2 Timothy 2:8 “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead…”

The Christian faith is more than learning a set of facts. It is more than passing some academic tests. I have often told my confirmation classes that I am not concerned they will ever forget the central teaching of Christianity: “Jesus died on the cross to pay for all your sins.” I am more concerned about the place that truth will hold in their hearts, and the impact that truth will have on their lives.

In the last letter he ever wrote, so far as we know, the Apostle Paul urges his faithful friend Timothy, “Remember Jesus Christ.” Paul was not afraid that Timothy would forget who Jesus was. He is saying, “Here is something worth thinking about all the time. Here is a teaching, a story, a person who will change your life, and change it for the better. Here is the key to keeping your faith alive.”

What do you like to think about? There are many ideas competing for our attention, If someone cuts you off in traffic or you catch someone lying to you at work, your mind may be occupied with anger. If you have bad news from the doctor, or threatening news from the weatherman, your head and heart may fill with worries. If you turn on the TV to numb your mind after a long day at work, there is a ton of garbage available to be dumped into it: lust, violence, and disrespect to name a few.

None of this is good. None of this is compatible with “Love God,” and “Love your neighbor.” But they can be appealing in their own twisted way. This should not surprise us. “The sinful mind” (that is, the kind of fleshly mind we are all born with) “is hostile to God,” Paul writes in Romans. “It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.” Eventually, this kind of thinking can land us outside of faith altogether.

Paul and Timothy had to wrestle with their own ungodly thoughts. This letter was Paul’s last. He was in a Roman prison for the second time, and this time he was not going to get out alive. He seemed to sense that. And he knew that his situation wasn’t encouraging for a younger pastor like Timothy. When pastors and missionaries are getting their heads chopped off for preaching the the gospel, it doesn’t make recruiting others for ministry easier. The apostle encouraged Timothy: “Endure hardship like a good soldier.” That’s easy to say, but where were they supposed to find the strength to do it?

“Remember Jesus Christ.” “Focus on our Savior,” Paul urges. “Think about him.” This more than a diversion. Years ago, when my wife and I were getting ready to have our first child, we went to childbirth classes. One way to help mom through the pain of labor is to pick a focal point–any object or place in the room–and concentrate. It’s a diversion, a distraction, to keep you from thinking about the pain.

Jesus is not just a distraction. There is real help for heart and head here. Remember that Jesus Christ is “raised from the dead.” There are two things to think about in those words. First, in order to be raised, Jesus had to die. He knew what it was like to suffer as we do. He even suffered one thing no one reading this has suffered yet: death. His death was not an unfortunate accident or the natural result of celebrating too many birthdays. Again, Paul reminds the Romans: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He died to save us. He died to forgive us. He died to reconcile and restore us to God.

That itself is reason to be brave, patient, and optimistic. But there’s more. Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. More than that, he reigns. After he rose from the grave, he rose to heaven where he rules the universe. From there he promises to pull what’s left of our own decayed bodies out of their graves, renew and restore them, and fill them with the same kind of glory that oozes from every pore of his body now.

If that is so, what is the worst that people who persecute you can do to you–kill you? What is the worst that can come from your health problems or life’s storms, whether literal or figurative–an early death? What’s the worst thing God’s forgiven children will ever get from the sins that trouble their consciences–a casket with their name on it, a funeral in their honor? What of that? Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, and so will we!

Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead. This still gives us strength to endure.

Mark 4:40 “He said to the disciples, ‘Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?’”

There is a tone of accusation in Jesus’ question to the disciples who endured the storm on the Sea of Galilee with him in the boat. He isn’t merely asking them why they experienced the emotion of fear. That, I suppose, is clear enough. He is accusing them of being cowards in the Greek. That is a moral failing, not just an emotional one. Deadly storm or not, Jesus expected more of them.

If you are like me, your sympathies may lie more with the disciples on this issue at first. Their reaction didn’t seem so extreme considering the circumstances. We may wonder how Jesus could have expected more of them when the boat was about to sink.

The answer lies outside the story. They heard Jesus speak so many promises. They watched him perform so many miracles. By this time they had seen him command demons, heal the sick, and raise the dead. He had promised to make them fishers of men. Was he just going to let them die without fulfilling his promise? Did they believe his promises or not? Did they believe he was the one he claimed to be or not?

