Wednesday Night Devotions: 1 Peter 2:11-12

Lately when I've been here, I've been focusing on working through one chapter of scripture: 1 Peter 2. Four weeks ago, we looked at the first three verses, and one thing we learned was how important it is for us to be challenged and forced to really think and ask the hard questions when we're sharing our spiritual thoughts with each other, even here at prayer meeting. If we don't do the hard work, we can't grow. And all of us need to grow. God wants to transform us, not leave us behind. God wants us to walk with him, and a walk means progressing forward. Two weeks ago, we looked at the next set of verses, and we learned that we're called to be the one holy temple and royal priesthood of God on the earth. All of us are responsible to be together a holy union where people can come to experience the glory of God in Christ and to receive the power of the Spirit. We don't have this kind of privilege and responsibility by birthright. We're sinners called from all walks of life. But now we form one temple, and we have to let God be manifest in our midst. We're called to offer up our praise and service to God as a priestly sacrifice, and to give thanks to God, because it's only as members of the body of Christ that we can be royal priests, not on our own.

Too often, all of these lessons pass us by. Too often, we Christians are content to live on milk for life and to take our limited spiritual food through the IV of broken-down devotionals. Too often, we fear stepping outside of our traditional comfort zones, and we let our complacency and our ways of doing church get in the way of maturing spiritually. Too often, we Christians make it almost impossible to experience God among us. Too often, we get in Christ's way with our division, our squabbling, our rabbit trails, our personal agendas, and our laziness. Too often, we reflect the secular rather than the sacred, instead of reflecting the sacred to the secular. Too often, we model our priestly service on Cain's offering instead of Abel's – we don't give God the firstfruits of our praise, the best of our service, but just toss him a few cheap afterthoughts and expect God to thank us for it as if we were doing him a favor. And too often, we forget the grace that saved us and look down on those who are where we all were – and especially those who commit the apparently unforgivable offense of doing sins that look different than our favorite sins! Too often, we forget that we're both unpolished blocks and the temple of God's presence for all the world.

We need to keep those lessons fresh in our minds. They're part of what God is teaching us through Peter. We sometimes think that we can just drop in on a passage of scripture without reading what else the author has been saying up to that point, and we can get into trouble by doing that. This week, remembering what came before it, we can pick up where we left off and see just how much Peter has packed into the next two verses:

“Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” [[1 Peter 2:11-12]]

Peter has already been talking about our identity as far as Christ is concerned. Being in Christ means being royalty in the kingdom and a priesthood in the kingdom and a temple in the kingdom. Note: 'in the kingdom'. What about 'in the world'? What does being in Christ mean for our position in society? Look at the words Peter uses. 'Foreigners'. 'Exiles'. See, our citizenship isn't really in the world, not our first allegiance. When we look at the world around us, we aren't supposed to think of it as 'home' anymore. This world, as it now is, is not our home. It isn't our native country. We aren't citizens of this world in this age. We're citizens of God's monarchy. Or, as Paul says in Philippians 3:20, “our citizenship is in heaven”, not in earthly places. And, he continues, from heaven will come a Savior who will take our lowly bodies and make them glorious bodies like the one he already has.

So this world isn't our home, and our citizenship isn't here. We live in this world as nomads. We wander to and fro, passing through. Our investments aren't here, or at least they shouldn't be. Our allegiance isn't here, or at least it shouldn't be. We are every much as foreign here as someone who lives in this country on a temporary visa. We aren't the natives. We're ambassadors from somewhere else. And an ambassador of the kingdom of Jesus the sinless 'last Adam' is not supposed to live like a citizen of the kingdom of the fallen 'first Adam'.

Now, it's easy to misread what Peter is saying here. When I say “this world”, I don't mean “this planet”, the earth that God created. I do not mean that we don't belong with our feet on solid dirt. I do not mean that our goal is to leave our bodies behind and live forever as spirits with harps on clouds somewhere way, way out there, far away from this place. No, that's not what we're talking about. If we mean by 'heaven' the place where God is now, somewhere separate from the earth we're currently living on, then 'heaven' is not our end goal. The Bible teaches us that we will be resurrected, raised bodily from the dead when our spirits return to what remains of our bodies. (After all, we just quoted Paul saying that Jesus will “transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” [Philippians 3:21] – the body that was lowly ceases to be lowly and becomes glorious, so clearly what gets discarded is the lowly status, not the body itself!) That's why, while the Greeks and Romans who rejected the idea of resurrection sometimes cremated their dead, early Jews and Christians buried their bodies in the ground. It was the people of God's way of bearing witness to the world that there's no need to 'burn their bridges' with the body, because God isn't done with it yet! So even though they knew that God can raise a person up as easily from scattered ashes as he can from a skeleton or even a mummy, they wanted to use even death as a chance to point the world to what their real hope was.

So 'escape' to heaven is not the idea that we're working with in the Bible. We can see that plainly at the end of Revelation. The New Jerusalem comes down to earth. The presence of God will be on the earth forever. Earth is not something God will abandon, and it isn't something we will abandon. There will be no more divide between the world where God lives and the world where we will; all will be brought together as one. What God has in store is a healing for the whole earth, a redemption from the fall. God has given us some glimpses into earth-as-it-will-be, and one of our responsibilities right now is to be good stewards of the earth and to help it and everything in it become more like what's to come; our job is to bring a taste of the future 'heaven on earth' into the present world. So when I say, “This world is not our home”, I don't mean that this earth is not our home. I mean that worldly society as it currently exists, in this 'present evil age' (as Paul describes it in Galatians 1:4), is not the society we're made for in Christ. When it comes to that world, we're passing through as pilgrims. And when that world comes to an end at the Last Judgment, “we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken”, says the author of Hebrews (12:28).

So here, we're 'foreigners' and 'exiles', we're 'pilgrims' and 'strangers', we're 'aliens'. Because of that, we have no reason to conform. Fitting in is not part of the Christian job description! People who are citizens of 'this world' give in to their sinful desires. Christians are foreigners who should not. Peter insists that we should “abstain from sinful desires”. If we really did that, wouldn't it be a lot easier to tell the difference between the people of the kingdom and the people of the world? Peter also says that these sinful desires “wage war against your soul”. Our yearnings to sin are not something neutral. They are not something we can establish a nice working relationship with. They are not our friends. In the war that wages in each of us, they are enemy combatants. They are the devil's footsoldiers firing away at our spiritual health, our relationship with God. Show the devil no mercy! Don't concede an inch of ground in your hearts to sinful desires. Don't take the free sample. Don't think that a little sip won't hurt. Sin is like a can of Pringles: once you pop, you just can't stop! Sin is intentionally addictive, and it results in soul decay. That one taste is a dangerous risk. That one taste is not abstinence. And abstinence from giving in to sinful desires is exactly what God calls for, and nothing less. Taking the 'a little bit won't hurt' approach to sin makes no sense. Not if we believe what Peter says about sin waging war against our souls. Who plays flirtatious games with the enemy army? Sampling sin is like letting an enemy soldier put a bullet through you because, after all, it's just one, and it's such a little thing. No one in their right mind would take that approach to any soldier who wages a war against our bodies. Why would we take that approach to what wages war against our souls?

But that approach is exactly the approach taken by many of those who don't believe. Some will relish certain sinful desires, because they don't see the war. They think the enemy soldiers in their souls are on their sides. When they look at their bleeding wounds from messing with sin, they blow them off as decorative! That's the way Peter's audience used to look at the world. They were in sin, and they were in sin deep. But now, Peter says they shouldn't even so much as dabble in it. It's a complete and total 180º.

