Hebrews 2:11 “Both the one who makes men holy and those who are being made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.”

God wanted to make us part of his family, and so God’s Son made himself a part of our family. He didn’t start over with a new lump of clay from some untainted world in another universe to fashion his human body and soul. He didn’t merely speak his human body into existence. He chose to be born of a human woman. He drew the genetic material for his flesh and bones from Mary’s. Maybe, when they stood next to each other, you could see her eyes in his. Maybe that chin or that nose was her father’s, his grandpa’s. The blood flowing through his veins was the blood of generations of Jewish kings, and patriarchs before them, and this world’s first citizens before them. Somewhere, his family tree intersects with ours. Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family.

Yet, he is not ashamed to call us brothers. There is an old saying that you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. Jesus did. But this is what is even more amazing: he chose his family, in spite of all the baggage our human race has to offer.

Have you ever done genealogical work, put together a family tree? There is always the hope someone important is hiding back there on one of the branches. Maybe I am descended from some hero I can be proud to claim as my ancestor. Of course, the opposite is true as well. There is always the danger that some lowlife, criminal, or thug–maybe even a real monster of history–made a contribution to who you are today.

And we hope that no one in our own generation is going to do something to disgrace the family name. The family is a part of ourselves. We feel the shame when other members make a public spectacle of themselves.

Not Jesus. He knew what he was getting into when he joined humanity and became our sacred Sibling. He knew about the murderers, adulterers, and perverts. He knew about the liars, cheaters, and thieves. He knew about the self-righteous, the smug, and the snobs. He knew about the backstabbers, the unscrupulous, and the hypocrites. He knew about us all. He knew that he would be accused of the same shortcomings that ran in the family. He joined it just the same.

That is because he loved us too much to pity us from afar. He came close, he became our brother, so that he could be accused of all the family sins. Then he suffered not only their shame, but their punishment as well. At the cross, he cleared the family name forever. He has cleared your name forever, and he is not ashamed to be called your brother.

Can we imagine a greater glory, this side of heaven, than to claim Jesus Christ as our own flesh and blood?

1 Corinthians 13:4 “Love is patient, love is kind.”

“Patient” is an interesting way to describe love. The word that Paul uses for patience pictures this virtue as a person who takes a long time before he or she gets angry, blows up, or lashes out. The frustrations, the insults, perhaps even the pains, pile high, yet the person maintains a sense of calm, an uncomplaining spirit, a happy disposition. Our old word “longsuffering” captures the thought. Love looks to suffer for a long time without retaliating in some way.

Isn’t that a useful virtue for life? There are little irritations which call for patience. Slow traffic tries my patience, as does waiting on hold for the customer service representative to take my call. There are also major issues which require patience. Spouses, parents, children, or friends may take a long time to change. Their habits may be irritating, or their behavior might be outright offensive and hurtful. Selfish choices can tear at the fabric of your relationship. Dishonesty may chip away at the foundations for a shared life. Jesus never suggests such treatment should be simply overlooked. But love doesn’t look to give up right away. It doesn’t jump ship when we discover that relationships take work, and people we love have far more flaws than we imagined. Love is patient.

This patience is a feature of love because it is a feature of how God has treated us. Think of how long he has been putting up with you and me. Our record of offenses against him stretches the entire length of our lives, from conception and birth to this very day. We continue to repeat many of the same blunders until the day we die. Every inconsiderate act we commit against friend or family member is a sin against his holiness.

Yet we are still standing here today, alive and well. We survive because he is patient with us. Through Jesus’ death on the cross he has forgiven the mound of sins we have piled up throughout our lives. He patiently continues to extend forgiveness for Jesus’ sake until we need no more forgiveness in heaven. God’s patience is more than a model. It is a gift to take to heart and treasure as long as God gives us breath.

For when we have taken God’s forgiving patience to heart, then he can change our hearts. Then he will live in our hearts and help us look for the next thing love does: “Love is kind.” A couple of features of Christian kindness help us see what love looks like more clearly. Kindness is really an action word. It suggests that we are finding ways to be useful to each other. It is more than doing affectionate things. It is a life of serving others.