The words he spoke had the power to stop this storm. Didn’t they have the power to change their hearts as well? Didn’t they have the power to convince them that yes, Jesus cared, even if it looked like they were about to drown?

 Jesus’ words, his promises, are still the secret to maintaining our trust in him, though it looks as if our problems are going to sink and drown us. Would he lay down his life to pay for our sins if he intended to hurt us? Would he suffer all he did to save us and then decide to stop working for our good, when it costs him nothing additional to offer his continued help and care? Is he less powerful now that he has returned to heaven?

Jesus has promised to save you, forgive you, and raise you to eternal life. He promises to be with you, to make you strong, to rule the universe for your good. In short, he promises to love you. You know that he does. Have faith. We have every reason to believe that he cares.

Mark 4:39 “He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’ Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.”

If what Jesus did hadn’t worked, perhaps the disciples would have been concerned about his sanity. Here he is, talking to the storm. It isn’t a person. It has no ears. Jesus isn’t dealing with an unruly teenager whose party got out of control, so now he acts as the stern parent.

It reminds one of the earliest chapters of the Bible. The Maker of the Universe speaks to the world he is making, and things happen. Light, and land, and plants and animals appear. The surface and the skies and the stars get themselves organized.

You see, God’s word is more than an intriguing set of ideas, a collection of timeless truths, a convincing argument in a spiritual debate, or a Jewish take on ancient Middle Eastern history. It is a power. It is a force. It accomplishes what it says.

So we see with the storm. The wind died down. Mark’s Greek pictures something quite dramatic. The winds didn’t blow softer and softer until there was just a gentle breeze. No, the winds stopped dead. One moment you have the kind of driving, damaging winds that get our weathermen to interrupt your regular programming. The next moment there is a dead calm. The air is still. One moment the waves are so high they are breaking over the sides of the boat and filling it with water. The next instant Jesus and his disciples are floating on a sea of glass. This was no natural passing of the storm. This is the power of every word God speaks.

What, then, does this tell us about the man who had been sleeping in the boat? The disciples asked the question, too: “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him.” That can be only one person. This isn’t a great prophet requesting God’s help and getting a miracle, like Moses when the Red Sea parted. This is the one who gives the command directly, “Quiet! Be Still!” The wind and the waves obey him. The one they called their teacher, the one you call your Savior, is the God who controls your world.

He still controls your world. The storm you fear so much, that has you feeling so helpless, that has you wondering whether Jesus cares, no matter what kind of storm it is, is still a storm he can turn off in an instant. He promises, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” He sits at his Father’s right hand in glory. He rules all things for the good of his church. That’s you! Maybe it looks as though everything is out of control. But Jesus still controls every moment you live, every experience you have.

Sometimes the storms will soak you to the bone. You will get a mouth full of sea water in the process. But Jesus is still in control, and he will not let you be lost.

John 8:32 “The truth will set you free.”

If there is one idea, one concept, associated with the United States of America, it is freedom. Years ago I had a lengthy conversation with a woman from another country who wondered why the United States didn’t have stronger social programs. Why was there such resistance to socialized medicine? Why didn’t the government mandate more maternity and paternity leave? Why should college students have to pay for their own tuition? Didn’t these things make life better for everyone? Wouldn’t we all feel more safe and secure?

Perhaps she was right about feeling safe and secure. I didn’t debate the relative advantages and disadvantages of the government programs for which she was advocating. But I could point out that the great vision that captured most Americans’ hearts and minds was freedom. Our national anthem doesn’t celebrate “the land of the secure and home of the safe.” It calls our country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Freedom also lies close to the heart of the Christian faith. It is, we should remember, a different kind of freedom than that enshrined in our political documents. It is not the liberty promoted in The Declaration of Independence or protected by the U.S. Constitution. It is not a guarantee that we will be able to speak as we wish, worship as we wish, or gather with whom we wish without being molested. It does not protect us from unreasonable intrusion and treatment by our criminal justice system. It is a freedom the Christian enjoys, that cannot be taken away, even if an oppressive government denies us all the freedoms of life and citizenship we have come to expect.

Jesus provides this indestructible freedom through “the truth.” This isn’t truth in the abstract. He isn’t promising that correct knowledge will free you and empower you to make correct decisions. That may often be true, but these are neither the truth nor the freedom with which he is concerned.

