Ephesians 4:2 “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”

I know a man who ran for elected office and won. It changed him. He wasn’t elected to a national office. But even winning a local campaign made him feel important. He had power. The majority had chosen him. It started to go to his head. He didn’t treat people who served or waited on him with the same dignity. They were more like inferiors to command than equals to appreciate.

Another acquaintance of mine started his own business. For a time it was quite successful. He was making a lot of money. He rubbed shoulders with other wealthy people. He wanted to live in a house and drive a car that were worthy of his new status and success. You could tell that he didn’t regard people with less money, or people who hadn’t accomplished so much in their careers, as his equals.

Money, status, and power have a way of changing people–usually not for the better. We start to believe our own propaganda. We forget where we came from. We congratulate ourselves for our ingenuity, praise our own hard work, and take full credit for our success story. We are just a little better than most others, you see.

You or I could be elected President of the United States. We could start the next Apple or Google. But we still wouldn’t have as exceptional and privileged as we are to be believing Christians. Jesus, the Savior of mankind, regards you as his dear brother or sister. The Chairman of the Board of all the Universe recruited you for his team. He made you royalty in his worldwide organization. There is no “up” from your calling as a Christian.

That is no reason to congratulate and praise ourselves, as though we could take full credit for this spiritual success story. Paul urges us to be humble. If we remember where we came from, do we have reason for anything else? We were so lost, our sins were such a mountain of messed up choices and ideas, that only the death of God could save us from ourselves. In Jesus, God did die and save us. But that is no reason for us to get a big head. This calls for humility, because we know where we came from. We know how incredibly generous and forgiving God was to make us what we are today.

This also calls for us to be gentle with other people, not brash and abusive. “Be patient, bearing with one another in love.” It’s true, people do dumb things, even fellow Christians. Sometimes they do something mean. Sometimes they are self-indulgent, unthinking, or show a lack of concern for anybody else. All too often, I have to pay. Their bad behavior costs me. When this happens, like the rest of the world in which I live, I would like to let loose with my mouth and unload on the morons whose problems I now have to try to fix.

But nothing anyone has done to me, no problem anyone has ever created, begins to compare to the trouble my sins caused for my Savior. It took thirty-three years of love and a cross to fix it. Yet far too often, I am still committing the same sins. Jesus has been gentle, and patient, and he bears with me.

The better I know my own place, the more I will treat others with gentleness and patience in return. That’s only fitting in light of the gentleness and patience with which my Lord deals with me.

Ephesians 4:1 “As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”

Perhaps you notice an irony in Paul’s encouragement. His words suggest that your calling to be a believer in Jesus is this high privilege. It is a great gift, one of our dearest and most important possessions. He writes this as a prisoner for the Lord. In other words, it is this same calling that has landed him in jail. Apparently we live in a world that strongly disagrees with Paul’s evaluation of faith in Jesus and membership in his church.

Maybe we are tempted to sympathize with the world’s view here. It’s not that we think Christianity is terrible. We wouldn’t be here if we did. We are free to leave any time we want.

But our values, our priorities, our way of life all suggest we don’t see Christian faith as such a high calling. How do you measure how important something is to someone? You answer questions like, “How much are they willing to spend on it? How much time are they willing to give to it? How much work are they willing to put into it?”

As Christians, we live in New Testament freedom. We haven’t been handed a set of rules, like Old Testament believers. No law says, “If you want to be a Christian, you have to give this much money. You have to spend this much time at church. You have to volunteer for this many activities.” Jesus teaches us that giving, and learning, and serving–like faith–have to come from the heart to be any good.

But if Christian faith means anything to us, why would we want to do less than God’s Old Testament people? Individual circumstances will vary. But the typical Christian today gives 8% less than his Old Testament counterpart. Attendance across most denominations has dropped below 20% per week. In general American Christian churches suffer from a crisis of volunteers. Again, individual circumstances will vary. But the statistics suggest we don’t regard our calling to follow Christ as this high and holy privilege to be valued above all else. On average we spend twice as much money, and fifteen times as much time, on recreation and entertainment as we do on our faith. Are football, Yellowstone, and America’s Got Talent really worth so much?

