The 10 Commandments and the Faith

As a student, I had a hiccup in history that I could not get past. It had to do with the whole idea that our nation is a Judeo-Christian nation. Judeo-Christian means that our roots are based upon not just Christianity but also Judaism. What confused me about the term was that none of the founders were Jewish. They were Christians or perhaps deists, though I think that perhaps is revisionists’ history. Jefferson had some pretty strong things to say about Christianity and the Bible. So given that we were founded by Christians, I wondered how we became a Judeo-Christian society. Then I learned that we are “Judeo-“ because of the shape of our government and justice system. In Isaiah, God is called our lawgiver, our judge and king. This gives us the three branches of government. Then of course the Old Testament Law, an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, became the bases of law for our society. But unlike most others, our justice was tempered with Christian grace.

So to say that our government is Judeo Christian is fair. To say that we are as a people? Well we started using that term more readily so that we would come across as inclusive of the Jewish immigrants fleeing Europe not too long ago. And that is where we became snagged as a Christian people. I am not talking about the government because Judeo-Christian principles worked for the structure of this republic.

In churches across the country, if you asked the average preacher if the 10 Commandments are something that should be taught and followed, most of us would say yes. Ask the average member, you would get nearly 100% saying yes. And this is nothing new.

Where the Law of Moses comes into the picture of faith has always been a hot topic. It was what was happening in Antioch with the Pharisees who went down from Judea.  But I wonder, even speculate, that there was more going on than just merely arguing the finer points of the 10 Commandments. Let’s read the passage this morning.

Now I will add a disclaimer here. Yes, I’ve added more. The argument was circumcision. But the circumcision is tied to the Law of Moses, which is often in short referred to as the Ten. When one point is argued and accepted, it becomes easy to accept other points as well. I equated the three into the term “Ten”. And since I am a big fan of advocating that we do not live by the Old Testament, since we are saved by faith alone, the Old Testament is still a useful tool of showing how Jesus was foretold as early as the Garden. It is complete with glimpses of God’s love, grace and justness. It shows glimpses of people who struggle with life no differently than you and I do today. But when we start following and adopting it, then we can run into trouble.

If the Ten is so important to follow, then may I ask who has a tattoo? All of us men here have beards that are way too short. And then there’s the clincher: who here likes pizza or catfish? Yep, both are unclean foods. All of us are wearing poly-blends. My point is that it’s all the same. If you argue circumcision, you argue the Law, you argue the Ten. That is where I am coming from in my message.

Now what is really going on here is something more than just arguing the Law. The critics could be hung up on the tradition. For as long as they knew, the Ten was part of their lives. The Ten was the first thing they learned past the names of their siblings as well as mom and dad. Now here is Paul and Barnabas out away from Jerusalem, away from Judea, teaching that the Law was no longer needed. I can see these men, themselves no longer needed back home, thinking that they could go to one of the new churches and become teachers, teaching what they knew, the Ten.

We never do well with change. But that is the nature of life. The only constant is change. Yesterday morning, an icon in the El Paso skyline fell. There was an old copper smelt that had two smoke stacks. One was as tall as the Empire State building, and the other was nearly 20 stories taller. They both came down because change happens.

So here we can see people who are having trouble letting go. Perhaps more than that, they perhaps still wanted the power that they no longer had. I am not saying that they set out to be bad people. But once one is used to being something, when he has to let it go, it is extremely difficult.

However if these men went out as enemies of the church, seeking to destroy those who are new in the Faith, then there is a lesson to mark. It teaches us that we need to be careful and on watch for those who’d want to sneak in and destroy the church. We need to cling to strong doctrine and appoint leaders over us who are as committed to the faith.

This is about the ego. Something that not only did the early church have to deal with, but we still have the ego to deal with today, be it the preacher’s ego or your own ego. Sometimes we can be well meaning, but when we allow our pride to step in, then we find ourselves creating a huge mess.

And there is another lesson for us about faith. Why circumcision mostly? I had originally intended to talk to you about the difference between baptism and circumcision, but that is not what this passage is about. This act is different from baptism in a couple of manners: women are not circumcised, and wet people dry.

So on one hand, by holding to this, we can have an outward sign that we can point to. “See? I am a Christian!” Um, yeah, I think they did that. “See? I am a Jew.” But outward signs are nothing according to Paul. What is important is the change of the heart, or the circumcision of the heart.