Nor is he commenting on the importance of telling the truth as opposed to obscuring it with lies. It may be true that telling lies constructs a prison of our own making around us. The more we lie, the more fear of exposure imprisons us. Keeping our story straight becomes increasingly difficult. Telling the truth may free us from the trap our lies have created, but Jesus has something else in mind when he promises, “The truth will set you free.”

The truth Jesus promotes is the gospel of grace. The freedom he offers liberates us from sin and death. In his next breath he told the Jews to whom he was speaking, “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” But the truth will set you free. It does more than uncover a path to freedom for us to navigate on our own. It picks us up and carries us to freedom in its own arms. It delivers us. In the opening verses of his Revelation, the Apostle John praises Jesus because he loves us “and has freed us from our sins by his blood.” The writer of Hebrews assures us Jesus became a man to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” This gospel not only sets us free. It is a gift, a blessing God provides for free.

As American Christians celebrate Independence Day, we thank God for the freedoms that allow us to live our faith and share it with relative safety and ease. But even if these freedoms fail, Jesus’ truth has set our souls free. No government or power can take that freedom away.

Mark 4:37-38  “A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, ‘Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?’”

Radio personality and consumer advice expert Clark Howard (now retired) coined the phrase, “customer no-service.” It refers to the lack of help on the other end of the phone. I’m sure you are familiar with this scenario: You dial the help number, and you get a pre-recorded voice. It provides a menu of choices for different situations. Each number takes you to another menu of pre-recorded choices. Some of those take you to still another set. Where does it end?

Sometimes you talk to a live person, but it is clear they are speaking to you from the other side of some ocean. And they aren’t really listening to you. They are working from a script. Maybe you feel you were making more progress with the robo-voice and the numbers on your phone’s keypad.

There’s nothing worse than being put on hold for the rest of your day, consigned to a purgatory where you have to listen to hours of elevator music while you wait for a person to come back on the line. Does anyone care about my problem? Is customer service actually going to help?

Maybe you have felt the same way about your prayers. You dial up the Lord for help, but it seems as though your request is met with silence. Jesus’ disciples got to that point fighting a storm that was about to sink their boat. Desperate for help, they ask, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

We never expect Jesus to ignore us. His lack of attention may have surprised the disciples even more. This little boat trip had been his idea in the first place! Have you ever gone on a trip your children were so excited to make that they were already in their seats buckled in while you were still loading the car? Jesus is sitting in the boat, waiting for his disciples to get going.

Do your troubles have that kind of feel sometimes? “Lord, I didn’t do something wrong to end up in this situation. You put me here.” Relationships can work that way. In my ministry I have tried to serve people who fought against the very help they were asking for. They pressured me to do things that weren’t right. And they didn’t go away. “Lord, you put them here. What am I supposed to do?”

Maybe, like the twelve disciples, following Jesus has put you in a place of real physical danger. You might think that Jesus would be quick to come to the rescue then. You wouldn’t expect him to ignore you in your time of need.

But there are other things he has for us to learn. Sometimes our experience, our skill, and our strength are our downfall. The disciples don’t go to Jesus for help immediately. They try to fight this themselves. If anyone on earth knew what to do in a storm on the Sea of Galilee, it was these men. Most of them were fishermen. The sea was their life. This was the very kind of boat they sailed. This was the lake where they had made their living.

When they do turn to Jesus for help, their attitude isn’t confident trust or humble submission. There is a tone of accusation in their voice, implying Jesus doesn’t care. They have lost hope. They are full of despair. They are convinced they are going to drown.

Does it ever seem like Jesus is sleeping in the back of your boat, ignoring you and the storm you are fighting? We want to see his power bailing us out, cleaning up the mess, setting everything right in dramatic fashion. We pray. We plead. Nothing.

We don’t consider that our greater need may be to experience how weak and helpless we are. We sing about it in “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” “Little ones to him belong. They are weak but he is strong.” We can read examples of it in a dozen Bible stories. We hear the words directly from Jesus’ mouth. “Apart from me you can do nothing.” But nothing drives the point home like the school of experience. There are no lessons we learn better than the ones we actually live.

And the “I-can-do-it-all-by-myself” spirit is nowhere more dangerous than it is in our spiritual lives. It may be cute when toddlers and preschoolers are trying to be like their parents. It is deadly to faith when children of God think, “I’ve got the power to conquer this sin,” or “I can cope with what life throws at me without growing deeper in prayer and Scripture,” or “my skills and abilities alone will get me through anything.”

