[Machine transcription]
Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. Hallelujah. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
I want to look at the first lesson and the epistle this morning, and I’ll tell you
why in just a little bit, but we can’t â we just simply can’t skip the gospel. So I’m
going to just give you a couple of hints at the gospel in the hopes that as you’re thinking
about it this week and as you’re meditating on it and talking with each other that this
will come up. Jesus comes joyfully, almost playfully, to the disciples. He asks them
if they’ve caught any fish. He knows. No, they say, well, you’re looking on the wrong
side of the boat. All the fish are under the boat, Jesus. But they throw the net on the
right side, and there’s 153 fish, and they say, oh, we’ve been through this before. It’s
The Lord, Peter jumps into the water and he swims ashore, and he finds that Jesus has
prepared there on the shore a charcoal fire.
You remember what happened last time Peter was at a charcoal fire?
I don’t know him.
He swore an oath, I don’t know him, before the rooster crowed twice.
But now Jesus has another charcoal fire with fish and bread all ready, and he says, do
you love me?
Three times.
Remember that there’s different Greek words for love, and that’s part of the drama in
the text.
You can’t see it.
So Jesus says, do you agape me?
And Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I phileo you.
Agape is the basic term for love, but it’s God so loved the world and men loved the darkness.
That’s the agape.
Phileo is the brotherly affection.
Do you agape me?
You know I phileo you.
Do you agape me?
Lord, you know I phileo you.
Then Jesus says, Peter, do you phileo me?
And he was distressed because the Lord asked him
and he says, Lord, you know all things you know.
I phileo you.
That’s some of the drama in the text.
And then it ends with this beautiful thing
where Jesus says, follow me.
That’s what he said last time when he called them
when they were fishing and he made them disciples.
But just not, let’s not miss this,
that Jesus is about to ascend into heaven
and still they’re going to follow Him, just like you.
You follow Jesus, even though He sits at the right hand of the throne of God.
It’s a beautiful text.
But I want to look at the first lesson from Acts and the epistle from Revelation,
and this is why.
I don’t know if you all do this, but I am a forgetful person,
and so to remember things I have to leave myself notes.
And, you know, like a sticky note on my desk.
Every day, I wake up and there’s a sticky note on my desk that tells me what not toâ¦
And it’s still half the time it doesn’t work, right?
Take out the trash or don’t forget the catechism awards in church today or something like this.
I’m always making myself notes.
But those are the to-do things.
But we forget even more important things, and I don’t know if you’ve ever made yourself
a sticky note like this, but just a couple of days ago, I made a little note that I
put on my dashboard on my car that says, first, thanks, which is reminding me that when I
get in the car and I’m leaving the house and going to do whatever I’m doing, that I ought
to be thankful, that we ought to wake up thankful that we start with Thanksgiving.
You can imagine someâ¦
I have a note that I wrote somewhere else that said, you belong to Jesus.
And it’s good to remind ourselves of this because we forget.
We think that, I don’t know, we think we belong to ourselves or we think we belong
to the grave or to the devil.
You belong to Jesus.
It’s good to remember.
But these two texts, I want to take these two texts and put a sticky note on your mirror
or on your conscience, the two pictures that the text gives us.
The first from the book of Acts, the conversion of Paul, and the second from Revelation, the
lamb on the throne.
Because these two texts are reminding us of things that we are easy to forget.
And the first one is this in Acts chapter 9, which by the way, so there’s a little typo
in your bulletin that says that Luke wrote that in the year 690, just take the zero off.
It was 69 A.D., but these events happened probably in the year 36 or 37 A.D.
Stephen is martyred, and Saul was there overseeing the death of Stephen, and then he wasn’t content
to just stamp out Christianity in Jerusalem, but he wanted to stamp out Christianity everywhere.
So he goes to the Sanhedrin, and he gets papers authorizing him to arrest and bring back to
It’s like extradition papers.
He can arrest, bind, and bring back any person who follows Jesus, and he can bring them back
to Jerusalem to try them and then to put them to death.
I mean, remember when the disciples are all afraid in the upper room after Easter and
we wonder what are they afraid of?
They’re afraid of Saul.
He’s the kind of guy that they’re afraid of because he was after them.
He hated Christians.
Christians.
He hated the confession of Christ, and so he’s traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus
in order to destroy Christians.