Like outward signs, the Ten is really about the minimal.  I am Christian because of the sign I wear, or the plastic fish icon on my bumper, or because I shared the “I love Jesus” poster on Facebook. Because I have done of the listed, then I am free to do what I want for the rest of the time.

Take for example the job description. They are a list of rules one must keep in order to maintain employment. As long as you stay within the job description, you keep your status. It is the same with the Ten. These are rules of minimums. Love God by not having any idols, by not using his name in vain, by honoring your parents, but not doing the five things to your neighbor. These are the minimums God wants you to keep in order to achieve a right standing. But there are just under 300 commands in the Law of Moses. If you live to keep the law, then you’ve violated the first, have no other gods. Why? Because God wants us to live for Him! God desires to have fellowship with you and I, AND He wants us to want that fellowship with Him as well. So Jesus grabs the only two ambiguous commands when asked of the greatest.

He said, “Love God with all your being and the second is like it, love your neighbor as you love yourself.” What does something like that look like? Instead of do not commit sexual impurity, Jesus said do not lust. Don’t even entertain such thoughts. And impurity is any relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman. Instead of do not murder, Jesus said do not be angry with your brother. Do not hate, but show your enemy love by allowing him to compel you the extra mile, which gives us, “Going the extra mile.” Give more than what is asked. This is why Jesus tells us to rethink our self importance. If you serve your neighbor, than you are loving him. If you are loving him, the Apostle John says, then you are loving God. Well, no one can hate his neighbor and love God is more accurate. But my claim is still true.

Faith isn’t about the minimums. It is about the max. This is why living with the Ten is bad advice for Christians because we tend to confuse ourselves into believing that holding them, we have done our duty. But our Father doesn’t want our duty. He wants us to aim as high as possible for the Kingdom. Faith is taking steps that everyone says is not there, that everyone says is impossible. But for the size of a mustard seed, you can cast by faith the mountain into the vast sea.

Again, in the parable of the talents, did you notice the only failure in that parable was the one who sat on the money. He didn’t aim and fail. He just didn’t aim. That’s the ten. Faith is like the one who invested his 5,000 and had 10 to show, or the man who invested his 2,000 and had 4 to show. They doubled because they had faith.

Now we must ask ourselves, but not just today, are we living minimally for God, or do we truly have faith in the Father? When we set aside rules and traditions, when we aim high, let me tell you: that speaks volumes more than some outward appearance. People do notice when someone truly walks a life of faith. Would you like to have such a life of faith?

When the Crowd, Win the Crowd (Sermon)

See Paul sitting there in Lystra? He had just been run out of a town because some rose up against his preaching Jesus.  Now he is here in this new location. I can see him preaching to both the Jews and the Gentiles. To the Jews he’s said that Jesus came to redeem Israel and the world, that he is the long awaited messiah. To the Greeks I can see him preaching the freedom that Jesus offers, freedom from relying on others’ charities, freedom from obeying sets of rules, freedom from the guilt of the wrong doing, freedom from the fear of the end or death. Then there is a man there sitting, listening, wanting. I can imagine him wishing that he didn’t need to beg for scraps and pity. It is always been in the heart of man to want to provide for himself and perhaps even provide for those he loves. It’s a base instinct.

And Paul saw him listening, believing all that Paul had to say. To demonstrate his message, Paul then tells this man to stand up. Not only does the man stand, but he adds jumping. Mind you, he’s never been vertical. His ankles have never had weight of any sort on them. He starts walking instantly. I wonder if he was like my boys, still occasionally tripping, or was he graceful as if he’d been doing this all along? It doesn’t really matter. He was healed.

Then Paul learned something about the human nature. The human heart, which Jeremiah says can’t be trusted, is fickle, and can’t be trusted. Let’s read the people’s reaction to Paul’s good work following his good words.

(Read Verses 11-18) So here is Paul, instantly he’s Lycaonium’s pastor. Everyone likes him. He is at the top of his game, so much so, that they want to see him as a god. There is that temptation within leadership, just as there has been with being part of the “right” church. When the crowd cheers you, focus on God. It can become easy to lose focus on Jesus. After all, look back to Peter. He walked on water, further than you and I, but the moment he lost his focus, he sank.  Thankfully, Paul and Barnabas didn’t. They continued pleading with the people, barely stopping them from making the sacrifices to them. They continued stating that God is living, and continues to show His love and grace. It was a close call. But when the crowd cheers you, focus on God.