Only Jesus saves. He forgives sins, and he alone. He rescues us from the messes we create, and the ones that seem to be foisted upon us. He isn’t sleeping. He is waiting for us to set aside our self-reliance and put our trust in him.

Yes, Jesus cares if you drown. If it seems like he isn’t helping, it’s not because he is ignoring you. He may be letting you see, really see, how much you need him after all.

Mark 3:1 “Another time he went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath.”

If you know anything about the Pharisees, you probably see the issue for them here already. Healing people is doctor’s work. The Sabbath law forbids people to work. From their point of view, it was better to let this man live another day with a crippled hand. That would be the obedient thing to do. That (they thought) would make God happy. It was better to do nothing, to let this man continue to suffer, than to do medical work on the Sabbath.

Jesus frames the question another way. “Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, ‘Stand up in front of everyone.’ Then Jesus asked them, ‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ But they remained silent.” Have you ever heard of a sin of omission? It’s a sin in which we “do nothing.” We fail to show love to our neighbor who needs it. Sometimes, even doing nothing is doing something. It is sinning against my neighbor, who needs me to reach out and love him. It is an evil work for which God may judge me.

If God were going to set aside a certain day a week for focusing on his grace, a day for nurturing our relationship with him, what kind of behavior do you suppose he would be expecting? What would he want his people to do? To use Jesus’ words, would he want us “to do good, or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” Would he want us to help our neighbor or neglect him? No one answered Jesus’ question, but there is only one way to answer it. The Lord of the Sabbath wants his day, and every day, to be a day for doing good, not for doing nothing.

So Jesus healed the man. “He looked around at them in anger, and deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.”

The Sabbath laws don’t apply to us in quite the same way they did in Jesus’ day. We usually worship on a Sunday, not a Saturday, to honor Jesus’ resurrection. It is a matter of New Testament freedom. We are free to choose our day of worship, though not free to neglect worship altogether. Here are a few take-aways from Jesus’ teaching about the Sabbath.

One, God’s laws are never arbitrary rules. They never hurt us. They always bless us and benefit us in some way. If they ever involve pain, that is due to our sin-sickness, not to God’s law. What God said about “honor your father and mother” could apply to all his commands, “…that it may go well with you and you may enjoy a long life on the earth.” Any application of God’s laws that gets in the way of our genuine, spiritual well-being and love for our neighbor must have problems with it somewhere.

Two, we will always make applications of the Bible to our current lives, but we need to be careful not to lift our applications so high that we put them on the same level as God’s own commands. There are many ways to love your children, your spouse, or your neighbor, but they won’t be the same for everyone. Whatever we do, the important thing is that we love God and our neighbor.

Three, thinking God is pleased with us because we are so skilled at keeping his law always gets us into spiritual trouble. It turns us into legalists. It makes us more concerned about external correctness than love for others. It substitutes personal performance for trust and love as the heart of our relationship with God. It is the reason the Pharisees could obsess about living the right way and completely neglect people who needed their help or sympathy. An honest comparison of our lives with God’s law always exposes our sinful shortcomings. An honest comparison of our lives with God’s law always leads us to see that we need Jesus.

Four, Jesus is the Son of Man, the Lord of the Sabbath. He is the God who established a day of rest. But more than that, he is the God who invites us to come to him and find our rest. He has carried our sin-burden, taken responsibility for our guilt, as though he was the one who committed our sins. He has paid the penalty for our sins and set us free from the debt we owed. There is nothing more for us to do for God to love and forgive us. In Jesus, we find rest for our souls.

Rest for our souls: more than anything, that is what the Lord of the Sabbath wants.

Mark 2:23-26 “One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath? He answered, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for the priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’”

The Pharisees reaction may seem odd to us. It’s not that they believed the disciples were “stealing” this grain. The law of Moses allowed you to take a little meal’s worth of grain from the edges of the field next to the road. In 30 A.D. there weren’t truck stops at every exit along the road with overcooked hotdogs and bags of chips inside. Part of being a member of God’s nation was letting your neighbor get a bite to eat at the edge of your field. It was considered godly hospitality. The next time you were traveling, you might want to borrow a few bites of barley from someone’s else’s field.

