Sermon Video - "Ananias and Sapphira", Acts 5:1-11

What is the nature of temptation?  Do believers fail because of external forces or internal faults?  Ananias and Sapphira both died because of there willingness to fake a charitable heart and thus lie to the Holy Spirit.  The additional tragedy of this situation is that they chose to enter into a temptation involving pride and greed when there were ample ways to avoid the situation.  It was a choice.  A choice to pick the "reward" of sin over the Truth of God; a bargain, but a fool's bargain. 

To watch the video, click on the link below:
Sermon Video

Jesus Christ is the same - Hebrews 13:8

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and forever."  A simple enough statement on the face of it, although I feel the need to insert a couple of commas.  What's so odd about something staying the same?  In reality, it is remarkable for anything to remain the same.  When we look at the physical world around us the one constant we see is change.  Nothing stays the say, everything is in a state of flux.  Our own lives are no different.  None of us are the same as we were ten years ago; not only have our bodies aged and changed (usually for the worse), but our relationships and our thinking as well.  Change is inevitable.
And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Isn't that what Solomon meant when he wrote, "there is nothing new under the sun.  Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look!  This is something new'?  It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time." (Ecclesiastes 1:9b-10)  Things such as death, taxes, man's inhumanity to man, natural disasters, pestilence, disease, and war are certainly not new.  The 24 hour news channels may report them as if they were a brand new thing, but we know we've seen them all before.
So what makes Jesus different?  The last word of the verse is "forever".  Everything I listed that we want go end, such as death, will one day be destroyed by the victory that Jesus accomplished with the Cross and the Empty Tomb.  One day, death will be no more, a new earth will be free of defect, and those who inhabit it will be free of sin.  Solomon knew that those things had all been around, and could see no way in which the evil in our world could be destroyed.  In God's wisdom, he sent his Son to our world to solve the dilemma that lead to Solomon's melancholy.
After God's final judgment of his creation, it will be God that remained the same throughout, from beginning to end, and his creation that (thankfully) returned to what it once was.  We will change, Jesus Christ has no need to; he will remain the same yesterday, today, and forever.

The Road to Freedom, April 9th, 1945

On the monday morning, with the war only weeks from ending, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Gestapo.  It marked the end of a decade of resistance by Bonhoeffer, first to the offical German Church's embrace of Hitler's Nazi racial theology, eventually to the Hitler regime itself culminating in his joining with the plotters in the failed Valkyrie plot.  In the end, Hitler personally ordered the death of Bonhoeffer and many other of the conspirators while he cowered in the rubble of Berlin awaiting his own suicide.  Evil, when it cannot have victory, is content with spite.  Similiar scenes were taking place all over Nazi occupied Europe as concentration camps hurried to kill as many innocents as possible before Allied troops arrived.

To Bonhoeffer, this end was a choice he would embrace if it was what God asked of him.  He could have stayed safely in America with rewarding teaching opportunities at seminaries that certainly would have benefited from his wisdom, but he chose to return to Germany to be with the Confessing Church (the opposition church formed to counter the Nazi takeover of the offical German Lutheran Church) pastors in their ongoing struggle against Hitler.  To give oneself wholly to God was the passion of his life.

If we allow ourselves to be sub-divided into a spiritual side that we give to God and a secular side that we reserve to ourselves, we will never be the Christians that God wants us to be.  Nor will we ever be as useful for the Kingdom of God as we could be.  It is only when we have decided firmly in our hearts that our lives are not our own that we can truly find lives of purpose and meaning.  This radical wisdom comes from Christ himself who said, "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 10:39)  Bishop Bell, a friend of Dietrich from his ecumenical efforts in London, ended his memorial sermon with the words, "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church".

No man knows the number of his days

Many who know me know that I have been dealing with several important life-direction choices in recents months and weeks.  For the most part, they've gone down in flames.  My attempt to join the Army as a chaplain was shot down (no pun intended) by a single doctor's opinion about the health of my knees (and yes, I'm still running and playing ball each week).  A couple of other opportunities have recently come to my attention, but there have been snags that may prevent them from working either.  In the midst of my own angst, and my genuine concern for the well being of my wife, I got a strange phone call this past week from my best friend.
I've received hundreds of call from him over the years, we've played sports together and hung out for almost thirty years, but this call was different.  The voice on the other end of the line was strained and sounded weaker somehow.  It didn't take long before he told me that he was in the hospital.  Having played basketball together six days prior I at first thought it was a joke; but it wasn't.  Long story short, my friend had been rushed to the hospital for an emergency situation that while treatable, could have been life threatening if no dealt with quickly.  We're both 36, our birthdays are a month apart; that's a wake-up call.  While I was worried about the direction of my career, my finances, and my wife (all legit things), my best friend was suddenly facing a very serious medical situation.  In the long-run, he'll be fine and this will be a blip on the radar, but it is also a reminder that none of us know the day or hour appointed for us by the Lord.  We don't know how long we have on this Earth to make a difference, how much time we'll have with our loved ones, or how many 2nd and 3rd chances we'll get to do the right thing.  Let's not waste any more of that time, it's too precious.
Get better soon, those 18 year old kids still need to be taught some lessons on the court.

We are indeed all mortals...Isaiah 40:7-8

"The grass withers and the flowers fall,
because the breath of the LORD blows on them.
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God endures forever.”

I came across this text today, quoted by Peter in I Peter 1:24-25, and it reminded me of conversations I've had in the last 24 hours with my mother and my mother-in-law about two of our relatives whose health is failing and for whom we've been praying.  We have a rather long life expectancy in America, but in the view of eternity, our time here is short.  What do we make of this?  Do we shout "carpe diem" and try to live each day like it is our last, or do we plan long-term and try to leave something behind that will last when we're gone?  The answer is both.  We must strive to make each day count, but we must also be wise builders who invest in the future and who take our responsibility seriously as members of the body of Christ.  God's Church will continue long after we're gone, his Word will endure forever.  God willing, the sacrifices we make for his kingdom will be enjoyed by the next generation.