Jesus is alive (sermon)

 Have You Been Made Alive With Christ? 

By Dan Delzell, Christian Post Contributor | Saturday, January 29, 2022 Repentance from sin plus faith in Christ equals a new life. | Pixabay Just as no one creates himself and then causes himself to enter the world through his mother’s womb, no one can make himself come alive spiritually. Regardless of how many good works or religious deeds you perform, you cannot make your spirit come alive. Your only hope is for God to make you alive with Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote “to the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colosse” (Colossians 1:2). “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; He took it away, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:13,14). A person comes alive with Christ when the Holy Spirit performs this supernatural conversion. Jesus said, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit” (John 3:6). The new birth is a work of God. It cannot be manufactured by man, nor can it be earned by our good works. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you can thank God for saving your soul when He made your spirit come alive on the front end of your relationship with God. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8,9). When you were converted by the Holy Spirit, you were instantaneously saved, born again, justified, redeemed and forgiven. A person who is spiritually dead cannot make himself come alive. You need someone with far greater power than yourself to breathe life into your spirit. This is what happens when a soul is converted. The Holy Spirit breathes the life of God into your spirit. On the Day of Pentecost, the power of the Holy Spirit was poured out mightily, resulting in many conversions. Peter preached to the people under the anointing of God, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit … with many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’ Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day” (Acts 2:38,40-41). These new believers then “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer ... And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42,47). N“Yet to all who received Christ, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:12,13). Have you been born of God? “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God” (2 John 5:1). That is, everyone who believes in Jesus as the promised Messiah. And the fruit of faith in Christ is love. “We love because He first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And He has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother” (2 John 19-21). “Anyone who does not love remains in death” (1 John 3:14). Have you been made alive with Christ? If so, you are trusting in Christ’s death for the salvation of your soul. And you feel guilty when you sin against God. You now seek to please the Lord with your thoughts, words, and deeds. And you turn away from wicked behavior. “Everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn away from wickedness” (2 Timothy 2:19). If you are regularly going against your conscience and against God’s instructions for holy living, you would be wise to stop in your tracks and turn around. Ask the Lord to forgive you and to help you say “No” to sin. “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope - the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for Himself a people that are His very own, eager to do what is good” (Titus 2:11-14). If you have been made alive with Christ, you are eager to do what is good because you know that Heaven is your eternal home. You know that you have been saved by God’s grace and that your sins have been washed away by the blood of Jesus. Here is something I know about all of us who are born again: “When the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by His grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life” (Titus 2:4-7). And always remember these words from our Lord: “If you love me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15). The Apostle Paul also had a lot to say about “the obedience that comes from faith” (Romans 1:5). Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do what I command” (John 15:14). In the words of a well-known hymn written by John Sammis in 1887: “Trust and obey, for there’s no better way, To be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey." Dan Delzell is the pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Papillion, Nebraska. 

3rd Sunday Of Ordinary Time: ‘Jesus Unrolled The Scroll’ 

