Psalm 66:8-12  “Praise our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard; he has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping. For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance.”

Take a moment to think about all your favorite stories, movies, or TV shows in which nothing ever goes wrong. There are no disasters or tragedies. Everyone always gets along all the time. No one makes any mistakes. No one is ever in danger, ever in pain, ever embarrassed. Can you think of any? I can’t. Whether it is drama or comedy, there has to be some sort of tension to make the story work.

Real life is similar. As hard as we may try to make sure that nothing ever goes wrong, it is filled with drama, trouble, and tension. Only now it doesn’t simply serve to make life more interesting. It makes it a little scary. Most stories and shows have a happy ending. Reality doesn’t always work that way.

If you back up a few verses, it seems that Psalm 66 has the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea in mind. When it speaks of “preserving our life” and “keeping our feet from slipping,” it is clear that something hasn’t been going smoothly. Now here’s the shocking thing: Not only did our God know about it and fail to stop it. Sometimes he was the one behind it! “For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver. You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs. You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and water…”

“You did this, God,” the psalmist says. “You brought us into prison.” Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you feel trapped? You size up the situation, look at your alternatives, and none of them seem very good? I can quit my job at a time when jobs in my field are scarce and face bankruptcy and starvation. Or I can keep showing up for work that is slowly robbing me of my sanity, raising my blood pressure to dangerous levels, driving me to an early grave. I can skip the chemotherapy, let the cancer take its course, and leave my children fatherless or motherless. Or I can take the poison, suffer through months of misery, and maybe leave my children fatherless or motherless in the end anyway.

“You put me in this prison,” the psalmist says. “You laid this burden on my back, or at least you let the bad guys ride all over my head.” Why? Why would my Lord do such a thing? “For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver.” Precious metals come from metal ores that have a lot of worthless garbage mixed in with the silver or the gold. It’s all good for nothing until you drop it into a blast furnace, turn the heat up to a couple of thousand degrees, and burn out all the impurities.

Sons and daughters of God come from raw material that has a lot of worthless sin mixed in, not the least of which is the pride that makes us think that we are gifted enough and good enough to get by on our own. It is dangerous to deny it. It will bite you if you do. We might as well own up to it. God intends to refine us, to burn that pride out of us by bringing us to situations that bring us to our knees. He leads us to that place where we can do no more for ourselves. All we can do is cry out, “Lord, help me!” Here is the test: Will we despair and give up? Will we get mad at God and turn away from him? Or will we trust him?

His salvation is waiting. “…but you brought us to a place of abundance.” When the Lord first leads a person to faith, he works in a similar way, doesn’t he? He leads us to feel the heavy burden of our guilt. He brings us to see that our sin is bigger than us. It’s crushing weight brings us to the place where we see there is nothing left for us to do. “Lord, help me!” And then he brings us to the cross, where we find an abundance of grace, more love and forgiveness than we ever thought possible. He doesn’t just help us with the heavy load. At the cross, Jesus removes it entirely and carries it himself. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” In leading us to repentance and faith, he brings us to a place of abundance.

The testing God sends after we come to faith brings us to a similar place of abundance. In stripping us of our self-dependence, and teaching us to depend on him, the Lord is drawing us closer to himself. He is showing us, truly, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” He is building in us the humble character and patient endurance that is appropriate for people who call themselves God’s sons and daughters. Even if the testing kills us, literally, he is only taking us home to the abundance of heaven. We have every reason to praise the God who preserves his people even though he may be testing us at any given moment.

Psalm 90:13-15 “Relent, O Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.”

An old saying claims, “Hunger is the best cook.” Food never tastes better than when you have worked up a voracious appetite. When Moses says, “Relent O Lord! How long will it be?” he is speaking as a hungry man. But the food he longs for is something to fill the spiritual emptiness created by a long meditation on sin and death. If all we knew of God was his anger at sin and the death it brings, we would spiritually starve to death. But it also gives us an appetite for something else from God: his unfailing love.