What makes our Christian calling so valuable that we aspire to live a life worthy of it? To start with, our Maker sacrificed the life of his own Son just to make it possible. How often don’t we hear about the sacrifices our soldiers and veterans have made to secure our freedoms and defend our country? It is something exceptional to live in this country. But the very Son of God sacrificed his life to secure our citizenship in heaven. It is a citizenship, a privilege, that will never end. It continues for all eternity. Our calling as Christians means we live every day as the objects of God’s love, free from the guilt and punishment of all our sins. Our calling as Christians is better than the best health care plan money could buy, because even after we die our Lord promises to these bodies back together, perfectly healed and restored, never to die again.

Out of all the people in the world, the Lord came and found you. He called you to know Jesus, his sacrifice, and his gifts. He planted the seed of faith in your heart. He claimed you as a child and family member, and he is proud to have you as his own. Paul understood that such a calling was worth risking prison, even death, to have. So did the other apostles. Now he urges us to understand its value, and live a life worthy of our calling.

1 Kings 17:22-24 “The Lord heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life returned to him, and he lived. Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. He gave him to his mother and said, ‘Look, your son is alive!’ Then the woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth.’”

There are two resurrections in these brief sentences. There is the obvious resurrection of the boy’s body to life. Then there is the resurrection of his mother’s faith, her renewed trust in the God Elijah served, whose word Elijah spoke.

The second resurrection may well be the greater of the two. A little boy can die, and God is still the God of mercy, if only we will see what he is doing. We have had a cancer diagnosis at my house, a little boy who might not have lived so long. Before we knew which way our fight with cancer was going to go, and what the outcome of the treatments was going to be, I thought about, “How do you explain this? What would you even preach at a funeral?”

Then I stumbled upon the opening words of Isaiah chapter 57: “The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil. Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death.” Spared from future evil, entering peace, finding rest–these are all expressions of God’s mercy, even if they are applied to a little boy who is barely ten years old.

Maybe Elijah could have preached this to the poor widow, and she would have understood. Her son was truly home, safe from sin and evil, forever kept in heaven until the day she joined him there. But that is not the path God’s mercy took that day. She had already buried one man dear to her heart. The Lord chose to give her little boy back to her in his mercy. She did not have to finish her earthly journey alone. Her faith revived. She knew God’s word was true, because that is the power of God’s mercy on human hearts.

God’s mercy is never absent in our lives. But we don’t always choose to see it. We pray little, timid prayers, not big, bold prayers like Elijah prayed, because we don’t fully grasp the extent of God’s love and grace. We sometimes fight the very circumstances the Lord is using to stretch our faith, or bring us blessing, because at the time it is hard, or it hurts.

But God is big in mercy, so he gives us more than we ask, and he does not deny us the crosses or burdens that serve our souls. The first thing we need to remember is that he is love, even in the worst of times, even in the face of death. Then we will recognize his mercy, and know its power on our hearts.

1 Kings 17:19-21 “‘Give me your son,’ Elijah replied. He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his bed. Then he cried out to the Lord, ‘O Lord my God, have you brought tragedy also upon this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?’ Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to him!’”

Elijah knew the God he preached and worshiped. He knew that he was a God of mercy. And that inspired in the prophet a bold prayer for help. It is bold because he acknowledges the Lord’s hand in the situation, his responsibility for what has happened so far: “Have you brought tragedy…?”

Sometimes people don’t want to acknowledge God’s role in the painful things we suffer, as though the Lord were only a passive observer with his hands tied to prevent him from doing anything about it. Elijah prays to the God he knows to be in control of all things, including the death of this little boy. If the Lord isn’t in control, then what is the use of praying to him?

