outsiders and able to work together to get God’s work done.

Can our churches be like that? Can we repent of our bad priorities, and let hearing and learning God’s word rise to the top of the list, so that it can grow our faith, and form our hearts into one heart? Can we set aside phrases like, “Well, I think…,” or “Everybody knows…,” and let the truths of the Bible form our opinions for us, so that we share the mind of Christ, and our way of thinking is united in him? People will probably think we are crazy if we do. This church in Jerusalem received its share of grief from the main religious leaders and general culture around them. Like Jesus, they were rowing upstream, swimming against the tide. But the greater blessings of unity make this a church worth imitating.

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Luke 7:16 “They were all filled with awe and praised God. ‘A great prophet has appeared among us,’ they said. ‘God has come to help his people.’”

Do you sometimes feel as though your faith has become passionless? You haven’t stopped believing, but your beliefs have become so much a part of your everyday life that they almost seem commonplace. They don’t inspire much excitement anymore. Perhaps you have even worried that you are beginning to take your faith and your Savior for granted, and you are slipping into complacency.

Then you could envy these people being filled with a sense of holy awe and spontaneously praising God here. Of course, if we had just seen a dead person sit up and start talking, we would all be a little excited and awe-struck, too. No wonder the news about Jesus spread around the country so quickly.

We don’t have less to be excited about. Every day Jesus forgives the sins that would otherwise keep us out of heaven and send us to hell. Isn’t that you and I receiving our lives back from the dead? That alone is all the reason we need to be filled with awe, praise God, and tell others. In fact, there is nothing more worth telling to others about what Jesus has done.

But as exciting and life-changing as this is, he does it for us everyday. Through no fault of our Savior, we can get so comfortable with it that it doesn’t seem special anymore. Maybe you can relate to the example a man once gave to one of our pastors. “Coming to our church,” he said, “was like a man dying of thirst crawling through the desert. Suddenly, over a sand dune, he sees an oasis, and he goes running down to the water, and he jumps in, and he yells and splashes around because he is so happy. But all around him are people who have lived at that oasis all their lives, and they look at him and say, ‘What? Are you nuts?’”

One of the blessings our Lord may bring into our lives by letting us suffer grief, and then coming to us with his comforts, and letting us find our help in his promises, and in his answers to our prayers, is this: he fixes our attention firmly on himself again. We don’t take him for granted anymore. We know that he is our life, our hope, our all. We can’t keep that to ourselves.Our hearts and mouths are filled with awe and praise.

An old professor at our seminary once wrote: “…children of God learn to know that God is nearest just at the moment when he seems to be farthest away. At the time when he seems to be most angry, when he sends them afflictions and trials, they know him best as their merciful Savior. When they feel the terrors of sin and death most deeply, then they know best that they have eternal righteousness. And just when they are of all men most miserable they know that they are lords over all things.” God isn’t missing when tragedy strikes. Look to his word and to his promises, look to Jesus, and you will know that God still comes to help his people.