(Read verse 19a) But not everything remained up and up. The crowd turned on Paul and Barnabas. For some reason, crowds are never reliable. It is too easy to turn an audience into a mob. I am not sure how long it took the Jews to turn the masses, day or two, a week or month? Luke gives us no passage of time, other than the allusion of the passage in verses 8 and 9. The man listened to Paul speak. For how long did Paul speak before the man believed?

Here is why, though, we cannot trust and live by our emotions, live by our heart, live by our feelings. One moment, the people are in awe as they listened to God give the 10 commandments to them. Then begging in reverent fear for Moses to intercede, they turned and made a golden calf. I believe that when they heard the first 10, they were in earnest. But a few days later, perhaps a week or two, they turned away. They earnestly made a calf.

The crowd is fickle when one day; they are out clipping branches and laying blankets in the road welcoming Jesus as their rightful king. They were in earnest. They truly believed him to the long awaited king. Then just a few days later, 5 to be exact, the crowds are now saying, “crucify Jesus!” And unfortunately, they were in earnest.

Now some people come to stir up trouble because they were envious of the popularity of Paul. I can see the poisoned words, “Paul said your gods were worthless. He said that your parents who died worshipping Zeus are now dead in their sins.” It wouldn’t take much to poison a person’s mind.

I remember talking to one lady in a previous ministry. She said that to accept immersion as I teach it, instead of sprinkling, as her Lutheran priest taught, then she will not see him, or her deceased husband, or her deceased parents and siblings again. She would rather suffer with them if my teaching was correct and hers was wrong. Be it known, I never said where the fate of her loved ones rested. I said, and still say, trust in the Lord and his mercy and grace!  Yet, when the crowds jeer, focus on God.

(Read 19b & 20) The final lesson that Paul teaches us is when the crowds abandon, focus on God. That is the cycle of the crowd. They will praise us, then boo us and then leave us. They left Paul thinking he was dead. They didn’t kill him. But I do think a miracle did take place. I do think he was healed since he got up and seemed to have returned to the town before he left the next day. I imagine that he waited only because the day was already too late for traveling.  But when he did leave, he continued preaching. He continued winning people to the Lord.

For us, we are fighting a temptation. It would be easy to see us as having been abandoned by the many who’ve been part of this congregation. The world and the devil would say, “See how small you are? There’s no hope that this church has what it takes to grow!” But then we still have Paul’s promise to the church in Corinth. We have all we need to carry out the mission. We just need to focus on Jesus. We need to focus on reaching our lost loved ones with the good news that Jesus died to set us free. We reach, God adds.

Now the crowds may cheer us as we do so. The sad reality though, as we focus on God, on living righteous lives, or to live according to the grace we’ve received, the crowds will more than likely jeer us. It will give us a choice. We may think that we are to focus on ourselves, but no. That is not the solution. The solution is to focus on Christ. It’s not sitting around, hoping people will drop in through our doors. It is actually making a point to encourage people in Jesus, to talk about the Lord’s grace and ask them to consider Jesus. Time and again, God shows how when the crowds… we should win the crowds for Christ. Then the Lord added daily to their number those being saved. Are you ready to win? Do you need to know how to win? If so, come as we stand and sing.

Oh Great Day of Hope - Matthew 27.50-53 (Sermon)

This indeed is a Great Day!  And though I can easily take the time of the message to lay out why I prefer Easter as the title for our Christian holiday, I want to do something that is different today. I have elected a passage that is pre-burial in part, but not really pre-burial.

Because it goes beyond what we can fathom, I suspect many gloss over these 4 verses. There is no real simple explanation, other than the most simplistic of explanations. It finds a foretelling in Ezekiel 37, how God told Ezekiel to prophesy so that the valley of bones becomes flesh, and then again so that these bodies might regain their breath. He obeyed and a valley of dry bones became an army.

Of course, this is fascinating. Though Ezekiel is in a vision, what was happening in Jerusalem that day was no vision. It was happening, and because it happened, we have a great day, and we have a great hope! Let’s look at this passage, Matthew 27.50-53. {Read Text}

Let us see the good news of the Resurrection. The first and foremost is the reason Christ came to this earth. Back in the Garden, man was created in the image of God, the Lord Almighty. He created them male and female. He said above all creation that Man and Woman were very good. They knew no sin, felt no shame. Daily they walked with God. They enjoyed fellowship with Him. But along the way, Satan came in to corrupt this fellowship. He deceived Eve and she ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Adam, not wanting to lose her, shared in her sin. In their choice, they lost the garden. God had to banish them. He would not abide in sin. They were sentenced. Justice would be coming.