Peter's advice is this: live good lives among the pagans, or among the non-believers. I think there are two really instructive things in those simple words. The first one is easiest to miss: “live … among the pagans”! There have been so many groups of Christians throughout history who have thought, “If only we could withdraw to our own place, we'd be free from this corruption. If only we had a place where just Christians lived, then we wouldn't have bad influences. We should get out of the bad part of town and spend our time with our new society, the church. If we associate with church people, if our friends are church people, if we work with church people, if we go grocery shopping among church people, if our restaurants are owned by church people, then we'll only have to deal with church people – nice, clean, decent folks we can trust. God's going to judge the world soon enough, and so we'd better withdraw now so that when the hammer falls and makes a big splat, we don't mess up our nice clean shirts with the splatter.” That's the way some Christians think, if they're being honest about it.

Back closer to Peter's time, there was a Jewish group called the Essenes – the ones responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls – who took the same sort of approach and pulled out into the wilderness to live together and wait for God to end the messiness around them. Our county is home to another group with many of the same tendencies: the Amish. But Peter says to live among the pagans. Christians are called to be separate (morally, that is), but not to be separatists. Separating ourselves that way is not a fully Christ-like life, because it misses out on the Incarnation. No, we're supposed to be living among the pagans. We're on a mission to them. Our whole lives are supposed to be caught up in this mission. You know what logically comes before being the hands and feet of Christ among people? The 'among people' part. We have to be very careful that we don't create our own little bubble of a Christian subculture and go live inside the bubble. Christ came to burst our bubbles.

But just saying to 'live among the pagans' isn't enough. The pagans are living among the pagans, and I don't see God patting them on the back for it. So why would God be happy with a person who refers to himself as a 'Christian' and lives among the pagans, but lives a pagan life? What God says here is that we should “live good lives among the pagans”. Remember faith, hope, and love? Remember mercy and grace? Those aren't just fancy church words. They're life words. They're the words for our lives among the pagans. Peter says that we should be living such godly lives that, even when the pagans accuse us of all sorts of nasty things (and, he says, they will), the charges won't stick. Their falsehood will be obvious. There's no guarantee that the pagans we live among won't continue to accuse us of every form of socially unacceptable behavior under the sun, but we can at least live so that no one can say that they have a point! People will see the way we live, and anyone with half an open mind will be able to see that we're motivated by love and grace and want to be a positive influence on the world, almost like we're salt and light or something. That's the way it's supposed to be, at least. That's the idea. God wants us to be mixed in all throughout the world as a living, breathing witness to what he can do with a human life. God wants our holiness to be visible – not so we can take credit for being righteous, like the Pharisees were fond of trying, but so that God can get credit for his holiness rubbing off on us. So how are we living among the pagans? Are we really living in abstinence from everything that wars against our spiritual health? Are we living intentionally in the midst of those who need to meet Jesus? Are we showing Christ's character undeniably in our lives – his holiness, his compassion, his truth, his love, his mercy, his grace? And, most of all, are we doing it all to see God glorified?

Wednesday Night Devotions: 1 Peter 2:4-10

Two weeks ago, the last time I had the privilege of sharing some devotional thoughts with you, we talked about three verses from the second chapter of Peter's letter written to Christians in scattered communities in what's now Turkey. We learned a lot from those three verses. They challenged us to make sure that we're spiritually mature enough to chomp down on a wide variety of healthy spiritual food, and not just to settle for easy-to-digest milk that we can sip without any work of our own. Spiritual maturity is something we're all commanded to strive after, no matter what physical age we are. We can learn to chew and digest spiritual steak. And that challenges us to ask ourselves what kind of spiritual nourishment we're getting in our Bible studies and in our devotionals. Are we still working with the same kind of basics that we would have used a decade ago? If so, then we probably haven't stretched ourselves very much since then. We should remember to ask ourselves the hard questions. We should force ourselves to think. There's no retiring from spiritual maturity. There's no retiring from getting deeper into the things of God, even if it may be hard work. God calls us to the hard work; he just promises that in Christ, we'll find a healthy rhythm of work and rest. If the devotions we share and the prayers we pray are no more meaty than we could have handled years ago, then maybe we've been refusing to grow – and that's not God's plan for our lives. In the kingdom of God, “we've always done it that way” is not an excuse for refusing to grow; neither is, “That makes my head hurt”, and neither is, “But I don't want to”. We're called to serve a God who transforms, a God who wants us to grow and change even though it stretches and pulls and stings and hurts.

“As you come to him, the living Stone – rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him –, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” [[1 Peter 2:4-5]]

“For in Scripture it says, 'See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.'” Now, to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, 'The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,' and, 'A stone that causes people to stumble, and a rock that makes them fall.' They stumble because they disobey the message – which is also what they were destined for.” [[1 Peter 2:6-8]]

Now Peter turns a corner to give us some new teaching. He says that Jesus is like a stone who's alive. He's the foundational cornerstone in what God is building. When people in society try to build shelters from the world, or to build schools of thought, or even to build things that honor God, too often people assume that something else can be the cornerstone. Too often people imagine that Jesus Christ is expendable. Too often we in our hearts pretend that Jesus Christ is expendable. But there is nothing expendable, nothing disposable, nothing optional when it comes to the one-of-a-kind Redeemer, the one and only Son of God. Jesus is the living Stone. The human builders rejected him. But in rejecting him, they trip over him and only hurt themselves more, because Jesus is the one chosen by the Father to be the centerpiece, the cornerstone, in his whole construction project. And there's no other foundation anyone can lay but this one. Jesus is not one option among many. Jesus is a necessity.

We can't afford to stumble over him. We can't afford to fall. Peter says that those who stumble over Jesus are stumbling and falling because they disobey the message. When they hear the gospel, they turn away from it. Maybe they think that there's no truth anyway, so there's no point in paying attention. Maybe they think that, when it comes to religion, one thing must be as good as another, and anyone who says otherwise is just being mean and intolerant. Those are popular objections these days. And they're both wrong. Jesus is the Truth. Not the Opinion. Not the Custom. Not the Truth-for-You-But-Not-for-Me. The Truth. More specifically, Jesus is the Beautiful-Truth-in-Holy-Love. There's nothing more loving than Jesus Christ. There's nothing more beautiful than Jesus Christ. There's nothing more holy than Jesus Christ. And there is nothing truer than Jesus Christ. We can say those things in a mean and intolerant and ugly and unloving way, but they themselves are not mean, they aren't intolerant, they aren't ugly, and they aren't unloving. They're what the world needs to hear, and what the world needs to accept. Because to not accept it is to stumble. But what's more, just hearing the message isn't enough. Just agreeing with the message isn't enough. Peter says that people stumble if they disobey the message. The message of Jesus Christ – that he died for our awful sins, that he rose again in victory and life, that he ascended on high as our great High Priest to intercede with us before the Father's throne, that he reigns even now as supreme authority over everything that happens in the whole universe, and that he's coming back to judge everyone both alive and dead – that's the message we're being given, and it has a lot of implications for how we live our lives. One would hope that all those in our churches at least are familiar with the message. One would hope that they all understand the message clearly. Sadly, that's probably too optimistic. But for right now, we have to ask the pressing question: how well are we obeying the message, obeying it with 'the obedience that comes from faith', as Paul says twice in Romans?