The issue for the Pharisees was, “Aren’t the disciples sinning by working on the Sabbath?” You may know that the Pharisees had added 613 of their own laws to God’s commandments. We might call them “applications.” God had framed the Sabbath in simple terms in the Bible. Take a day of rest. Everybody gets a day off work, even mom in the kitchen. Use the time, at least some of it, to get together for worship. That was as much as the Lord had to say on the topic.

Years later, the Pharisees added their official “applications” so that people would know how to keep God’s law. Since the Bible didn’t define “work,” the Pharisees defined it for you. If you carried a teaspoon full of grain back to your house from a field, that was small enough not to be considered work. But any more than that would be considered sinful harvesting on the Sabbath. You could eat a radish on the Sabbath, but you were warned against dipping it in salt, because if you left it in the salt too long that could be pickling the radish, and pickling was considered work. You could spit on a rock on the Sabbath, but you weren’t supposed to spit on the dirt, because that made mud, and mud was used as mortar for bricks, and making mortar for bricks was considered work. I’m not making this stuff up.

If you asked the Pharisees, “Why did the Lord give us the Sabbath?” they would answer, “So that we can keep God happy with us by what we do.” The more careful you were, the more you deprived yourself for him, the better they believed your relationship with God to be. As they saw it, after the first mouthful of grain or so, the disciples were over the line into sinful harvesting of that field. They were breaking the Sabbath.

Jesus saw things differently. He doesn’t argue about silly definitions of “work.” He doesn’t bring up the Sabbath at all. He objects to the Pharisees’ concept of how God’s law works. The law was not meant to make you hungry, or keep you away from life’s necessities. It wasn’t God’s method for inflicting pain.

When David and his fighting men showed up at God’s house without any food, the priest didn’t send them away hungry. He shared the special bread with them. This isn’t what the law said to do. And David and his men would not likely have starved in a single day. But the priest understood what the law was supposed to do: provide food for the priests. He also understood what it was not supposed to do: prevent other people from having food. So he was not condemned for giving David the bread.

This is why Jesus frames the issue this way: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The Sabbath was intended to give tired bodies a day of much needed rest. More than that, it provided rest for the souls of God’s people and nurtured their relationship with him.

Even in the Old Testament, when God’s people gathered for worship and read Moses, they heard about the Lord, the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. They sang in the psalms about the God who does not treat us as our sins deserve. As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our sins from us. The word of the prophets pointed them to the coming Messiah, who would be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. By his wounds we are healed.

This is the same Jesus we gather to worship today. We do not go to church to try to impress him. We go to receive his forgiveness and grace. Sunday may be a different day on the weekly calendar than the Sabbath, but it is still a day when the Lord of the Sabbath supplies our soul’s true need.

John 17:17-18 “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”

“Sanctify” is one of those five-dollar theological words that even Christians often don’t understand. “To make holy” is a basic definition, but “holy” means so much more than “moral” or “pure” or “lacking sin.”

When God makes something holy, he sets it apart for his special possession and use. We Christians are sanctified only because we are justified. By his perfect life and innocent death on the cross Jesus removed the sin that stood between us and God. He wiped our sin off our record so that God wouldn’t have reason to keep us away and condemn us. Jesus opened the way for us to belong to God once again by purchasing our forgiveness with the sacrifice of himself in our place.

God actually took possession of us personally when he called us to faith. Only one tool could make that happen, to turn us from unbelief to belief, to change us from people who were afraid of God, or resented him, or found him distasteful and unappealing, into people who trust him with our whole heart and soul. Logical arguments and the best of human science and research can’t do it. Great big entertainment spectacles and overwhelming emotional appeals can’t do it. Careful application of sociological principles and clever marketing can’t do it.

“Sanctify them by the truth,” Jesus says. “Your word is truth.” God’s words on a page, or preached from a pulpit, or wedded to water, wheat, and wine are the one thing that have the power to make us his own or keep us his own. When God has us, when our hearts belong to him, we are his personal possession because we have faith. Then we are not only justified, guilt-free, forgiven children of God. We are sanctified, holy children of God set apart from the world that does not believe what we believe or love the Savior that we love.

And God has set us apart for his possession and special use. “As you have sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.” Jesus prayer for you here, or God’s answer to it, give your life meaning and purpose. You have a mission, Christian. This is why Jesus said earlier, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world.” That would certainly make us safe, if God simply took us out of this world.