For the past three Sundays, Jesus has been progressively revealed — by the Magi, by God at his Baptism in the Jordan, and by Jesus’ own first “sign,” changing water into wine at the wedding feast of Cana. Today, as we settle into six more weeks of Ordinary Time, Jesus speaks of his mission of freedom and liberation. Jesus’ mission does not come out of the blue, nor is it “his way.” It’s been part of God’s plan for a long time, arguably from as soon as man first sinned (see Genesis 3:15). That is why Jesus “credentials” himself by reading this text from Isaiah (61:1-2 and 58:6) and applying it to himself. The Sunday Gospels do not give us the context of where a particular passage (pericope) fits in the overall Gospel. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is about to begin his three years of public preaching. He has been baptized by John. He has fasted and been tempted in the desert. That is the context in which “Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee” (4:14), as today’s Gospel tells us. John’s Baptism was a “baptism of repentance” (Acts 19:4). The temptation in the desert was an extended reflection on sin and its perverting grip upon humanity. Jesus clearly titles himself a Messiah. He selects the quotation from Isaiah (“the Spirit of the Lord is upon me”) then explicitly applies it to himself (“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing”). He makes clear the liberation he promises is not a political liberation but freedom from man’s greatest enemy, his greatest un-freedom: sin. Sin is poverty, not in an economic sense but in the sense of being deprived of God’s grace and friendship. Sin is captivity, which is why Israel’s enslavement in Egypt is a sign of humanity’s enslavement to sin and God’s leading Israel to freedom through the Exodus a prefigurement of humanity being lead to freedom through Christ’s Cross. Sin is blindness, spiritual blindness that so distorts our perception that we call evil good and good evil. It is oppression, for sin frustrates man from being what God created and wants him to be: fully alive. It was St. Irenaeus, after all, who reminded us that gloria Dei vivens homo, “the glory of God is man fully alive.” Because we are removed from the religious milieu in which Jesus moved and because — unfortunately — the Old Testament is too often terra incognita for Catholics, we don’t truly sense the audacious declaration Jesus is making in today’s Gospel. His listeners get it, which is why in next Sunday’s Gospel they will even already try to kill him. But it’s not just a theological disagreement about Jesus’ identity. A deeper, more sinister force lies deep beneath the ostensible theological dispute. It is that peculiar and perverted power of evil, one that attracts us to it while making it hard for us to do “the good we want to do” (see Romans 7:19). The perverted part is, in doing evil, we freely choose and embrace something death-dealing. It’s what the Devil wants for us: death (see John 8:44). The 19th-century French artist James (Jacques) Tissot captures today’s Gospel in his gouache watercolor, “Jésus dans la synagogue déroule le livre” [Jesus unrolls the book in the synagogue]. “Gouache” is a a kind of watercolor that is opaque, usually using some kind of resin or binding agent, as opposed to being see-through. The painting is in the Brooklyn Museum. Readers of this series know that Tissot experienced a reconversion to his Catholic faith and dedicated his post-1885 work to religious themes. (Tissot died in 1902.) He made three journeys to the Holy Land in the 1880s and 1890s to study the landscape, art and customs of the region in order to make his paintings as realistic as possible. With that realism, Tissot ran up against the artistic (impressionist) and intellectual (secularist) currents of his day. His 365 paintings of the “Life of Christ” enjoyed acclaim in his day and were bought by the Brooklyn Museum. Death interrupted a series of paintings he was working on of Old Testament themes. I chose Tissot’s painting because it faithfully reflects what the scene of Jesus reading in the synagogue would have looked like. Jesus is dressed in prayer shawl, as are all the men gathered around him. There are at least 10 men, because a Jewish synagogue service requires a minyin, a minimum of 10 males who have been bar mitzvah-ed, i.E., become “sons of the law.” Bar mitzvah is the moment when a Jewish male is now bound to observe the prescriptions of the Law (Torah) and is usually marked, among other things, by his reading of Sacred Scripture in public for the first time in synagogue. Behind Jesus is the Aron Kodesh, the Ark in which the Torah scrolls are kept, with its parochet, or curtain, in front of it. Removal of the scrolls for reading during the service has something of a quasi-exposition character to it. Because the biblical “books” of Jesus’ day are, in fact, scrolls, we see the scroll in front of Jesus in its ceremonial wrappings and with the two rolls which hold it protruding from the top. This is what the Gospel is referring to when it says “he was handed the scroll … unrolled the scroll, and found the passage …” Jesus, as a pious Son of Israel, would use the rollers, although I understand in his day he would also only touch a Scriptural scroll at the edges. (We cannot see it here, but in reading scrolls, Jews often use a device called a “yad,” a metal pointer with a finger-like appendage at its end, to follow in the text without touching it). Jesus stands on a raised platform, called a bimah. This pulpit is usually raised two or three steps high and fenced with a railing. It is in the center of the synagogue, enabling the Scriptural reading to be proclaimed prominently for all to hear. In Catholic churches, we have a reading from some part of the New Testament apart from the Gospels (usually an epistle of Paul) and pride-of-place goes to the Gospel. Since the introduction of the Novus Ordo in 1969, the Sunday lectionary has been supplemented by the “First Reading” which, for most of the year, is typically from the Old Testament. In Jewish synagogues, pride-of-place goes to a reading from the Torah, or “Law,” the most sacred part of the Hebrew Bible, corresponding to the Pentateuch or the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). The custom arose, however, also to include a reading from the prophets (neviim) which, presumably, is what Jesus is doing. This week, Jesus declares his identity and mission. Next Sunday, we’ll see Nazareth’s reaction.