But while Peter is talking about Jesus as the living Stone, the one who's most precious to God, Peter says something else here. Peter is telling us that as we come to him, we're more living stones. We're part of what God is building! We aren't just observers. We're God's building materials. And as we let him put us together, what's the finished project look like? Peter says that it's a “spiritual house”. In other words, it's the one and only end-times temple of God, the temple where God's Spirit is living. We together, even we right here, are God's temple in construction. Or rather, we're already a temple, and the temple is growing. This temple is alive!

If we're going to be God's temple, that carries some serious weight. A temple is the place where God lives. A temple is the place where people go to meet him. A temple is the place where people go to serve him. And a temple is the place where people go to build up their relationship with him. That's what the temple was always for. Only, as we talked about in church this week, the new temple isn't a place. The new temple is us. But what kind of a temple are we choosing to be? If a visitor came to this prayer meeting, would they walk away thinking, “Wow.... God lives here?” If a visitor came to this prayer meeting, right now, would they meet Jesus personally? Would they be able to experience the presence of the risen Christ among us.... or would we get in the way? If a visitor came to this prayer meeting, would they be able to walk away feeling refreshed and connected with God? Or would they have to leave feeling distant from God still? If we're doing our job as a temple here, right here in this prayer meeting, people could come here and meet Jesus. People coming here could fall in love with God all over again. But would they? Are we being that kind of temple? Are we a temple of the veiled-but-visible glory of God? Or as a temple, are we named 'Ichabod' – “no glory”?

But Peter doesn't just say that we're a temple. He says that we're being built up into a temple. This temple is not static. This temple is not finished. This temple is supposed to grow. That means, for one, that we should be out there recruiting some more stones! But it also means that we should together grow to spiritual maturity. Like we discussed before, our job as a people is not to stay still. Our job as individual Christians is not to stay still in our walk. They call it a 'walk', not a 'standstill'! Our job is to grow. Our job is to go deeper, to see farther and wider, and to love harder. Are we growing? When we look back on our week, do we have to admit that we haven't learned anything new that we can use to understand God's word better? Or can we say that we've gotten closer to the heart of what God is saying? And if we can say that, then the next important question is, what are we going to do with it?

“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” [[1 Peter 2:9-10]]

Earlier, Peter had already alluded to the fact that, as the temple of God, we're also the priesthood of God. A priest is someone who comes before God on behalf of others, and before others on behalf of God. A priest is someone sanctified for God's special service. In the Old Testament, there were plenty of priests, all descended from Moses' brother Aaron. Their leader was the high priest, and once every year, after some intense preparation, the high priest would get to pass through a veil in the temple into a room called the Holy of Holies, the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept – and on top of that box was a 'mercy seat' representing God's throne, flanked by a pair of heavenly creatures called cherubim. The Holy of Holies was where God's presence was. Under the old covenant, there were a lot of priests, and they kept having to be replaced. None of them lasted. They had limited access to God, and what was worse, the offerings they made couldn't really fix the problem of sin. It was just animal blood and a hamburger or two. It wasn't good enough to clean us inside and out.

But we know that things are different now. Instead of there being many priests, there's really just one. Our Great High Priest is none other than Jesus. He's perfect. He's in God's presence all the time, in the real Holy of Holies in heaven. He's alive forever, so he never has to be replaced, nor is there anybody who could fill his priestly shoes. Best of all just as the change in covenants moved us from many weak priests to one perfect priest, so it moved us from many weak sacrifices to one perfect sacrifice – which Jesus made on the cross and then brought into the Father's presence forever.

So if the whole old priesthood has been replaced by Jesus, then what does Peter mean when he talks about us as not just the temple but as the 'royal priesthood'? Well, remember that as the church, we're the bride of Christ. A woman who marries a king gets to share in his rule through the marriage; so we, in being united to Christ, share in his royal rule and in his holy priesthood. As Martin Luther wrote in 1520, “just as Christ by his birthright obtained these two prerogatives, so he imparts them to and shares them with everyone who believes in him according to the law of the above-mentioned marriage, according to which the wife owns whatever belongs to the husband. Hence all of us who believe in Christ are priests and kings in Christ.”

See, we don't have a priesthood independent of Christ's, nor are just some people in the church priests. But all of us are royalty and all of us are priests – though only through sharing in the priesthood and the royalty that Jesus has. We weren't always a people. We weren't always united together like this, as a 'holy nation'. Before we met Jesus, we were outsiders to God's people and to his plan. We weren't living under mercy. But God is a God who invites the outsiders to become the inner circle. God is a God who takes a bunch of miscellaneous no-goodniks from all backgrounds and all walks of life, and makes them into one new people and one new family and showers them – us! – with undeserved mercy after mercy and blessing after blessing. Peter says that God did this so that we could 'declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light'. We aren't in the dark anymore, the way we once were. We're living in the light, as he is in the light. We've been given rescue from the dungeon. We've been called to be priests and a temple. And the spiritual sacrifice we offer in the new covenant is to praise God with our lips and with our lives for how incredible he's been to us:

O for a thousand tongues to sing

My great Redeemer's praise,

The glories of my God and King,

The triumphs of his grace!

My gracious Master and my God,

Assist me to proclaim,

To spread through all the earth abroad

The honors of thy name.

Jesus! the name that charms our fears,

That bids our sorrows cease;

'Tis music in the sinner's ears,

'Tis life and health and peace.

He breaks the power of canceled sin,

He sets the prisoner free;

His blood can make the foulest clean,

His blood availed for me.

On this glad day the glorious Sun

Of Righteousness arose;

On my benighted soul he shone

And filled it with repose.

Sudden expired the legal strife,

'Twas then I ceased to grieve;

My second, real, living life

I then began to live.

Then with my heart I first believed,

Believed with faith divine,

Power with the Holy Ghost received

To call the Savior mine.

I felt my Lord's atoning blood

Close to my soul applied;

Me, me he loved, the Son of God,

For me, for me he died!

I found and owned his promise true,

Ascertained of my part,

My pardon passed in heaven I knew

When written on my heart.

Look unto him, ye nations, own

Your God, ye fallen race;

Look and be saved through faith alone,

Be justified by grace.

Sermon: "Christmas Is Just the Beginning"

Have you ever noticed that, after Christmas, you sometimes feel a bit deflated? We have all this energy and all this excitement and all this anticipation going into the Christmas season; we buy our presents, we put them under the tree, we get our families together, we organize parties.... and on December 26^th, it feels like it's all over and done with. Christmas seems like an ending. But really, Christmas is just the beginning.

Last week, Rev. Vondran made some invaluable points. One that struck me was how Jesus reveals to us what God is like. Remember, Jesus is the Word made flesh. Christmas is nothing less than the celebration of God starting to dictate his Autobiography, not just in words on a page, but in and as a human life. Whoever catches a glimpse of Jesus has a window into the heart of the Father.

If the only glimpse we got was on that silent night, we'd understand far more about God than we ever would've without it. But the baby born in Bethlehem didn't stay in the manger. He grew up so we could see God in action on the human stage. Reading the Gospels, it seems like even just a week in his life would be biting off more than we could chew. But with The Story, we're zooming waaaaaaaaaaay out to get the God's-eye view of it all. Even in just the early days of his ministry, I see three broad lessons that Jesus gives us about God.