You see, for as long and as passionately as our God has hated our sin, he has loved us with a love that knows no limits and knows no rest. His love knows no limits. Think about it. What could you possibly imagine to ask God to give up that would be such an imposition, such an outrageous request, such a painful sacrifice, that he would say to you, “Now that is going too far. That’s out of bounds. That’s just too much to give up.” What could you ask him? He has already given up his home, his power, his respect, his Son, his life to love you. Isn’t that what Jesus is all about, God giving up everything to forgive you and to save you?

His love knows no rest. It is unfailing love. He doesn’t have a bad day at the office and take it home to take out on you. He doesn’t grow in a different direction and grow apart from us. He doesn’t burn out from constantly pouring himself into this relationship with little or no appreciation in return. His love is unfailing. It knows no rest. It never takes a day off.

Doesn’t that satisfy the hunger, like a bowl of hot soup on a cold day? But doesn’t that also serve as something of an appetizer for even more? Happiness and peace are elusive in this world. We find our little moments of relief, we experience some joy, but it is all so fleeting.

There is only one place I know where God will make us glad for as many days as he has afflicted us, and even more, and that is in heaven. This is yet another promise of his unfailing love, and if we have learned to number our days here, we will spend them longing for the better days to come.

Psalm 90:1 “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.”

God has been our dwelling place. There is a comforting picture of his constant care in that statement. God has been like a home around us. The help we receive from him is not so much like going to the doctor’s office. That isn’t some place you live. It’s some place you occasionally visit only when you are very ill. God is more than someone we go to for an occasional visit. He is like home. We live with him and in him. He is the one who has been our constant protection from the elements. He is the one whose grace shelters our souls.

The word that Moses chose for “dwelling place” also suggests that it is something of a hideaway, an escape where trouble cannot find us. Wild animals often have homes that are camouflaged and hidden to avoid the attack of predators. When we are dwelling with the Lord, we are likewise hidden away in his protection from those who want to prey on us. The devil may “prowl around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). But wrapped in the righteous life of our Savior, covered in the blood of his forgiveness, we are perfectly safe from the devil’s accusations.

This is where we have lived all our days as believers in him. God has always been our dwelling place, not only for us, but for our parents and grandparents before us and for our children and grandchildren to follow us, ‘throughout all generations.” It’s not as though people have ever had different options here. “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.” Even before creation, our God is the one who stretches back forever without beginning. He didn’t replace some other god somewhere along the way. He didn’t come to his position by promotion, or succession, or acquisition. He has always been there, just as he will always be there. He is the only God there is. As we pray this psalm with Moses, we note that every day we have lived has been lived in his constant care.

Revelation 1:12 “I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands…”

Seven verses later the meaning of this picture is explained in simple terms: “The seven lampstands are the seven churches,” seven Christian congregations spread across modern day Turkey, each facing its own set of challenges and temptations at a time when persecution by the unbelieving majority made them feel rather alone.

The lampstands are a picture of churches, and I don’t think that it is hard to understand why our Lord chose that image. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus told his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount. A Christian congregation, where Jesus’ disciples are gathered together, is a light shining in a dark place. That is just as true of our congregations today as it was of any of these other congregations 1900 years ago.

Look at the values and standards competing with ours in the broader community in which we live. On my way back and forth between home and church I used to drive past a rather impressive looking building with one odd feature: it had no windows. Perhaps you can guess why. Inside women are paid to disrobe for the men who attend this club. I have never stopped to confirm what I am about to say — for obvious reasons — but my impression is that on any given day of the week between the hours of noon and midnight that parking lot has more cars in it than my church’s parking lot on Sunday morning.

You, dear Christians, are a light shining in a dark place. There are many interesting and useful things our churches could do, from feeding the hungry to entertaining the teenagers to keeping some stretch of a nearby highway free of trash. These could even be used to enhance the gospel ministry. But don’t let these kinds of things become a replacement. What good is it if a congregation should improve the whole world yet lose its own soul?

Let’s keep the gospel light burning in our lampstands. The light that calls lost souls to repentance, and to find the forgiveness of sins in the innocent death of our Lord Jesus, and never-ending life in his glorious resurrection from the dead, is the true light of our churches. Without it they are nothing more than a social club, and none of what we do will make a dime’s worth of difference the day after Judgment Day.