But then who would show your neighbors what living as a Christian really looks like–not sinless perfection or super-human niceness, but humble admission of our brokenness and genuine appreciation for God’s forgiving grace? Who would invite them to come and see what Jesus has done for them? Who would raise our children and pass the word on to the next generation? Who would pray for missionaries and bring the offerings that make it possible for us to send them? How could a lost world be found? How would we have ever been found?

Jesus prays for us to be set apart, to be sanctified, so that he can send us just as he was sent. That means that your faith and service is the answer to Jesus’ prayers.

John 17:14-15 “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.”

Hate is a strong word. Does the world really hate those who follow Jesus? Doesn’t it announce its respect for Jesus as a friend to the poor, and the outcast, and the morally questionable? Doesn’t it love to quote Jesus, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” or “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone?”

Don’t be fooled. When the Washington Post asked a Harvard professor if faith groups were too absent in the war on poverty, he stated that organized religion has been using all their resources on issues regarding sexual morality. “This is the most obvious point in the world.” It’s true, Christians are concerned about sexual morals. But what Christian institutions spend on fighting poverty dwarfs what is spent on morality. If just one Christian charity, World Vision, were a country (not a charity but a country), its spending on poverty would rank it twelfth in the world. What that one charity spends fighting poverty is about 10 times all the donations to all the pro-life or pro-family organizations in the country.

When this was pointed out in a response to the Washington Post, one commenter replied, “Yes, but evangelical Christians often expect the people they help to listen to their message.” The nerve of those Christians–telling the people they help that God loves them and sent Jesus to pay for all their sins! The world hates us for the word Jesus has given us, whether his word defining right and wrong, or the word that asks us to believe we are sinners saved by God’s grace.

So Jesus prays for our safety, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” Sometimes being a Christian can be physically dangerous. You know how Jesus’ 12 disciples ended up. Only one died a natural death. I know a Christian woman who had a husband so jealous of our faith that he mocked her as “Mrs. Jesus” for years. He eventually became violent because she spent an hour or two in church each week.

But Jesus’ prayer is really more for the safety of our souls. “Protect them from the evil one.” If the devil can’t lure us to his side with his bribes; if he can’t entice us with promises of pleasure; then he wants to intimidate us with his threats. He is the prince of this world, after all. He has more people on his side than on Christ’s. Christianity may be the biggest world religion, but it is still embraced by less than a third of the world’s inhabitants. The number of Christians in the land where we live grows steadily smaller every year.

So being a Christian is going to cost you. To part of the world you appear stupid and naive, believing the nonsense about morals, and an all-powerful Spirit in the sky whom atheist Richard Dawkins ridicules as “the flying spaghetti monster.” To an ever growing part of the world you are a hater, a bigot, for believing what you do about good behavior, or believing that Jesus is the only way to heaven.

So Jesus prays for you. He prays for your safety, to protect you from the evil one. He is praying for your faith, your salvation, your eternity, your relationship with him.

About 30 years ago a young pastor came to his first wedding rehearsal blissfully ignorant of what awaited him. He had poured himself all week into crafting the best sermon for the couple he could manage. Then the wedding party arrived. In a few minutes it became clear that mothers on both sides had their own agenda. The order of things in the ceremony was all wrong. The positioning of the bridesmaids and groomsmen was all wrong. The bridesmaids should pause after each step. No, the bridesmaids should pick up the pace. On it went. It was exhausting.

Criticisms about the service and the sermon found their way back to the pastor even before the reception was over. Feeling weary and defeated, he dragged back into his office about 9 p.m. Saturday night knowing he still had a long night ahead of him. He still had to write a sermon. On his desk was a card with some Bible passages and a note from the soloist: “Pastor, last night at the rehearsal I realized how hard it must be to be the new kid on the block. I just want you to know that I appreciate all your work and that I’m praying for you.” Someone cared and was praying for him. It was like a long, cool drink of water in a dry and parched desert.

Do people ever tell you they are praying for you? It’s always appreciated, but sometimes their words may not strike us as a deeply moving, desperately needed message. All the same, there may be few greater ways to express genuine love for each other.

The greatest expression of Jesus’ love comes from the cross and the empty tomb. But in Jesus’ prayers for us we find another little gospel gem. We know he loves you and me, because Jesus prays for us. He prays for our protection from the haters set on destroying our souls.