And they heard about it.
They knew he was coming.
But on the way, the Lord claims him.
On the way, the Lord appears to him, and he falls on the ground, and he says, Saul, Saul,
why are you persecuting me?
And he says, who are you, Lord?
And he says, I am Jesus who you are persecuting.
Note by the way that Jesus suffers with us.
As the church is persecuted, so Jesus is also persecuted.
I am Jesus who you are persecuting.
Rise and enter the city and you will be told what to do.
And then he’s blind so he has to be led into the city.
And he is now on his way to becoming a Christian.
This is the thing that I don’t want us to forget.
forget. Jesus converts people. Do you know how easy it is to forget? And that forgetfulness
results in fear and worry, I think. We have friends and family that don’t know Jesus,
that are not Christian, that don’t believe in Him, that haven’t brought our nieces and
nephews and our grandchildren and our friends to be baptized. And we think that they’re
unbelievers now, and there’ll be unbelievers always, and we worry.
Or there’s people who hate the confession of Christ, who hate the name of Jesus, who
hate the Scripture, and they bring that anger against you.
I don’t know who it is, but maybe it’s your boss or someone who’s writing HR policy
or something like this.
And you see that they were at enmity with Jesus today, they were at enmity with Jesus
yesterday, they’ll be at enmity with Jesus tomorrow, and we’re afraid.
We worry and we’re afraid because we forget that Jesus converts people.
So the Lord sends Saul to Damascus and he sends Ananias to go see him.
He comes to Ananias and he says, Ananias, I need you to go and visit someone.
And Ananias, who seems like he’s the pastor there in Damascus, and he says, okay, Lord,
who do you want me to go and visit?
And he says, Saul.
What?
Saul?
Saul, that’s the guy who came here to arrest us.
I was hiding from him.
I was hoping that I would not run into him.
I was planning to never see him in my life.
It’s like the, you know, we got the severe thunderstorm warning that came yesterday.
That’s how the church in Damascus was with Saul.
There was a severe Saul warning, take cover.
However, he’s on his way to get you, and the Lord says to Ananias, “‘Rise and go to the
street, to Straight Street, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul.
For behold, he’s praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and
lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.'”
Do you think that Ananias said, Lord, maybe before you gave him the vision of me coming
you should have asked me first?
No.
It’s great.
The Lord gives him the vision of Ananias coming and then says, by the way, Ananias, you better
get going.
And he does.
Faithfully he goes.
And he lays his hands on him.
I mean, well, first, Lord, I’ve heard from many about this man, how much evil he’s done
to your saints at Jerusalem.
And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on your name.
But the Lord says go I’ve chosen him. He belongs to me. He will carry my name before the Gentiles
I’ll teach him all that he has to suffer for the sake of my name
So Ananias goes and he finds Saul and he lays his hands on him and he calls him. This is so wonderful
brother Saul
It’s not enemy Saul
It’s not persecutor Saul
brother Saul
the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came has sent me to you that you may be
that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit and
immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his
sight and he stood up and he was baptized and then he went to lunch. In fact not
only that he then goes to preach in the synagogue and he goes into the
synagogue and he argues Jesus is the Christ. Not only was this not what the
Christians were expecting it wasn’t what the Jews in the synagogue were expecting
either because Jesus converts.
I’m afraid a little bit for the Lutheran church and I’m afraid a little bit for myself that
I, that we have lost the expectation of conversion, that we forget that this is what Jesus does,
that He goes after His enemies, that He died for them.
Remember how astonished the Pharisees were that Jesus was eating with sinners?
I think we should be equally astonished that Jesus was eating with the Pharisees,
but He’s after us all. And this fact that Jesus converts gives us joy because He’s
converted us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His glorious light.
And because those that you love, He’s after.
And those that hate you, He’s after.
So let’s put this picture of the conversion of Saul on a sticky note and remember it every
day.
Jesus is in the conversion business.
The next picture is from Revelation.
It’s a beautiful picture.
It’s heaven.
And it’s one of these old throne room visions
like Ezekiel had or like Isaiah had or Amos.
They were there doing what they were doing
and then all of a sudden it’s like the curtain
was peeled back and they could see
the throne room of God there.
And John is in exile, so he was the pastor in Ephesus,
probably the bishop of the whole of Asia.