 That itself is a gift of God for every area of our lives. Apply it to marriage. In giving us marriage our Lord has given us more than an interesting diversion, a little trinket to enjoy selfishly. No doubt we would soon become bored with it if that were the case, like a child who loses interest in his Christmas presents shortly after Christmas.

But God has injected marriage with purpose. It is a place where his people can practice kindness. Husband and wife make their time and abilities useful to each other and to the children they share. This is, in part, how love looks. Love looks for ways to do something with my life that takes care of someone else.

Apply kindness to people we hardly know. People often find unexpected help deeply moving. Stories about it make the evening news and fill the human interest columns of magazines. You have probably heard the proverb, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” But once they know how much you care, they are all ears.

That makes kindness a useful bridge for the gospel. That makes kindness a useful tool for bringing others the greatest help they can receive: the peace of sins forgiven and heaven guaranteed.

Shakespeare wrote, “Love is a many-splendored thing.” Movies and song-writers have repeated the theme. They have romantic love chiefly in mind.

God’s love is even more worthy of the description. The Apostle Paul goes on to describe love fourteen different ways in this chapter of his letter to the Corinthians. It is no accident that patience and kindness lead the way.

Psalm 27:4 “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.”

Most of us are very concerned about the economy of our nation and our financial future. Many young adults struggle to find the kind of work that allows them to make ends meet and keep a roof over their heads. Still, most people alive today have lived through one of the longest and strongest rises in prosperity in the history of the world. Worldwide, fewer people (as a percentage of the population) live in poverty, fewer people are living on the edge of starvation, than ever before. Americans live in one of the wealthiest nation on earth, not only now but ever.

Living in a land of plenty has its own temptations, though, doesn’t it. The more we have, the more we are tempted to think that having things is the meaning of life. The more we have, the more we are tempted to worry about keeping what we have. We fret and fear when life’s inevitable changes bring an end to a job, a threat to our health, damage to our property, or danger to our children. These cares and anxieties play on our inborn sinfulness. They gnaw at the faith God has given us. In this way they threaten not only our bodies, but our very souls!

David knew such changes and temptations, too. He went from being a poor shepherd boy, to a respected member of the royal court, to a hunted outlaw, to the King of Israel. How did he get through this roller coaster of changing fortunes? He did it by keeping one thing always before him, always at the top of his priorities: “…that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon his beauty and to seek him in his temple.”

David knew what it was to have money, to have family, to have fame, to have power. He also knew what it was to live without them. But what he always wanted, more than anything, was his Lord. He wanted to go to God’s house and stand in God’s presence. He wanted to see the beauty of his Lord in worship, not some visible appearance of his invisible God, not brightly colored fabrics of the tent in which God was worshiped at that time, not in the gold, silver, and bronze furnishings with which the tabernacle was equipped. He wanted to see the beauty of God’s love for him, the promise of forgiveness signified in the sacrifices, the promise of God’s faithfulness in the feasts and readings that recalled his great acts of deliverance from the past, the promise of a Savior foreshadowed by it all.

Dear Christian, God has given you your heart’s desire! David’s prayer is your possession–a life in God’s house. Some of you, perhaps, have felt at times as though you almost literally did “dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of your life.” What has drawn you to worship and service was not the belief that you were steadily working your own way up that ladder of goodness into heaven. In your worship in God’s house, the Lord is getting you through life. You get to “gaze upon the beauty of the Lord” as it can be seen in the face of only Jesus. His love for you on the cross, dying in your place for your sins, giving you heaven as his gift, satisfies your need for him.

In the annals of history, neither you nor I may enjoy a prominent place. But a life lived in God’s house is particularly blessed. There God richly weaves all the blessings of salvation into the fabric of your lives. By God’s grace it will someday see us on to the eternal blessings of heaven.

James 4:8b-10 “Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”

The first time I ever read these words in James I felt that maybe the apostle’s expressions were a little over the top. Maybe this was a bit much. But let’s take a closer look at what he has to say, and see if he isn’t right on the mark.

First, James gets that sin is more than bad behavior, but it isn’t less. It is a defect on the inside and the outside. It is a matter of actions and the heart. Sometimes we may be tempted to give ourselves a pass if we stop ourselves from doing what we were thinking. We congratulate ourselves if we don’t let our anger, lust, or envy boil over into doing something we are going to regret later. I’m not saying we should just let it go, but there is already plenty to repent and confess when our hearts are wrong. Isn’t it finally the heart that God wants? Do we feel warm and fuzzy about people who hate us but don’t hit us? Hands and hearts both need to be washed and purified.