1 John 4:2-3 “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.”

Saint Augustine preached on these words from the Apostle John during Easter week about 300 years after they were first written. He recognized almost a dozen dangerous teachings and religious movements that could be identified by asking, “Do they know Jesus? Do they recognize him as God and man? Do the recognize him as the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior?”

The same test is useful today. You probably realize that there are a number of world religions that fail the test on this point: Judaism, Islam, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to name a few. More Christians are becoming aware that if you attend a college or university, many that are affiliated with Christian denominations, even some with the name Lutheran, and take a course in “New Testament Studies,” “the Gospels,” or some similar course, there is a high likelihood that the “spirit” teaching that class will fail on this point as well. Jesus’ divine nature, his atoning death for our sins, his bodily resurrection from the dead have all been denied in many Christian institutions of higher learning for well over a century now. It is inevitable that this same spirit has found its way into pulpits of Christian churches, too. That is why it is important that we heed John’s words, and test the faith of those who teach us. Regardless of who stands before you to preach or teach, including the man writing this devotion, have this question in the back of your mind: Does he know Jesus? Not “Does he speak warmly about Jesus?” Not “Does he make Jesus sound interesting?” Not “Does he use Jesus name a lot?” But “Does he know the same Jesus and preach the same Jesus that the Apostle John is describing here?”

It is not sinful judging to test our teachers this way. If you were shopping in the produce aisle at the grocery store, you would not put a badly bruised apple or an obviously rotting and moldy cucumber or a brown and mushy banana into your basket. You would “judge” these foods to be unfit for your consumption. Such judging is even more important when it comes to how we feed our souls.

A few verses later John clarifies our picture of what Jesus looks like, the standard for our test. “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10). To know Jesus is to know God’s love. That starts with Christmas, right? All by itself, sending his Son into this world was an incredible display of God’s love. For many years now we have had great respect for the parents who sent their sons and daughters into enemy territory in Iraq or Afghanistan, with all the dangers involved. God sent his Son into the enemy territory of this world, with far more dangers, far less defenses, and far more certainty of death so that he could give us life. That is love!

God’s love on Good Friday naturally follows. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” God not only knew that this could happen. He willed that it would happen. He sent Jesus to die as the sacrifice that took away the sins that stood between us and God. This sacrifice makes God smile at us, because we don’t look offensive to him anymore. It makes us smile at God, because he isn’t angry with us anymore. He did this, as the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 5, when we, on our part, were still God’s enemies. That is love!

The result, then, is that God’s love for us just solves everything! It takes away our sin. It creates in us the new birth of faith. It shows us what real love looks like, and then it produces that love in our own lives.

Faithfulness to the gospel that tells us God became a man, took our place on a cross, died in payment for our sins, and rose to guarantee our own unending life is still the standard test for those who teach us. Don’t be afraid to administer the test.

Isaiah 25:9 “In that day they will say, ‘Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice in his salvation.’”

There is a flavor of waiting in Isaiah’s words here. God’s people often wait for him to keep his promises. Waiting requires faith. Abraham waited 25 years for the Lord to keep his promise to give him and Sarah a son. That’s half my lifetime. The nation of Israel waited hundreds of years in Egypt for the Lord to set them free from their slavery. The whole history of our nation isn’t that long.

Moments earlier in this prophecy the Lord promised to swallow up death. That promise was going to wait another 700 years after Isaiah put it on paper. That’s thousands of years after he had first made the promise to Israel’s ancestors. Many people gave up on the promise across the centuries. A faithful few waited, and believed. Their faith was rewarded and vindicated when our Lord Jesus came and destroyed death by his own death and resurrection.

Patience has never been a strong human trait. We probably have less of it than our ancestors. We live in an age of instant gratification. We don’t save up until we can afford something. We buy it on credit and pay with interest. We don’t save for retirement. There’s too much we want today. We get antsy if the checkout line at Walmart isn’t moving fast enough. We complain if they don’t open up a new register after five minutes.  A professor of mine once noted that the thing that makes common sense so valuable is that it isn’t all that common. In a similar way we need to keep reminding people that “patience is a virtue,” because while it may be good to have, not many of us show it much of the time.