The first key lesson is that God identifies himself with God's people. When God thinks of us, he says, “These people are my people; they're with me, I'm with them, and we're sticking together.” The entire life of Jesus is a brand-new testament to that. Matthew especially wants us to see the life of Jesus as picking up on a whole bunch of themes from earlier chapters in The Story and weaving the threads together. When Herod's threats loom in the Holy Land, Jesus is taken into Egypt, just like Jacob's family at the end of Genesis. After Herod the Great dies, Jesus comes out of Egypt in a new exodus, back into the Holy Land.

Later we find Jesus at the River Jordan, where Jesus was baptized “to fulfill all righteousness”. When it came to Jesus getting baptized, John the Baptist was every bit as confused as we are. I mean, the whole point of baptism seemed like it was a chance to turn away from your sins and start living a godly life. Baths are for the dirty – so why did the one and only clean man ask to go under? Well, if we had to go through it, Jesus didn't want to stand apart. He wanted to stand with us. That's just the kind of attitude God has. He doesn't hold himself apart from what we're going through. When we go through suffering and pain and tragedy in life, God wants us to be able to see as plain as day that he doesn't hold our bruised and battered hearts at arm's length. When we've rolled in the mud and we need to get wet, God's there in the river too. For us.

If he wanted to stand apart from messy human life, Jesus probably could've gotten away with skipping the river. He also could've skipped his forty days of wandering through the wilderness, which matched up with the forty years the Israelites lived as nomads in the Sinai. We go through our own wilderness times of temptation and trial on a regular basis. Jesus is God's loudest way of saying that he's with us in it all. If Jesus wanted to, he could have ended the contest with the devil pretty quickly. He could have said, “Satan, in case you've forgotten, I'm God, and I can't sin. To save us both some time, I command you to get lost.” But if he had, what lesson would there be for us? What hope for our struggles would we get out of seeing Jesus resist the devil in a way only God can?

Jesus deliberately chose not to go that route. Look at the way Jesus fights the devil off. Satan tells Jesus to satisfy his physical needs; Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8:13. Satan tells Jesus to impress everyone with a self-centered miracle, and even twists scripture to do it; Jesus jabs back with Deuteronomy 6:16. Satan finally offers Jesus jurisdiction over the whole world in exchange for one quick act of outrageous sin; and Jesus sends him packing with Deuteronomy 6:13. There isn't a single thing Jesus said to Satan that we can't say, too. Jesus is God's way of showing us that we have exactly what we need. If we learn God's words that well and understand their spirit so we can guard against Bible-abuse, we're ready.

The second major lesson that Jesus teaches us about God is that God is eager to teach us one-on-one, no matter what level we're at. God will accept us and meet us wherever we are, though he won't be content to let us stay down there. Whatever our hang-ups, God has a message for each and every one of us, all of us in this sanctuary right now. There isn't one of us who could say, “God's word isn't for me”, and not be a liar. When we read about the start of Jesus' ministry, one catching story is about Jesus' secret visit from a bigshot Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a great rabbi. In Jesus' own words, he's a “teacher of Israel”. He's a top theologian, a knock-out preacher. If anyone has it all together, it's Nicodemus! But Jesus warns Nicodemus that he's on the verge of flunking out on the basics. Nicodemus is so clueless that on the first sentence out of Jesus' mouth, he gets lost!

See, what Jesus has to teach Nicodemus is that it doesn't matter who you are – you could be a down-and-out loner or an all-star rabbi – our old life isn't what makes God happy. Our family tree has its roots in bad soil. We need a new one, one that has roots not in a pedigree of human bodies, but only in the Spirit of God. We need to be born all over again, this time with God as our parent. Jesus tells him about how much God loves the world that rejects him. God loves God-haters so much that he sent the very best, his Son, to die. He sent his Son to be lifted up on the cross so that whoever looks at him in faith will be cured of sin. It's that look in faith that makes all the difference. Anyone who put all their eggs in Jesus' basket is in safe hands; those who'd rather hedge their bets are in for a rude awakening. Faith is the one thing that makes the difference between life for those who have it and condemnation for those who don't. Faith is inseparable from being born again. And that's exactly the message that Nicodemus needed to hear.

Later on, Jesus leads his disciples into a place they'd rather not be: Samaria, a region the Jews of his day went out of their way to avoid. The Jews couldn't stand the Samaritans. He sent his Jewish disciples off to buy some food in a Samaritan town while Jesus waited outside at a well – probably because if they stuck around, they'd just have gotten in the way. Jesus finds himself talking to a sexually broken Samaritan woman who may have felt like an outcast even among other Samaritans, let alone when talking to a Jewish rabbi. Jesus crosses all sorts of barriers to have a conversation with her. He reveals, bit by bit, that he knows exactly what sort of life she's lived – and he wants her to know that, no matter what worldly lines in the sand are drawn between them, he wants her to come to him and find a healing that lasts.

As she's working her way up to realizing that Jesus is the promised Savior, she comes to see that Jesus has a hotline with God. So she asks him to settle one of the controversies of the day. Everyone knows that for the one God, there can be only one valid temple. The Jews worship God at the temple on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem and reject all the others. But the Samaritans worship God at the temple on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria and reject the one in Jerusalem. Jesus tells her that it doesn't matter any more. Worship used to have to do with geography, because the temple was a place. But if our God is spirit, there's no reason why his temple has to be a place – and Jesus tells this Samaritan woman that from now on it won't be. The new temple isn't a place, it's a people – it's us!

Now it doesn't matter where we stand when we bring our offerings to God. It doesn't matter if we get together to worship God between these panels of stained glass and those panels. It doesn't matter if we worship God without so much as a shard of stained glass in sight. It can be in our homes, it can be in the park, it can be at the side of the road in a bad part of town. What matters is whether we're living out our worship as though we're really God's temple. We need to live like the temple where his Spirit of Truth dwells to bear its fruit in our lives. God calls us to worship as the temple where people can come to meet him – and when they meet him here in Christ, in our midst, then they can have the Spirit flowing through their lives like a raging river that never runs dry. And that message is exactly what the woman at the well needed to hear.

The woman went back into her village and spread the word. They invited Jesus in, and many of them learned for themselves who Jesus is. But the disciples were complaining... as usual. When they tried to distract Jesus with lunch, he told them that he had everything he needed right there already. They thought maybe Jesus got some take-out while they were grocery shopping. They didn't understand that food is nothing compared to carrying out God's mission. They were so bogged down in earthly things and earthly meanings that they were blind to what was most pressing of all.

You know, when I picture this conversation, I imagine Jesus grabbing Peter by the shoulders and shaking him. “Don't you see? Open your eyes! Open your eyes and look, look at that field of people! They're ripe for harvest for the kingdom!” That was where the heart of the Father was. The heart of the Father wasn't with what the disciples bought in town. The heart of the Father wasn't in staying on schedule to get out of Samaria. The heart of the Father was in rejoicing in the chance to share the gospel with people who were starving spiritually and were ready and willing for the meal of God's love to be served to their souls. No one shows the Father's heart like Jesus – and if Jesus went to such desperate lengths to reach the Samaritans, I wonder how we can ever look at the unsaved in Akron and Ephrata the same way again.

The third crucial lesson that the start of Jesus' ministry teaches us about God is that God values the humble faith of outcasts more than the self-satisfied morality of the 'in-crowd'. Early on in the Gospels, we get the sense that if there's one thing that the Pharisees and Jesus most definitely are not destined to see eye-to-eye on, it's how to treat people who don't have it all together. The Pharisees were convinced that they were on top of it. They were so proud not to be like, you know, those people. You know the ones I mean. The ones who feel afraid to darken church doors because they don't feel good enough.