Second, James gets how our sins should make us feel. “Grieve, mourn, and wail.” Yes, sin is this bad! It ruins everything! It hurts the people around us. It drives wedges into our relationships. It robs us personally of health, contentment, and peace. In the end it deprives every person on the planet of life and consigns many of them to hell. Has there ever been another catastrophe in history that wreaked such havoc on us? Nothing we experience is as sad as our own sin.

Third, James knows that often our reaction to sin is the opposite of what it should be. “Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.” His point is not that laughter should be missing from the Christian life. Jesus promises that those who weep now will laugh. Psalm 126 celebrates the laughter of those Jews who came home from their exile in Babylon. God wants laughter to mark our lives, not be absent from them.

But you know that sometimes people find joy and laughter in their sin. That isn’t right. Drunk people laugh and carouse. The couple having an illicit affair may laugh over the thrill and danger of their trysts. The school bully may laugh at bloodying someone’s nose. Have we ever laughed when someone we considered our enemy–in politics, at work, in the neighborhood–suffered some of misfortune?

None of these things is defensible. Don’t celebrate sin. Mourning is the appropriate response to the damage it does to our lives.

Then the Lord lifts us up. “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” Have you ever noticed that this is a theme that runs through the whole Bible? We could even say that it is the theme of the Bible. God doesn’t lift up the high and mighty. He lifts up the low. He heals those who have tried every remedy and have nowhere else to turn. He feeds the hungry. He gives victory to those on the brink of defeat. He makes kings out of sheep farmers. Find a character in the Bible who is at the absolute end of all help, and you have a person in the perfect position for God to come and lift him up.

So it is when we are crushed by our guilt. That is the perfect position for us, because then God can come and cleanse us in his grace. Then we are just the kind of people he claims as his own children, the kind of people he describes in 1 Peter 2, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God.”

That is not because we have such impressive qualifications. It’s because God gives grace to the humble. He lifts up the lowly people who are not too proud to repent.

James 4:8a “Come near to God, and he will come near to you.”

I suppose that an invitation like this could sound scary, like being “invited” into the principal’s office at school. It’s not a place a student usually goes unless he’s in some kind of trouble. He knows it’s not going to be pleasant in there. When God invited Israel to gather around Mount Sinai to hear the 10 commandments, they were terrified by the smoke, the darkness, the lightning, and the booming voice of God. They were all too aware of their failure to keep the commandments the Lord was handing down.

But the invitation here is not like that. We can come near to God with confidence because we are living under his grace. The blood of Jesus opens up a way to God without fear because it cleanses us from our sins. When we come near to God, he comes rushing to us with his gifts, like the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20).

When we come near to God in baptism, God comes near with his Spirit to cleanse our hearts and claim us as his own children. When we come near to God in the words of Scripture, preached or taught or read, God comes near in promises that give peace, and hope, and love, and faith, and courage, and power. When we come near to God in the Savior’s supper, God comes near in the same body and blood that redeemed us to say again that all is forgiven. There is no sin that keeps us part.

You know that a frightened child wants nothing more than to have its parent near. Lovers want nothing more than their beloved near. And penitent believers want nothing more than to have their Savior near. He always has good things for us in hand when he comes.

James 4:7b “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”

When Christians see God and his grace clearly, they see the opposing side more clearly, too. The difference between right and wrong comes into clearer focus. But that doesn’t mean we have completely lost our taste for sin. A diabetic may understand that sweets are bad for him. That doesn’t mean his taste buds have stopped craving them.

God may be a gentleman in the way he deals with us, but the devil is anything but a gentleman. He doesn’t fight fair. He always attacks at our weakest points. If a short temper trips you up, expect the devil to litter your path with all kinds of irritations. If controlling your sexual passions has been a challenge, expect the devil to double the opportunities for everything from lust to extramarital affairs. If you have always been a little insecure about having enough money, the devil will be whispering in your ear, “You can’t afford to be giving anything away,” when someone needs your help, or “See, God isn’t going to take care of all your needs,” when the water heater gives out or the transmission dies on your car.