We may not understand why his running of our world calls for catastrophic hurricanes, deadly wildfires, crushing inflation, or fighting in Ukraine that could turn into World War III. We may not understand why illness, injury, or death has to touch our lives when it does. But let’s not think that our Lord has been asleep at the wheel. He is not helpless to keep these things from happening. That would be far worse than suffering our tragedies in the first place. Elijah can admit God’s role and still pray for help because he still has faith in God’s mercy.

Elijah’s prayer is a bold prayer because he dares to disagree with the circumstances as the Lord has currently worked them out. His question, his word choices, suggest that it is not good for the widow to suffer this tragedy and for her son to die. There is some hint of that in all our prayers for help, isn’t there–some note of “I object” to things as they currently stand, “I disagree” with the way the Lord has been directing current affairs? Where do we get the gall to question the Almighty on the way he is running our world and offer him our opinion?

Truth is, the Lord has revealed that he is a God of grace and mercy, hasn’t he? Over and over again in the Old Testament he described himself as the “gracious and compassionate God.” In doing so he has practically invited us to come and speak our mind when current circumstances don’t seem compatible with his claims of compassion. We believe he really is merciful, and that inspires our prayers.

1 Kings 17:17-18 “Some time later the son of the woman who owned the house became ill. He grew worse and worse, and finally stopped breathing. She said to Elijah, ‘What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?”

Few things tempt us to doubt God more than suffering. It is the main reason the Apostle Peter wrote his first letter. It has inspired books like Why Bad things Happen to Good People or Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants. It became a problem for the widow who offered food and shelter to the prophet Elijah and took him into her home.

Children get sick and die every day in our world. Worldwide, over three million children die before they are five years old, or a little over 4%. In our own country, about 4000 children will die before they turn four, and another 5000 will die before they turn fourteen. That’s a small percentage of the population, but still a lot of people.

In Elijah’s day the mortality rate for such young people was probably more like one out of two or worse. There was a famine going on in the land. Childhood death was common.

But that didn’t make it easy. It can be hard enough to understand why God lets us suffer ourselves. When our children suffer or die, it is even harder. It doesn’t seem fair, somehow. The children may not be perfect, but compared to adults their sins seem relatively mild and few. Why should their lives be cut off?

Adding to a parent’s torment is the natural affection we have for our children. Something more dear than all our possessions is being taken away. We have a helpless, powerless feeling when all we can do is stand by and watch some disease or condition have its way with our child.

On top of this, the widow in our story was losing her only child. Now her family was gone. She was all alone in this world. Someday, when she became old, there would be no one to take care of her.

So this personal tragedy was sad, and hard. It was also a trial for her faith. “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” she asks the prophet. How do I explain such a painful, scary thing? Today some people choose to believe that incidents like this are evidence for God’s non-existence. Their own existence is all a big accident. We are all alone in a senseless universe with no meaning or purpose. Others get mad at God and accuse him of being cruel and unfair.

Some believe that God is punishing them, as the widow here. A past sin is coming back to bite them. God is angry, and they are now being forced to pay for their past crimes or misdeeds. That adds a spiritual crisis to the personal loss we are already suffering. We won’t long be able to trust a God we are convinced is living in our past, who won’t let our mistakes go, who is set on making us pay for our sins years after we have committed them. Our hearts are wounded, and like the widow in the story we need the power of God’s mercy to come and address our doubts.

Let me point out that this is why your pastor visits you in the hospital or in a time of personal tragedy. Perhaps that’s obvious. He does not come with physical healing powers, nor is he a doctor. He won’t be bringing anyone back from the dead.

But your pastor has the cure for your guilt. He gives you something to nourish a lagging faith: God is love. His dealings with you begin and end with grace. He forgives your past. He will bless and transform your present. He has secured your future. Maybe his mercies aren’t always easy for us to see. But they are there, no less than his grace. They are filled with power to work on our hearts and address our doubts, even when life hurts more than we can bear.

Deuteronomy 8:17-18 “You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me. But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.”

In today’s charged political climate, the reasons for poverty or wealth are hotly debated: are they the product of special privilege or simple cause and effect; abuse of power or hard work and sweat; a matter of victims and oppressors or lazy freeloaders and honest laborers. This morning Moses would like to say, “Wait a minute. You are all forgetting something.”

“Remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth.” The circumstances that have made most of us relatively prosperous are not solely the result of our own efforts. They are not even mostly the result of our own efforts. The talents that made us employable were not our own creation. God himself wired our brains for the skills we have.

The health that allowed us to put our talents to use is not merely the result of healthy diet, exercise, and choices. In the mid-1980’s, Jim Fixx, whose books popularized running and helped lead the fitness revolution, died of a heart attack at the age of 52. There are countless diseases and conditions from which you and I have been spared purely by the grace of God.

We did not choose to be born into one of the world’s strongest economies and best political systems. But even if we did, there is no guarantee that we would personally do well in them, or that the system itself will continue to work.

God’s hand has kept wars from being waged on our own soil, and limited the severity of natural catastrophes, and prevented politicians more corrupt than the ones we already have from rising to power. More than one empire has fallen from power and prosperity to subjection and poverty in just a matter of days.

But here we sit in the comfort of our climate-controlled homes and vehicles, well-fed and clothed, about as safe and secure as any people have ever been.

Why? Because all is grace. The same God who sacrificed his own Son for an ungrateful world, who found us and claimed us as his own when we weren’t looking for him, who forgives us not because we deserve it but because that’s just the way he is, continues to feed and care for us, often in a princely way. All is grace, and let’s not be blind to his ongoing generosity.

Deuteronomy 8:14-16 “Your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble and to test you so that in the end it might go well with you.”

“What have you done for me lately?” In sports, if the quarterback who led you to the Superbowl, or the pitcher who won the World Series, has a down year, the team may trade them, or even cut them. There is little or no loyalty for past contributions.

“What have you done for me lately?” In business, if the CEO who drove the company to the top of the industry can’t keep it there, if last year’s salesman of the year can’t make his quota this month, they may find themselves on the street looking for a new job. “What have you done for me lately?” the board of directors, or the management team demands. People don’t value past contributions very much.

In history, particularly history seen from the viewpoint of faith, the God we worship has an impressive resume, one we can’t seem to remember very long. Moses walked the Israelites through some of the Lord’s more impressive work the last forty years: deliverance from Egypt, water from a rock, miraculous free food in the desert. In spite of experiencing these things themselves, the people’s forgetfulness was draw-dropping. Just two weeks after walking through the middle of the Red Sea on dry ground the people were accusing God of trying to starve them to death! It was as though the epic plagues the Lord brought on Egypt and the parting of the waters never happened. “What have you done for me lately?”

The Lord’s deliverances have only gotten bigger and more impressive since then. He left heaven to live on earth himself. He permanently adopted a human body and soul, fused himself to his own creation, and subjected himself to all the heartache and hardships of life in our world.

He made the guilt of our sins his own, carried it in our place, and faced the consequences for it though he was completely innocent himself. He endured the justice that should have been served to us, suffered the kind of abuse and torture that would be outlawed as inhumane in our place and time, and died pinned to a cross of wood, mocked or abandoned by all who knew him, forsaken by God the Father in heaven, to set us free from our sins.

Three days later he left his own grave alive and glorified to prove the price for sin was paid, and document the defeat of death and the devil. No greater sacrifice has ever been made. No greater danger to humanity has ever been overcome. No greater gift has ever been given.

But that was nearly 2000 years ago. Today Moses’ words urge us to remember the history that has brought us such good things. It is his promise of even greater blessings to come.

Deuteronomy 8:10-14 “When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws, and his decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God…”

There are three potential problems with our prosperity that Moses either implies or directly identifies. The first is its negative effect on our prayer life. “When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God,” he urges. Praise the Lord your God. That’s a kind of prayer. You might think it would flow naturally from our happy circumstances and prosperous condition.