The Lord’s timetable may seem painfully slow to people with so little patience. Believe. His answers to our prayers seem like they will never come. Believe. We have been putting up with these morons, suffering through this situation, dealing with this pain for weeks, or months, or years now, and he promises he won’t let me be tempted beyond what I can bear. Believe. Jesus promised to return and make everything right and take us home almost 2000 years ago. He still hasn’t showed up. Believe. The Lord kept his promise to destroy death and save us from sin thousands of years after he gave it. We can believe that he is good for every other promise on which we are waiting. In all of history he hasn’t missed one yet.

Imagine how your life could be different if you knew that you were going to live forever. O wait, you do know that. The Lord has destroyed death, just like he promised. Believe it.

Isaiah 25:7-8a “On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife announced that they were donating three billion dollars to try to end all diseases in our lifetime. In his last state of the union address, President Obama appointed Vice President Biden to a task force to try to cure cancer. They want to double the speed of our progress against the disease.

The desire to wipe out leading causes of death is not a new one. In the past, great progress has been made in controlling or eradicating certain diseases. Smallpox, which killed between 300 and 500 million people during the 20th Century, today exists only in a few laboratory samples. Bubonic Plague, or “the Black Death,” killed nearly 100 million people during the 1300’s. That’s almost one fourth of the entire world population. As many as 2000 people around the world may still get the plague in any given year, but now it is treatable with antibiotics.

Just about the time we get a handle on one disease, it seems a new one appears on the scene. Ebola, West Nile Virus, Zika, AIDS–these have all become big concerns during my lifetime. The problem with mankind’s war on death is that we never get to the root of the problem. It’s not a disease, or bad genes, or untamed forces of nature, or unhealthy habits and practices. “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin. And in this way death came upon all men, because all sinned.” “The soul who sins is the one who will die.” “The wages of sin is death.” This is simply beyond the skill of modern science. It is beyond the reach of all human efforts, even religious ones. Only one person, one Being, can do anything about it.

And he has. Isaiah lived and wrote his prophecies in Jerusalem, the city built on the same mountain where 700 years later Jesus was put on trial, condemned to death, crucified, and buried. There he paid for the sins of the world. And when he rose from the dead three days later he accomplished what no doctor, no scientist, no researcher can ever do. He destroyed death. “Swallowed it up,” Isaiah says. He broke it and stomped all over it, and it will never work the way it used to work again. He changed it from permanent condition to temporary condition. He reconstructed what was once the gateway to hell, making it the door to our true home in heaven.

This makes all the difference. Christ destroys “the sheet that covers all nations, the shroud that enfolds all peoples.” Death is like a dark sheet, this shroud of gloom that darkens life. Jesus tore that sheet to shreds, and now the light comes pouring through. Consider the truly Christian funeral. We still shed some tears as we say goodbye. But it is not despair. Underneath the tears there are often smiles, even a note of joy. Gathered with those we love we often find laughter. As we remember those who have died, we consider where they have gone. We celebrate the new and perfect life they have in heaven. Death is in tatters, and Christ has set God’s people free.

Isaiah 25:6 “On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine–the best of meats and the finest of wines.”

When my wife and I got married, we fed dinner to over 150 people. When my children graduated from high school we fed 25 or 30 of our friends and family as well. My high school had an annual banquet to celebrate the academic and athletic accomplishments of the student body. Food is something we often use to celebrate milestones, achievements, and happy events. We have learned this from our God. When the Lord created a worship schedule for his Old Testament people, he created feast days. The Passover, the great celebration of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, was the “Passover Feast.” Later in the year they had the “Feast of Pentecost” to celebrate the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai, and the “Feast of Tabernacles” to remember their forty-year journey through the wilderness.