Jesus didn't avoid them the way the Pharisees did. He did lunch with them. The Pharisees and others got upset when Jesus ate with – gasp! – 'tax collectors' and 'sinners'! Jesus fell in with bad crowds – on purpose. The Pharisees and their friends judged Jesus for it. How can this traveling teacher not know what kind of people these are? Hasn't he ever heard that bad company corrupts good morals? Doesn't this Jesus guy understand that he's setting a bad example? Clearly if this man is the sort of man who would spend his time with thieves and adulterers and traitors and prostitutes and terrorists, he isn't someone any self-respecting Pharisee would want his children around! But a main point of Jesus' life is that God is the sort of God who would spend his time with haters, with abusers, with bullies, and with the broken – and if we need any more proof, all we need is to remember that God somehow still wants anything to do with us.

Jesus reminds the Pharisees that when a doctor's at work, he doesn't surround himself with healthy people who don't want to see him. A doctor dives headfirst into the midst of the sick and the dying because they're the ones who need him and know it. The irony is that the Pharisees are worse off, because they're so proud of their own goodness that they can't see that their goodness 'falls short of the glory of God'. Even if the Pharisees came a few inches closer to God's standards, just a few, they fell miles away from God's values. And one of the greatest dangers for the church today is if we miss this. It's easy to give lip-service to grace and mercy. It's hard to live as someone who depends on it completely. A church that doesn't remind itself that they'd be miserable sinners without God's grace, a church that forgets that it's called for an active mission of grace to the hurting and the impure and the lost – that is a church in grave danger of becoming the neighborhood Pharisees' Association instead of the church that God wrenched out of Satan's hands through the priceless blood of his one and only Son.

Every natural inclination of our hearts is to be a Pharisee. But Jesus came to show us that that's not where God's heart is. If we believe the good news that God is really Christ-like, then we have to ask ourselves some very hard questions about our methods in God's mission. We have to ask ourselves, if God isn't above identifying himself with the people, who are we to hold ourselves above the muck and the mire of the day-to-day lives of the lost? We have to ask ourselves, if God's teaching through Jesus is true, then do we really get what it means to trade in everything about who we are in order to get a completely new identity from God? We have to ask ourselves, if God is willing to have a bunch of rescued sinners serve as his holy temple, are we really being a temple where people can meet Christ and get healing? And we have to ask ourselves, if God's heart breaks and burns and chases down the hungry lost, then what's wrong with us when we put anything worldly, even good things, ahead of our God's all-consuming passion? Those are uncomfortable questions. They make me uncomfortable. I squirmed when I wrote them. I'll probably still squirm in a week, or in a month. But when we come to see that Jesus is the one who makes the heart of the Father known, even in the earliest days of his ministry, then we can't not know that every 'if' in those questions is a guaranteed fact. And we can't pretend that it doesn't have a drastic impact on who we are as the church. And that's just the start of Jesus' ministry! Over the next few Sundays, we have the awesome chance to explore what else Jesus can show us about the heart of God. Because Christmas was just the beginning of the new chapter in God's story.

Wednesday Night Devotions: 1 Peter 2:1-3

“Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.” [[1 Peter 2:1]]

In the first chapter of his letter, Peter talks about God's great gift to us. Peter realizes that we're fallen, both body and soul. Because we're fallen and we live in a fallen world, we come with expiration dates. Our life here is perishable. Some believers come to appreciate this fact sooner than others. In this perishable life, we may have to face trials of different kinds. Peter says that these trials are permitted by God for a very simple reason: to refine us by burning away any of the selfishness that wouldn't fit in well in God's kingdom.

Peter also tells us that – long, long ago – the prophets were very curious about what God had in store. They knew that we weren't meant to be perishable. Peter says that they caught glimpses of the truth: that there would be a Messiah, a special Anointed One sent into the world someday by God, who would do something about our problem. Peter says that even the angels in heaven were curious about what all of this would mean, and what it would be like to fall and then be redeemed. Sure enough, God sent his eternal Son into the world as the promised Messiah, Jesus. Jesus died on the cross to clean us from our sins, which were the reason why we became perishable in the first place. Peter says that Jesus cleansed us by shedding his “precious blood”, which was worth far more than all the riches of the earth.

Jesus then returned from the dead and rose into heaven in glory. It's because of this that we can have “new birth into a living hope”. When our parents gave birth to us, they were working with perishable materials. But now that God has given new birth to us, our new birth is from something that can't ever perish or fade away: the word of God. This word of God is the gospel message that was preached to us. We all here became Christians when we heard the good news of what God's been up to: bringing his peaceful rule back to the world through Jesus. Because we've been born out of something imperishable now, we're no longer the people we used to be, long ago before we met Jesus. Now we're new people. Some of us might remember that when our parents passed on, they left us something behind that we could inherit. But our earthly inheritance can't compare with the new inheritance that we get in the new birth. Peter says that the new inheritance “can never perish, spoil, or fade”. Peter also says that God has it in storage in heaven, but that when Jesus comes back to earth and we welcome him in, Jesus will bring our inheritance of eternal life and honor with him to give to us.

In the meantime, we live in a perishing world, a world that's constantly falling apart around us. Someday we know that Jesus will come back and make it all new. But until then, we don't fit in. We're not natives here anymore. Nowhere on earth is our hometown. We're foreigners. We're immigrants here on a temporary visa. Peter says that as we wait for Jesus to come back, we should “set our hope on the grace” that Jesus will bring. We should be looking forward to how amazing that will be. We should also have “minds that are alert and fully sober”. It's very easy to just slide through life, not paying attention to the world around us. But that isn't what God calls us to do. God wants us to pay attention to what's going on in the world. More importantly, God wants us to pay attention to what he is doing in the world.

We should be ready every day for Jesus to come back. How should we be living today? We should be living today so that, if Jesus suddenly came back tonight, not only wouldn't we be caught off-guard, but we wouldn't have any regrets. We should live today so that, if Jesus came back tonight, we could look back on today and say to ourselves, “That's how I wanted to be living when Jesus returned”. Peter says that before we knew Jesus, we were ignorant and clueless, and we just kept following our evil desires – those temptations that sin puts in our heart to settle for less than God's best. But Peter encourages us to live a holy life, one that doesn't look like the rest of this world but looks like it comes from somewhere else entirely; and Peter tells us to love each other from the bottom of our hearts.

And that brings us to Chapter 2. Right off the bat, Peter says that for all these reasons – but mainly because we've heard the imperishable message about what God did and is doing through Jesus and have been born again because of it – we should live a certain way. There are certain attitudes and behaviors that God wants us to throw away from our lives. That includes everything deceitful. We shouldn't trick people, we shouldn't lie, we should just be tellers of the truth. It also includes everything slanderous and everything malicious or nasty. Everything that leads us to spread unpleasant rumors about each other, everything that leads us to be mean to those around us – all that has to go. And so does all of our hypocrisy. We need to practice what we preach and walk the walk as we talk the talk.

“Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” [[1 Peter 2:2-3]]

As Christians, we – just like Peter's audience – have “tasted that the Lord is good”. Peter's quoting here from Psalm 34, which is an acrostic Hebrew poem that David wrote after escaping from an enemy while pretending to be crazy. In that psalm, David opens by saying that he'll always praise God, because God is the one who delivers the righteous. When David looked for God's help, God was there for him. God rescued David, and David encourages the people, “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him”. In other words, go ahead and see what it's like to trust God. Take the free sample; taste it, savor it. If you do, you'll find out just how good God is! If you side with God, you may not have everything you want, but you will have everything you need. Anyone who wants to live a good and joyous life should learn to follow God and not stray from his path, David says, because God will pay close attention to those who follow him closely. David says that God is “close to the brokenhearted” and will protect the righteous one. As we learn later on, Jesus Christ is the Righteous One, and when we hide ourselves in Jesus and cling to him, we live in God's presence, safe from the powers of sin. That's the message that David has for us, and Peter says that as Christians, we sampled what God offered us – which was nothing but his own self. And we liked it, and we've been coming to God's table ever since, since when we tasted, we realized, “Yes, the Lord is good”. Charles Wesley wrote a beautiful short hymn on Psalm 34:8 that I find very inspiring:

Taste him in Christ and see

The abundance of his grace;

Experience God, so good to me,

So good to all our race!

Celestial sweetness prove

Through Jesus' grace forgiven,

And then enjoy in perfect love

The largest taste of heaven.

Peter urges his audience to be like newborn babies who drink “pure spiritual milk” in order to “grow up in your salvation”. Now, this letter may have been addressed to a community with a lot of new believers in it. Elsewhere, Paul says that Christians need to grow out of being babies. He tells the Christians in Corinth that, because they were still full of sin and hadn't set themselves apart from the pagan world around them, he had to give them milk still, and not the 'solid food' they should've been having. The author of Hebrews also says that those who still need milk are “not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness”. So what we see here is that immature Christians are compared to newborn infants who can only take in the most basic spiritual teachings. They aren't ready for more advanced spiritual nutrition. But if they grow, then they can begin to handle more and more solid food and become mature in their faith.

But, Peter says, even if we're still on milk, it should be pure. It shouldn't be expired, and it shouldn't be mixed with anything gross. It should be fresh and clean and just the milk. I wonder how badly God's heart breaks when he sees some of the mistaken teachings that get passed off on his children before they're mature enough to see the difference clearly between the good and the bad. Sometimes God's children drink bad explanations of the Trinity – the one God we know in the three distinct persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are each the one God and who existed in perfect love and fellowship since before the world was. They drink it in music, they drink it in second-rate 'Christian' novels, they drink it in bad analogies that point to dangerous mistakes the church flat-out rejected hundreds and hundreds of years ago already. Sometimes God's children drink bad understandings of how God works in the world, so that we hurt each other with unbalanced clichés like “Everything happens for a reason” and “It must have been God's will” – which have some truth in them but can just as easily mislead, because part of what it means for the world to be fallen is exactly that terrible things happen senselessly, though God can bring good out of it all. Sometimes God's children drink skewed understandings of faith and works, either assuming that if we say we believe and have church membership then we must be okay and don't need to ever do anything, or else assuming that we get to heaven if we're decent, churchgoing folks who led a life with a bit more decency than villainy. Sometimes God's children drink bad understandings of worldly success and God's plan, especially the way some popular televangelists dish it up – we wrongly assume that anyone faithful to God will succeed by worldly standards, not remembering that the pure word of God talks about taking up our cross and living as a poor foreigner in this world, coming from somewhere with radically different standards.

Interestingly, First Peter, First Corinthians, and Hebrews all imply that the Christians they're written to are just infants and not mature enough to move on from the milk. That makes me wonder how the churches in our area measure up. In our church, how many of us are really able to pick up a knife and fork and sink our teeth into some spiritual filet mignon – and how many of us are, at best, drinking from a spiritual sippy cup and thinking that it's all we'll ever need? We can be sure that if we aren't being stretched and feeling filled from what we're getting, we probably haven't made ourselves move on from milk. But what do we get in our Sunday school classes? What do we get in our devotions and our prayer meetings and our commissions? What do we get in the songs we choose to sing to God during worship on a Sunday morning? What are we really getting? Does it seem like more than we can handle? Does it require hard work to chew? Solid food does; milk doesn't.

Some milk is fine as a nice frothy beverage to go with our grown-up meals, but if we don't start also eating something solid and keep it up, we can't grow. We also need to be sure that our meals are balanced. We shouldn't be spiritual vegetarians who eat only, say, creation or the end-times – just one part of the biblical food pyramid. We shouldn't always get chocolate cake for our main course, eating those parts of the Bible that make God sound so nice and friendly and fluffy while skipping over anything less sweet-tasting, like God's judgment on human sin. (We see people in our culture doing that a lot these days – and look at the spiritual tooth decay that sets in!) We need to dive into God's whole smorgasbord and develop a balanced spiritual diet. We need solid food that makes us chew and grow stronger, and we need the whole range of cuisine from God's table, not just this dish or that dish. What we get should make us think, it should make us learn, it should make us grow, and it should build up our spiritual muscles so that we have the strength to apply it. So how are we doing? What are we feeding on here? What are we feeding each other? What's the nutritional value on our sermons, our devotions, our spiritual reading, our fellowship with each other as believers?

Wednesday Night Devotions: Ephesians 4:1-16

Our devotional for tonight comes from the first half of the fourth chapter of Paul's letter to the Ephesians. This letter, written while Paul was in prison, was a general letter addressed to the Christian communities in the city of Ephesus and its neighboring cities in what is now western Turkey.

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

One of the overriding themes in Paul's letters is the relationship between Christian faith and good works. Earlier in this letter, Paul talks more about our salvation – our rescue from the clutches of sin and our delivery into the power of God's love and rule. Paul stresses that this salvation is not a result of human works. It doesn't matter to Paul whether the works in view are good human morality and being a 'nice person' or the specific works commanded in the Jewish Law that was given to Israel through Moses by God at Mt. Sinai in Exodus. Neither of these has the power to save. Paul wants us to know that salvation can't be gained by simply being an obedient member of God's chosen ethnic group, nor by being a decent person who carries her neighbor's groceries, always has a smile on her face, and never hurts anybody's feelings.

Instead, Paul says, salvation comes only by the grace of God – God's gifts given in an attitude of favor toward us, even though we have a track record of awful ingratitude. The only condition of this generous gift is that we have faith, an attitude of loyalty to God (we should want to please him and stick by him through thick and thin) and trust in God (we should believe that his promises are dependable, believe that he can and will follow through on them, and actively depend on him to give us everything that he's promised us, which is just what we need). Paul mentions that even this faith doesn't come entirely from within us; it, too, is a gift of God. This doesn't mean, of course, that we have no role to play in our own faith. John Wesley wisely saw that, although it is true that human sin ruins our ability to even react to God's offer of salvation, this isn't the end of the story. Wesley – and here he disagreed with earlier Christian thinkers like Martin Luther and John Calvin – realized that God doesn't leave any of us entirely on our own without hope. God reaches out in what Wesley called 'prevenient grace' – that is, grace that 'goes before' – to open up our hearts and give us the ability to respond either positively or negatively to his first move. All the glory and credit for our salvation goes to God, but we still have the responsibility to react rightly.