Pastors Share Why Awareness Of Jesus Is Vital: ‘Without God’s Presence, Church Is A Social Club’ 

By Nicole Alcindor, CP Reporter | Wednesday, January 19, 2022 Getty images Daniel Fusco, the pastor of Vancouver’s Crossroads Community Church, and Banning Liebscher, founder of Jesus Culture Music, shared in "The Crazy Happy Podcast" that Christians need to be aware of Jesus' presence because “without God’s presence, church is a social club.” “Ultimately we were created for relationship, just to be connected and to know God and … to be in the presence of God is where we are most fulfilled and alive,” Liebscher, who also serves on staff at Bethel Church in Redding, said in the Jan. 11 podcast. LISTEN: THE CRAZY HAPPY PODCAST WITH DANIEL FUSCO “And I think there is something about just saying, 'We are going to be a people of His presence above all else.’ I mean, in His presence is found [the] fullness of joy. Freedom is found in His presence.” Every human longs to be in the presence of God — and God wants to stir up fresh passion for His presence, according to Liebscher. But many times, he said, Christians choose a version of success apart from God’s presence. “We get to a place where we realize there is no success apart from His presence. It’s His presence I was made for,” he said. “By and large, the Church has three buckets by which it is founded,” added Fusco. “One is the Scriptures [or] the Word of God and the second bucket is tradition. … This is how God has moved in different times and different places. The third bucket is experiencing God. Scripture is the story of people experiencing God.” The Word of God, Fusco said, is amazing because it's driven by God’s presence. "The Scriptures are tied to God’s presence and of course tradition coming from a group of people who experience God’s presence in a unique way,’” he contended. “I always tell people: ‘If the best of all we have is watching historical people experience the presence of God, and then we don’t get to, then we are actually getting to be nourished by someone else's food that they have eaten,” he noted. Liebscher said in his own personal life, he feels more alive when He is in God’s presence. However, he finds that, as a Church, there needs to be more of a realization about the importance of the presence of God. “Apart from God’s presence, we’re like every other social club out there that is organized,” he said. “But we’re not a social club because what separates us is the presence of God in our midst. It’s Emmanuel. It’s ‘God with us.’” “Pastors and preachers sometimes think that it’s our planning, our effort, our sermons that change people’s lives. But the reality is, I’ve never preached a sermon that has changed somebody’s life,” Liebscher stressed. “It’s the presence of God. It’s the Spirit of God that changes people’s lives. ... God’s presence changes lives. My life was changed with an encounter with the presence of God, not from a really great program.” Fusco said he believes that everyone has experienced being discouraged, defeated and hopeless due to the pandemic and other world news. “We feel vulnerable given all that’s gone on in the world and … when I feel these things, it’s because I am believing a lie,” Fusco said. Liebscher highlighted the importance of guarding one's heart and taking up the "shield of truth" in such times. "It’s the concept that the arrows that are flying at us are lies and this is the native tongue of the devil. … He is the father of lies. He’s trying to lie to you. This is why you have to hide His word in your heart,” Liebscher explained. “You have to fill your life with Scripture because it is truth. It is the shield against all these lies.” Some Christians tend to “drop the guard around their hearts,” Liebscher said, which results in lies being able to have a foothold in their lives. When this happens, the enemy finds access to plant seeds, he said. It's important to remain vigilant in this season, he posited, adding: “We are exhausted from all of the stuff; all the social media, all the news, all the pandemic, all the unrest, all the elections, put it all together — all the unknown, all the uncertainty. We’re just tired and so when this happens, we drop the guard around our heart.” He pointed out that physical health is directly related to spiritual health. He reminded listeners, "Don’t ever underestimate the power of a meal and nap.” “I think, as believers, sometimes we tend to separate the physical and spiritual. We somehow think they’re not connected. But listen to me, if you’re tired physically, it absolutely affects you spiritually. You begin to drop the guard, tired emotionally, tired physically, tired mentally.” Liebscher and Fusco agreed that when a Christian recognizes that they are experiencing pain, isolation and hurt, they should begin to plan how to cope with what they are feeling. All plans, however, should involve God. "Awareness of what’s going on inside without the presence of God becomes almost an adventure in narcissism,” Fusco said. “Those emotions are real. Those feelings are real. And if we don’t stop and we’re not honest or aware of it, then you just kind of move through the world wounded and broken, wounding and breaking people without God’s transformational presence at work,” he added. In every area of a Christian’s life there should be healthy fruit as outlined in the Bible, Liebscher said. The presence of God, he emphasized, contributes to this health. "Healthy fruit is a result of the soil you’re planting yourself in,” Liebscher said. “If you want to be healthy, if you want to bear fruit, then you got to be in the soil of God’s presence, you got to be in the soil of God’s Word and you got to be in the soil of God’s community," he concluded. "And that healthy, thriving, vibrant, fruit-bearing, freedom believers are found in the presence of God, in the Word of God and are found in the family of God.” LISTEN TO MORE CRAZY HAPPY PODCASTS HERE