James wants us to know that when we give God the proper place over our lives and resist the devil, we are going to have a fight on our hands. But here’s a promise: “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” If the fight were just between you or me and the devil, then we would get KO’d in the opening seconds of the first round every time.

But we don’t face this fight alone. The God who left heaven to become one of us, and died on a cross to deliver us, now stands with us. There is a scene in the movie version of Prince Caspian (part of The Chronicles of Narnia, the series of children’s books by C.S. Lewis) in which the armies of the enemy are charging across a bridge. Suddenly, one of the little heroes of the book, a little girl named Lucy, appears at the other end of the bridge. As she stands there she draws a cute dagger out of its sheath, little bigger than a steak knife. The oncoming army stops dead in its tracks. They are not afraid of a little girl. Behind Lucy stands Aslan, the all-powerful lion who stands for Christ in this fantasy world. No army in heaven or on earth is a match for him.

When the God of all grace stands with you, no army in heaven or on earth is a match for you. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you, because he has no choice. You are living in the power of God’s grace.

James 4:7a “Submit yourselves, then, to God.”

Christians can get life wrong in a lot of ways. They can get loud and mean, greedy and selfish, sexually permissive and promiscuous, hypocritical and judgmental, just to name a few. In the early verses of chapter 4, James seems to have seen some of all of this going on in the people to whom he was writing. He doesn’t mince words confronting their bad behavior.

When we come to our senses again, God’s grace is there to forgive us and pick up the pieces. That leads to a different kind of life. James wants us to understand what that life will look like, a life lived in view of God’s grace. It begins with understanding our place, where we stand in relation to God.

God is not a tool we use to get what we want. He is not a wax nose we can bend and shape to look the way we want. Getting God right starts with understanding that he is on top. “Submit yourselves…to God.” Put yourselves under his will, under his direction, and under his care. Stop fighting him for who is going to be the boss.

He doesn’t force you to do this. How many times in your life have you looked at what God wants, and then decided to do what you wanted to do instead? He didn’t stop you, did he?

But he wants to spare us of the consequences of our foolishness, the damage we do to our families, our friends, our bodies, and ultimately our eternal souls. Since he is a gentleman, he doesn’t tackle us with his power, pin us to the ground, and twist our arm behind our back until we cry uncle. He woos us with his grace. He gives up his only Son to save us. He forgives us without end.

As this love wheedles its way into our hearts, we learn to let go. We learn to trust him, even if too often we still don’t understand him. It’s okay to let him be the boss, to give him the final say, because you know that in the end, he is going to get it right every time. If we are going to live our lives in view of God’s grace, we will submit to God. Under his gracious direction, we come out on top.

Mark 8:32-35 “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ he said. ‘You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”

You can’t pay Jesus to save you. There is no admission charge for following him. Salvation and forgiveness and faith are all gifts. He is giving it all away for free.

But once you have the gifts, there are consequences. When you follow someone, there are certain things you are bound to experience. When I was in college, one of my favorite high school teachers celebrated his 25^th anniversary in the ministry. Several of my classmates decided to attend the celebration, enough to require two cars. I was the driver of the second car. I was not familiar with the route we were taking, so I followed the first car.

In 1984 we had no GPS, no generic voice telling us where to turn. It turned out that the driver of the first car had a lead foot. If I wanted to follow, I had to go fast, really fast. When we drove through a speed trap, guess which car got pulled over? Not the lead. There were consequences for following my friends in the other car, right around a hundred of them if I remember.

There are consequences for following Jesus, a kind of “cost” if you will. “He must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Clearly, God doesn’t think about our lives the way we do. Is there something you are working for in life, something into which you are pouring your heart and soul?

Maybe it’s the career you have set your sights on. You have your education all mapped out, and you are dropping tens of thousands of dollars on getting there.

Maybe it’s the family you want to have. You are diligently looking for Mr. or Mrs. Right. Or you have been carefully nurturing your marriage, and you have not overlooked a single detail in how you raise your children. You have planned their every experience, so that you have this beautiful, tight-knit family, and everyone turns out a certain way.

Maybe you have poured hundreds of thousands of your hard-earned dollars into your house. You pay thousands more every year to tinker with the landscape, the flooring, the furniture, and the window treatments, because this is your dream home, your sanctuary, your escape.