Paul recognizes that we're fixed and put right before God only on account of faith, not because of anything we earn – and this is what distances Paul from the very popular error in which we pull ourselves up to heaven by our own bootstraps. But Paul also takes pain to distance his teaching from another mistake, which is the belief that once we say we believe in Jesus, how we live is irrelevant, and our Christian good works are still meaningless. Paul wants nothing to do with this crazy idea. In the first verse of this fourth chapter of Ephesians, Paul says that we have received a calling. All of us are called – not just some special group in the church like pastors, not just Christians from this background or that background, but all Christians. This calling is simply to live under the kingdoms of this world as representatives of a kingdom that isn't of this world. In the world we call our true home – the heavenly Mt. Zion – we're all adopted children of God, who join Jesus Christ in inheriting all of God's promises. By being joined with Jesus Christ, who is the eternal King of Kings and the sinless High Priest, we together become a royal Christian priesthood. That means that, simply by being drenched in God's Spirit the way we were when we were saved, each of us has become a king or queen and a priest or priestess – but it isn't our own royal or priestly family tree that gives us this, but rather membership in the Church, which is the body and bride of Christ. This is an incredible calling! What Paul begs Christians to do in this verse is, therefore, somewhat intimidating: live up to what God has made us to be. Note that we don't receive the calling by living up to it. Note also that there's no suggestion that God will cancel out our calling if we slip from time to time. But note also that God really does want us to live a certain way. For God, there really is a right way to live as a Christian, and a wrong way to live as a Christian. For a Christian priest-king or priestess-queen, there are certain actions and attitudes that are unacceptable, and certain actions and attitudes that are necessary.

“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” [[Ephesians 4:2-3]]

In these next couple of verses, Paul begins the lengthy process of spelling out for us exactly what kinds of attitudes fit together nicely with our calling as a royal priesthood in Christ. Paul says that part of that Christian character involves gentleness, humility, patience, and love. Later on, Paul spells out in more detail exactly what sorts of behavior these character traits would rule out. Paul's big emphasis here, though, is peaceful unity. In the early church, there were several different kinds of division that were very troubling, but one major kind of problem the church dealt with was the question of Jews and Gentiles. The Jews, after all, had a deep history of being the (tragically flawed) chosen people of God. They were the ones to whom God had given all the promises and all the gifts. Jesus was the Messiah promised to the Jews, was born as a Jew, lived a Jewish life, surrounded himself with Jewish followers, and founded a movement that, at least at first, seemed to mainly attract Jews who wanted to serve the God of Israel in the way Jesus had spelled out. So it's understandable why some early Christians struggled with the question of on what terms non-Jewish outsiders – that is, 'Gentiles' – could join in the fun. Did these converts have to become Jewish first in order to become followers of Jesus? Did that mean accepting physical circumcision and setting aside delicious foods like bacon and sausage and trusting in obedience to the Jewish Law in order to stay in Jesus' good graces?

For Paul and other major leaders in the early church, the answer was no. Paul held out a special place for Jews but stressed that it was nothing to boast in. Both Jews and non-Jews had sinned against God, and the God of Israel was God over the whole world and everyone in it, whether or not they recognized him. The God that the Jews had been worshiping wasn't a God they were ever supposed to pridefully keep to themselves; he was and is a God they were always supposed to invite people of every nation to come and share on very open terms. Still, even though Paul explained it so clearly, social and political pressures led some groups within the church to resist Paul's radical idea. (For one thing, by accepting Gentiles on non-Jewish terms, the early church made it easier for non-Christian Jews to say that Christianity wasn't a legitimate form of Judaism at all – which meant that Christianity wouldn't be eligible for special protections like exemption from the Roman requirement of worshiping the Roman emperor as a god.) Even though these groups caused trouble – which came out most clearly in the Christian communities in Galatia, as Paul's very angry letter to them made perfectly clear – Paul stuck by his message. Divisions like being Jewish or non-Jewish, being rich or poor, being a man or a woman, or being a free citizen or a slave were just not important when it came to finding our identity or calling in Christ. For that reason, those divisions shouldn't be relevant for living life together in the church, which is why Paul begs Christians to do everything that they can to keep living as one church that goes beyond silly racial or social or economic or political barriers, rather than splitting into separate parties. Paul wants us to remember that the unity we're called to in Christ isn't some fancy idea he or anyone else came up with. It's nothing less than a supernatural work of the Spirit of God, and shame to us if we rip up a miraculous gift for our own petty agendas.

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” [[Ephesians 4:4-6]]

Some Jewish writings around the time of Jesus – give or take a century or two – use the idea of monotheism (belief in just one God for the whole world) for some interesting arguments. They stressed that there has to be a match between God and certain other things – for example, the number of broad communities who worship God. We've talked in church not too long ago about the Divided Kingdom, how after Solomon's death Israel got split into a Northern Kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam and a Southern Kingdom of Judah under Rehoboam. This sort of thing badly troubled some Jewish authors. They said that, if there's only one God, then there should be only one people of God. If there are two separate 'peoples of God' who don't appear to get along, then this makes it look like they must have different gods, which is exactly the opposite sort of witness that Israel had been created to give in the first place. Similarly, the Samaritans eventually founded their own temple on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria to rival the Jewish temple on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. But Jewish authors stressed that, if there's only one God, then there shouldn't be a need for many temples. They developed a strict 'one temple per God' rule. Later on, when confronted in John 4 by a Samaritan woman about the temples at Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Zion, Jesus answers that the question of which to choose is about to become irrelevant. Since God isn't a physical body and isn't restricted to just one area, there's no reason the temple has to be a place at all. Instead, both the true temple on Mt. Zion and the false temple at Mt. Gerizim were getting replaced by the end-times temple, which isn't a building or place at all, but the whole united people of God who make up the body of Christ, since Jesus is our true temple and we as his body are the temple also.

Christian authors borrowed this theme. For instance, John 17 has often troubled people. Some groups, like Mormons – who also violate Jesus' teachings by building hundreds of separate physical temples on the earth today – try to argue that when Jesus said he was one with the Father, he just meant that they always agreed, but that he never claimed they were one and the same God. They point to how Jesus paralleled the oneness of Christians with the oneness he had with his Father, and they claim that since the unity of Christians is allegedly just a unity of mindset and purpose, this must be all Jesus meant for him and his Father, either. But when we understand this background, we can see that Jesus was saying that, just as he and his Father are one God, we as his followers should be one people, with all that that entails. And, since the one God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is full of perfect divine love between all the persons of the Trinity, so the one Church of all of us should be marked by God-given love for one another, which means we should keep peace and hold together in unity.

That's what Paul is drawing on here. If we all have the same God (the Father) and the same Lord (Jesus Christ) and are indwelt by the same Spirit, then it should be obvious that we all got the same baptism, since all of us were baptized 'into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'. All of us, then, should have the same faith and the same hope and the same calling – and if that's the case, then there can't possibly be any basis at all for driving a spiritual wedge between groups of faithful Christians. And that goes for a wedge between Jewish Christians and non-Jewish Christians... or between rich Christians and poor Christians... or between male Christians and female Christians... or between ordained Christians and non-ordained Christians... or between Republican Christians and Democrat Christians... or between American Christians and Chinese Christians and Israeli Christians and Palestinian Christians... or between Lutheran Christians and Baptist Christians and Presbyterian Christians and Roman Catholic Christians and E. C. Christians. Just the opposite – quicker than 'Mr. Gorbachev', Jesus tore down all the 'dividing walls of hostility'!