He was pastoring there and there was persecution
against the church and they said you can’t be a pastor,
you can’t preach the name of Jesus, and so they sent him in exile to the island of Patmos.
And there he is on Sunday studying and praying, and all of a sudden he has this vision, and
there is the throne of God, and there is God in His glory, and in the hand of God is a
scroll rolled up and sealed with seven seals.
And John knows, almost intuitively it seems, that this scroll has to be opened if the world
is going to be saved.
And so, they’re looking for someone worthy to open the scroll, and nobody is found.
And John realizes it, and he starts to weep.
In fact, it doesn’t just say he’s crying, so I always picture John weeping, like, maybe
a little bit sad, and the tears just barely dripping out of theâ¦
But it doesn’tâ¦
It says that he loudly wept.
Loudly.
He’s wailing.
I began to weep,” this is chapter 5 verse 4, I began to weep loudly because no one was
found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it.
If that scroll can’t be opened, then we are doomed, John and the church and everybody
else and he knows it, and so he’s weeping that there’s no one worthy to open the scroll.
But then one of the elders comes to him and says, stop crying, look, the Lion of the tribe
of Judah, the root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and the seven
seals.”
It’s one of these things that happens in the book of Revelation, just as a little aside,
but you’re going to hear something and see something, and what you hear is different
than what you see, but it’s describing the same thing.
And so the elder says, there’s one who can open the scroll, it’s a lion, he’s conquered,
he can tear it open with the strength of his mouth, and he’s on the way.
Now, I don’t know how you would react if I told you that I brought a lion to show you
this morning and he’s going to come through the door here.
I don’t think you’d be too worried because you wouldn’t believe me.
But if you did believe me, you would be worried, right?
You would be a little bit nervous about what’s going to come around the corner if I had somehow
access to a bunch of lions.
So imagine that you’re worried that a lion is going to come through the door, and then
look what happens.
Verse 6, between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a lamb.
Here comes a lion and through the door walks a lamb, and both of those are describing Jesus,
the lion of the tribe of Judah, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
And he’s not, he’s standing there alive, but he’s wounded.
In fact, he’s standing though he had been slain, still with the wounds of his slaughter.
That’s Jesus with the holes in His hands and His feet, seven horns, seven eyes, the
seven spirits of God sent into the earth, and He, this Lion, this Lamb, this Jesus,
this Savior, He goes and He takes the scroll from the right hand of Him who is seated on
the throne, and He sits down on the throne.
Now here’s the second thing that I forget that the devil would tempt you to forget as
well is that Jesus is on the throne.
When we watch the news at night,
we’re tempted to think that the devil is on the throne.
When you read the newspaper in the morning,
you’re tempted to think that the world is out of control.
When you listen to the news
or when you hear the stories of tragedies
as you drive around or as you talk to your friends,
you think that it must not be that Jesus is on the throne,
but let this picture, let this vision
and captivate your own imagination, it’s true.
Jesus, your Jesus, the one who died for you,
who carried your sins and endured God’s wrath in your place,
this one is on the throne at this very moment
and he’s ruling and reigning all things
for the sake of his body, the church.
Now this matters.
I don’t know if you’re like me,
But I just, it just seems to me like the world is sort of spinning out of control.
And so I’ve got to put this sticky note on the mirror.
It’s a throne, and on the throne is the Lamb.
And it reminds me that Jesus is the King of kings.
That Jesus is the Lord of lords.
And that He, through the midst of all of the troubles of this life, He is the one who is
making all things, working all things together for the good of those who love Him and are
called according to His purpose.
Now there’s two pieces of comfort that I want to take from this for you, just very quickly.
Number one, that Jesus is in charge.
And number two, that Jesus is in charge with His blood.
So the first comfort is to know that everything is not out of control as it seems, but the
Second is to know that everything is under His control for your salvation.
Worthy is He to take the scroll and open the seals because He was slain and by His blood
He has ransomed all people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.
And He has made us a kingdom of priests to reign with Him.
So, may God grant us this comfort, this perpetual reminder that Jesus converts and that Jesus
rules, and He does all of these things for our benefit.
May this be our comfort and our wisdom and our peace.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Christ is risen.
He has risen indeed.
Hallelujah.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus
Christ our Lord.
Amen.