When God came to earth as a man, Jesus continued to show us that our Lord likes to celebrate with food. Jesus never got wild or out of control, but he was always open to attending a dinner party. He attended the wedding of his friends at Cana, a banquet with tax-collectors and sinners that Matthew threw in his honor, and even dinner at the homes of some of the Pharisees, who didn’t particularly like him. A few even accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton because he ate and drank so freely with people during his earthly ministry.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that when the early Christians started to put together their worship schedule to celebrate the things Jesus did to save us, feasting was something they had in mind. Usually we simply call it Christmas when we celebrate Jesus’ birth. But the more formal name for this in the church calendar is “The Feast of the Nativity.” Sometimes even less significant events were thought of as “feasts.” Maybe you never thought about the meaning or significance of these words from a song you hear around Christmas: “Good King Wenceslaus went out, on the Feast of Stephen.” The day the church set aside to remember the first New Testament Christian to give his life for Jesus was described as a Feast day.

So the Lord is announcing a new feast here in Isaiah. It anticipates Jesus’ empty tomb. It celebrates God’s victory over death, and our resurrection from the dead. Isn’t that an unquestionably happy thought? And doesn’t this whole idea of feasting teach us something about the faith we believe? Somehow we Christians have managed to give people the idea that this faith is a sour, gloomy religion. The main thing about being Christian, we seem to communicate, is that we should feel bad about ourselves, and give things up, and not enjoy life very much.

It is true that God wants us to repent of our sins, and we have plenty of sins of which to repent. But the main thing about sin is that God forgives it! We are free, and he doesn’t ask us to pay a thing. I don’t deny that our Lord warns us not to cling too tightly to this world and the parts of it that give us pleasure. But it still pleases him when his children enjoy his gifts with thankful hearts. And as our senses fade and fail, and he takes away our ability to enjoy one thing or another, he does so only because he is going to give us better things, vastly better things, immeasurably better things, in the future home he has prepared for us. There is a happy tone, something to celebrate, in grace and heaven.

So get out the good china, splurge on your favorite delicacies, raise a glass in thankfulness for God’s saving love. A sour, gloomy life simply doesn’t fit.

Mark 6:12-13 “If any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave as a testimony against them.’ They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.”

There are two things we learn about the message Jesus sends his disciples to preach. First, The message includes a word of warning. When the disciples were rejected, Jesus did not want them to quietly leave town. They were to go through this ritual of shaking the dust off their feet. It was a vivid way of saying, “You are due for God’s judgment, and there is nothing in common between you and the people of God, not even the dust we are shaking from our feet.”

That doesn’t sound like a sure-fire way to win friends and influence people. But Jesus didn’t tell them to say this to be mean. Loving people means telling them the truth, especially when their lives are in danger. Telling people that they are headed for hell is not the same thing as wanting them to go there, any more than telling people that they are sick is the same thing as wanting them to be unhealthy. People need to know for their own good.

We still deliver that warning as a part of our witness for Jesus. The threat of hell is an indispensable tool in our evangelism toolbox. It may go against every advertising rule and publicity principle in the book. “The customer is always right,” we are told. People don’t want to be told that they are bad. People want to hear something positive that can help them right now. But you can be sure that on Judgment Day people won’t want to be on Jesus’ bad side, either. Jesus gives us a word of warning, a message of law, as part of what we need to be his witnesses.

Secondly, the disciples “went out and preached that people should repent.” Mark sums up their message in that one word, “repent.” That is not merely a repeat of what we have just said. To repent is to have a change of mind. To repent is to make a 180 degree turn. It includes the turn away from sin, but it also includes the alternative: the turn to Jesus and his free forgiveness. I don’t believe that the disciples’ message was all doom and gloom, fire and brimstone. They also preached the sweet love of Jesus. They didn’t preach despair and hopelessness. They preached faith and new life in the mercy of God that loved them so much he sent them a Savior.

In other words, we have something positive to say. To call the message about Jesus the “gospel,” the “good news,” is almost an understatement. Though people may be naturally inclined to reject it, we are offering to those to whom we witness the greatest alternative, the greatest opportunity, of all time: complete freedom from all responsibility for every sin–no exceptions; instant access to the most powerful being in the universe; 24/7 service and support for every earthly need, problem, or danger; the cure for death; the title and deed to a piece of prime real-estate in heaven–all for free, all at no cost to the customer. You don’t even have to pay sales tax. In the gospel, Jesus has given us everything we need to make the message sound appealing. When we are speaking the gospel, we have something worth saying, and hearing.