“But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says, 'When he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people.' What does 'he ascended' mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.” [[Ephesians 4:7-10]]

“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” [[Ephesians 4:11-13]]

Paul wants us to know that, although there is only one church and we must stay united, this doesn't mean that each of us is identical. He wants to remind us that each of us has received certain spiritual gifts from the risen and ascended Christ. Paul uses a cryptic quote from Psalm 68:18 here to make his point. In that psalm, the image is of Israel's God, Yahweh, coming to his permanent mountain home as a victorious warrior leading an army of chariots. The Lord Yahweh rides up from the Sinai Peninsula to his holy mountaintop temple, carrying away captives and giving many gifts. In Paul's use, Christ is Yahweh, the God of Israel. Christ had to first go down from heaven to earth. But after his resurrection, Christ continued rising into heaven itself, and indeed 'higher than all the heavens' to the very throne of God, where he sits as the ruler of the entire universe. Because he is ascended and exalted, Christ can give any gift to the people he loves.

But these spiritual gifts aren't simply for our own personal use. They're for the church. They let us each bring different things to the same overall mission. In his first letter to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, Paul used a popular image from political speeches of his day, where a city was pictured as a body. Instead, Paul adapted it to the church. The church is like a body, and the body belongs to none other than Jesus Christ. He's our head, meaning he's the chief and the source of everything else. We're all parts of that body, and all of us are necessary. But even though we're all the same body, we're all different parts; and even though we each have different functions and purposes in the body, it's still only one body, and we need to work harmoniously with the other parts of the body. Here, like the parts God put in a human body, so Christ gave to the church all sorts of spiritual gifts in the lives of various people. Paul's examples here are various leading figures that the church had in his day. As one gift to the church, Christ picked one group of people to be apostles, or missionary church planters. As another gift to the church, Christ picked some people to be prophets, who bring God's word into the worship service and into times of trial. Christ also picked some people to be especially powerful preachers of the good news everywhere. Christ picked still more people to be shepherds who are filled with love for the church and want to guide the people and nourish them and take care of them, and teachers who understand the Bible and the people and can pass along with clarity and passion what the church was taught by Jesus in the first place. And Christ gave many more gifts.

But why did Christ give all these gifts to the church? What relationship do they have for the rest of the people? Doesn't it sound like maybe these specially gifted people Paul mentions are set up above the rest – and so there'd be a place for division after all? Well, no. Christ says that all of these gifts are given for one purpose: “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ”. These people – apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, and any others – don't get their gifts to puff themselves up. They get them so they can use them to help others grow. And by helping others grow, they get the rest of the church prepared to serve God better. As a result of their ministries, the church as a whole can carry out its ministry. And as the church carries out its ministry, the body of Christ is built up. Eventually, Paul says, there are three ultimate goals: (1) unity in the faith; (2) unity in the knowledge of the Son of God; and (3) maturity. We might summarize these as peaceful love, solid teaching, and overflowing holiness. That, as far as Paul is concerned, is our end game and our target. That is what Christ wants from us, and Christ himself took the initiative by giving us people who can help us find our way down that road. In the meantime, the church needs to daily become more unified in the faith, more unified in the true knowledge of the Son of God, and more mature in holy love.

“Then we will no longer be as infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” [[Ephesians 4:14-16]]

The goal, Paul says, is for the church to be like a well-adjusted adult person. But he worries that, instead of being the body of the Good Friday Jesus or the body of the Easter Jesus, maybe the church is just the body of the Christmas Jesus. If we aren't mature in our faith, we're like babies. And babies, says Paul, get tossed back and forth by the waves. I'm not sure where Paul saw newborns getting dumped in the ocean, but I imagine it's true. There isn't much a baby in the sea could do to stop from being batted around by the waves. A baby isn't strong enough to swim in the sea. A baby isn't strong enough to be stable. And if a Christian is still like a baby, then a Christian may not be strong enough to resist a different kind of wave: false teaching. It isn't popular today to talk about some people being – oh no! – wrong. But Paul doesn't share our scruples. Some teaching is false teaching. And while we like to talk a lot about having a relationship instead of a religion – never mind that every religion in Paul's world was a 'relationship' – that can take our eyes off of the need to teach the truth and not give in to charming presentations of what turn out to be mistakes at best and lies at worst. We've all met people who are spreading false teachings. We meet some at work, others at school, and still others on our doorsteps at hours of the morning we'd rather be asleep. It's tempting to just put up walls and disregard all these 'cunning', 'crafty', 'deceitful' people – but we also have to remember not to shoot the messenger, even when the message is a false teaching. Even the people on our doorstep, or the angry atheists in the news, may be sincerely misled.

What does God want us to do? The next verse tells us: just speak the truth in love. There are two easy ways to get this wrong. On the one hand, we could speak the truth without love. We could condemn sin all the day long, pour scorn on the media and American culture, and separate ourselves from the world and all the impure people in it. But last time I checked, when Jesus wanted to give the disciples a good example to follow, they were tax collectors and widows and Gentiles, and not Phil the Pharisee down the road. The church has gotten itself into a lot of trouble by speaking the truth without letting its love shine through – and, more often than not, that just drives people deeper into the arms of their errors or their sins. On the other hand, we could speak in love and just fudge a little bit on that troublesome 'truth' thing. I mean, after all, if the Bible's “Thou shalt not” gets under people's skins a bit too much today, well, maybe it wasn't for today after all, then, right? Worst of all is if it sounds to someone somewhere like it might discriminate or make anybody feel excluded! Well, it may be true that a lot of people today say that ideas like 'true' and 'false' are outdated – at least, until you challenge something they deeply hold to be true. But as a third-century Christian named Tertullian once put it, Jesus called himself the Truth, not the Custom. As Christians, we can't afford to compromise on our message. And if our message itself (and not just the way we say it) is an offense to someone, then as much as our culture hates anything offensive (unless it offends people who don't matter, like those silly Christians), then offensive is just what it'll have to stay. We need to share the truth. We need to share what we know. And, although we Americans are a complacent people who don't like to have to think to hard, we need to hear the truth from the pulpit, put simply but not oversimplified, whether or not it seems 'practical' or 'relevant' or 'useful' or whatever standard we've come up with for what we personally want out of our preaching this week. Because if we aren't getting deeply into the truth in our sermons and our Sunday schools and our prayer meetings, then we might as well be eating from jars of baby food – nutritious, sure, but how fast will we grow into the 'mature body of Christ'?

But as Christians, we also can't afford not to let the world know that we love them and would die for them. Jesus died for the world on his cross, even the atheists and the sex fiends and the God-haters and the dictators – and it may just be that, when he defined discipleship as taking up our crosses and walking in his footsteps, he might have envisioned something of the same attitude in our hearts. These days, when the average American thinks of a 'Christian', the first thought that flashes through her head is probably not, “Oh, they're those people who built that free clinic that took care of my son when he got sick and we couldn't afford treatment, and who brought me groceries when I was out of work, and who helped me find a new job that treated me better than my last one, and who also taught me patiently what they believed and invited me into a life of following this strange, deep, challenging man named Jesus”. They probably think of some much less pleasant things. But if we speak the truth in love, real love, then we'll at least have given them a reason to think of the better things. And Paul says that, if we as the church go around speaking truth in love, then that is how we mature. We mature together, not separately. Because we're not just a collection of people who all just happen to have the same bumper stickers and T-shirts. We're one body. And if each of us will truthfully, lovingly, and faithfully serve the church with whatever spiritual gift Christ has given us, then that is the way that 'the whole body grows and builds itself up in love'.