What if Jesus were to come to you and say, “You know, I am in the business of saving people. Since you are following me, that puts you in the business, too, even if you aren’t a member of the clergy. I can’t explain all the details to you, because how a world of seven billion people all fit together in my plan is a little complex. But there are some people I want to save. For them to hear the gospel there is this chain of events that has to happen. Part of that chain of events involves you having to leave school and give up on your dream. It means that your spouse is going to die young, and you aren’t going to find another one, or one of your children is going to suffer a crippling accident. It means that your dream home is going to disappear into a sink hole, or be torn down so that the new state highway can go through.”

“I’m not trying to be mean. But remember, I am in the business of saving people, and you are following me now. I had to give up everything and die, too. If you are following me, you can expect to go to some of the same places I went along the way.”

Following Jesus through this life can be hard. It can take us places we would rather not go. But in the end, we end up with him. Losing our lives for him and his gospel will save them. No matter what the journey involves, it is worth it.

Mark 8:31-32 “He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.”

As Peter’s reaction reveals, this was not the way the disciples were thinking Jesus’ life should go. Who in their right mind would think this way? Jesus started teaching it here. He would repeat it a half dozen times leading up to the last days of his ministry. Sometimes he spoke as plainly and clearly. Sometimes it was thinly veiled in a parable. But Jesus made it clear that he was going to suffer, he was going to die, and he was going to rise again.

This was no accident. This was the plan, the one and only plan. “The Son of Man must suffer many things…” and be rejected, and die. It was necessary, because it fits the kind of Savior Jesus came to be. That challenged Peter’s thinking. That is still our challenge, because we don’t naturally think like God about the kind of Savior we need.

Jesus did not come to be the political deliverer. He was not there to make Israel a free nation, and bring down the hated Roman empire. As it turns out, the godless, heathen Roman empire actually fit into God’s plans going forward. Israel as a political entity didn’t fit the plan once Jesus finished his work there.

He still isn’t that kind of Savior. Politicians can invoke God and the Bible all they want. Jesus did not come to save us from high taxes or low wages. He did not come to save us from illegal immigration or unregulated gun ownership or environmental destruction. He did not come to make America great, and Christians will realize this when they start to think like God about his life.

There are a few other misconceptions we can chase here. Jesus did not come to save your career, your health, or your perfect family. Take an honest look at the way he lived his life. His closest followers abandoned him and he was literally executed for the work he was doing. He never married. His siblings and mother all misunderstood him, even considered him crazy at one point in time. He died at the age of 33. That’s probably not the career path, the family, or the lifespan we have been dreaming of.

Nor is he the moral activist Savior who came to save society from its vices. That’s not to say that he failed to express himself on the difference between right and wrong. His word is clear, and we ignore it at our peril. Jesus would not oppose people working for a good and just society. But he was bent on changing the individual. The only protest in which he ever participated was not staged in front of a government office or corrupt business. It was in the middle of the temple, at “church,” and it was a one-man show.

What kind of a person, then, needs a Savior who suffers, is rejected, dies, and rises again? People who know their sins. People who know that their sin isn’t a shrug-your-shoulders issue: we can blow it off because it’s normal. We are just like everybody else. No, we need a Savior like Jesus because each of us has created a mountain of spiritual debt that will kill us. There is no monthly installment plan to keep up with the interest and chip away at the principle. There is no bankruptcy court to restructure our sin-debt and make it more manageable. We owe the whole thing. We owe with our blood. We owe for all eternity.

That takes a special kind of Savior, one who has the ability to pay the whole debt we owe. That’s why it is no accident when he suffers, is rejected, dies and rises again. It is the satisfaction of our debt, the promise of our forgiveness. It is a gift, a sacrifice, an idea that only a God who is pure love and bottomless grace could have conceived.

The whole world is, “Hurt me, and I will make you pay.” The God who sent us Jesus, “You hurt me, but I will pay. I will suffer your hell and die your death.” On this day Jesus began to introduce a new way of thinking to his disciples. He was teaching them to think like God about the kind of Savior they needed.

Today he challenges us to think like God about his life, too, and why it had to end, it had to, the way it did.