Then skipping a couple of ions, we see a little old woman begging of David to bring his son back to court. She prophesied that God is not content with banishing his children, but looks for a way to restore the fellowship. Let me back up now, to the choosing of Abraham and his descendents of Isaac, his son by Sarah. (This is like a country dance, two steps forward, one step back.) God chose Abraham for the plan God had for creation. He was working on restoring the fellowship with His own creation.  But even as he was choosing Abraham, through Moses, he was teaching that the salvation wasn’t just for the line of Abraham, but for all nations. That’s why there was a court of the Gentiles.

That plan was to restore our fellowship with Him, and he would do so by coming into humanity as Jesus. Justice had to be paid, so our Father decided to take on this pain. So we would not need to know what it is to be alone, He was sin for us. Because he was sin, the veil separating us from God was ripped open. We now had the freedom to approach him on our own, without a priest, without a sacrifice for our wrongs. Isn’t that great?

It doesn’t matter what is going on in our lives. He wants us to draw near to him. He opened the door for us. His apostles quote Jesus in telling us that we can now casually call him daddy, or papa, as we would our earthly father. While we were strangers, steeped in our sin and guilt, in our shame, He died for us so we can embrace him, accept His offer.  That is what the ripped veil tells us. Come!

So that we know how much God loves us, how He longs for our fellowship, He gave us a token of what is to come. He gives us hope for more life. Mind you, when Christ died, saints from all over the world were not raised, only those in Jerusalem. And even then, not all the saints from Jerusalem were raised into life. Only some of the saints were raised. These saints had a two-fold purpose. They were first to be evidences of Christ’s command over death. In life he brought three back, even after the last one had been dead for 5 days. Why would this be different?

Ah but perhaps that is where there is differences. We do not know that they lived eternally at that point, or if, like Lazarus, they died again. We don’t even know who came back. Were these recently died or were some of these bones like Ezekiel? It is not unheard of for a cemetery to be called a valley of death. They are, after all, reminders that death comes to all. So we draw this conclusion that just as some were raised as Christ died, or maybe others were right, that they came to life when/after Christ did. What is important is that they came to life! And as we have placed our hope in Jesus, so too, will we come back to life. Unlike those from the cemetery, we will receive new bodies, free from the signs of trials we’ve faced in this life.

There is another application here. It is more personal, for us as a body, Central Christian Church of Stuttgart. We are few. Experts tell us that we are dead already. Once a church’s median age reaches 63, once a church drops to a dozen or less, there is no hope. But as you know, I am not one to rely on experts. Neither are you.

We, instead, serve a living God. You know that Jesus trusted everything to a group of 12. If we count the children, we are 12, a bit more. With that aside, let’s focus on this. Jesus conquered death. And just as in the act of Friday and Sunday, I firmly believe that He can do more than we can ask or imagine! Jesus breathed new life into bones. He can breathe new life into this congregation.

Our prayers must expect it. Father, build up your body as we strive to build your kingdom. Sure, we will take a bit more effort on each of our shoulders. Yet let us not focus on our strength to do this alone. Because Jesus is fully powerful, Paul tells us that He gives us the same power that raised Christ from the dead. It’s also why we have not only been given the strength to endure, to reach out to others, to do, to be vessels of God’s glory, but we have one another for encouragement.

This morning, we are reminded that it is a great day of hope in Christ Jesus. I want to therefore encourage you that not only will you see this day as a new day full of new opportunity, but I want you to see that this great day of hope is just the first day, as tomorrow will be another.

Let us open our eyes not to what we hear in the news and see around us, a world falling apart. Let us instead see the opportunities before us, see the fields white for the harvest.

Now we have our song of commitment, song of decision. We will sing #228, “Were You There”. We will sing verses 1, 4 and 5. Verse 5 is easy, though it’s not in the book. Were you there when he rose up from the dead. Oh sometimes it causes me to praise him. For those who are not clothed in Christ, what better day for you to make a decision for Christ? I invite you to come forward. Let us stand and sing.