But you know from experience that is not always, or even usually, the case. Be honest. When is your prayer life usually better, more regular, more fervent–when your life is purring along with no stress or worry, or when your world is caving in around you? Don’t you find yourself on your knees begging him for help in a crisis, but maybe going days without talking to him when all your needs are met? We are like the college kid who only calls home when he needs money. In our prosperity it is easy to forget to talk to God, and not talking is never good for a relationship.

Second, we get careless about keeping his commandments. Forgetting the Lord your God is practically the equivalent of “failing to observe his commands, his laws, and his decrees.” We have all known the spoiled rich kid who sees himself a little above the law. The rules are meant for lesser creatures who can’t buy their way out of trouble. He’s a common character in movies or literature. We see them on the news, too. A lawyer defended one spoiled rich kid by saying he suffered from “affluenza.” The uglier and darker truth is the way our own prosperity begins to erode the seriousness with which we take God’s law.

Third, all of this is symptomatic of the way prosperity can corrupt our hearts: “…then your hearts will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God.” Our proud hearts get the idea that we are naturally superior. Our wealth gives us the illusion we don’t need God. When prosperity makes us proud, our need for God is hard to see, and it is easy to forget the Lord your God.

We may be tempted to think, “At least I’m just a middle-class person. I probably don’t have to worry about this too much.” Take a moment with me for a brief reality check. Anyone who makes $34,000 a year is in the top one percent of income worldwide. Half of the people on the planet bring home less than $1300 a year. The poorest 5% of Americans earn, on average, the same as the richest 5% of people living in India.

This isn’t to say that our prosperity is immoral. But few of us can say that we haven’t tasted the prosperity Moses describes. Our food, our homes, our wealth, our possessions generally dwarf the experience of the richest Israelites 3000 years ago. The temptation to put all our focus on these things and forget God still haunts us today.

Though we may forget God, that doesn’t mean he has forgotten us. Prosperity itself is evidence of his loving attention. He is still providing for us, much more than we need.

Evidence of his love and attention appears even more clearly in the riches of his grace. Moses could speak to Israel’s prosperous future only because the Lord had rescued them from the slavery of their past. We anticipate an even more prosperous future in the abundance of heaven, because the Jesus has rescued us from the poverty of hell and the slavery of our sin. Praise the Lord for his goodness! Do not forget his greater gifts.

Luke 10:25-33, 36-37 “On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus, ‘Teacher,’ he asked, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘What is written in the Law?’ he replied. ‘How do you read it?’ He answered, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ‘You have answered correctly,’ Jesus replied. ‘Do this and you will live.’ But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ In reply Jesus said: ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him…Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?’ The expert in the law replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’ Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

They say there is no such thing as a stupid question. But there is such thing as asking the wrong question. If you get the question wrong, you can’t get the answer right.

Do you see how Jesus corrected the question posed to him by the “expert in the law”? He subtly shifted the question from “Who is my neighbor?” to “What does it look like to act like a good neighbor to others?”

The first question is an attempt to justify myself. And we would like to defend ourselves. The problem is, we have no business trying to defend our failure to love others and show mercy when the opportunity has presented itself. We will never save ourselves by defending our failure to love our neighbor.

The second question helps us identify our sin more quickly. It leads us to see our lack of love, repent of it, and confess it. It keeps us from the horrible, deadly mistake of trying to justify ourselves.

Because we cannot justify ourselves. Because we cannot and do not love our neighbor like God demands. Only Jesus can justify us by living the life of love we don’t. Only Jesus can justify us by taking the blame and assuming the fault for our loveless neglect. Only Jesus can justify us by dying in our place and paying for our guilt. Only Jesus can justify us by forgiving our sins and reconciling us to God.

That is where Jesus wanted to lead the expert in the law with this honest look at how you love your neighbor. Get the question right, and we will stop asking, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” “Who is my neighbor?” “How can I justify myself?”

Instead we will ask, “Why haven’t I loved my neighbor more?” “How can I escape the penalty I deserve?” “Where can I find a Savior to deliver me from my guilt?”

Then Jesus will be standing in front of us, the Good Neighbor who loves us, the Savior who justifies us in his mercy.