[Machine transcription]
Nathaniel said to Philip,
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
Philip said to him,
Come and see.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus,
Amen.
Dear Jordan the baptized,
Dear Nate,
Dear Jake and Nicole and Aslan and Jake the Sharper family,
Dear Morgan,
dear Leanne, the Lord grant you his joy and peace in believing now and forever.
Amen. We are tempted to distress. We are tempted to fear and trouble. We are
tempted by seeing all the things collapsing around us to forget that the
the Lord is our refuge, and our peace,
and ever-present help in every time of trouble.
There is a reason, dear saints,
that the fathers in the church decided
that if you can, you should build your sanctuary,
and what a beautiful name that is, the sanctuary,
that you should build your sanctuary
in the shape of an upside-down boat,
so that we would remember that the Lord’s church
is the holy ark that keeps us safe
If no matter what the trouble is, even if a flood, think about this, even if a flood
were to come and wipe away the entire world, the Lord would not let you perish.
He will keep you safe.
He will preserve you.
He will protect you.
He will watch over you.
He will guide you, and He will bring you at last to eternal life.
All those who belong to Him are safe.
And we should rejoice in this,
especially in troubled times.
We rejoice that the Lord gathers us to His safety.
Like Jesus says, remember Jerusalem?
Oh, how I’ve longed to gather you
like a hen gathers together her little baby chicks,
I suppose, and I’ve always,
whenever I would try to preach stuff like this,
people would say, pastor, you are too urban.
You don’t have any idea what it looks like for a chicken to sit on its little baby chicks.
Apparently, what it looks like is that, you know, when the chicken hawk or whatever else
is hungry for chicken, is flying around, that the mother hen would gather, spread out her
wings and puff out her wings and that she would just sit on the chicken so that if anything
bad was going to happen, it had to go through her first.
First, so Jesus has gathered you into the shadow of his wing, where you’re safe.
We rejoice in that all the time, but especially on Sunday morning when the Lord gathers us
here.
We should rejoice in that safety, in this sanctuary, in this peace and protection and
joy that the Lord gives to us.
That’s why he gathers us together, to bless us in this way.
It’s what it means to be a Christian.
Now, I want to meditate on that, what it means to be a Christian, a little bit this morning,
because there are a lot of, what, competing narratives about what it means to be a Christian.
I was wondering, and we’ve talked about this too, I just⦠I wonder sometimes what
the world thinks it means to be a Christian, what our neighbors, our unbelieving neighbors
and friends think that we do when we gather together in church, what the people across
the street⦠what right now is their⦠having brunch, what they⦠what they’re guessing
that we’re doing in here. Now, I don’t know. I’m interested in your guesses on this, and
so I’d love for you to tell me, but here’s my best guess. I think that they think that
we came in here to talk about how bad they are, to talk about what great sinners are outside
the walls of the church, to talk about how bad and wicked the world is, and by comparison
and how holy we are to wag our fingers at everyone out there and to puff ourselves up
for being Christian.
Can you imagine?
Or maybe they think we’re in here plotting an overthrow of the government, who knows?
But to come in here, we come to confess.
And think about this.
When we say confess in the Christian church, we mean two distinct things.
they’re related to one another, but we come to confess our faith and we also come to confess
our sin.
And we start with our sin.
The very first thing that you said, we didn’t have it this morning because of the baptism,
the very first thing that you normally say when you come into the liturgy is that you
are a poor, miserable sinner, that you’re not innocent, that you’re not holy, that you’re
not perfect, that you’re a sinner, that you’ve broken God’s law, you’ve broken
His commandments, you’ve done with your life, your actions, your deeds, your words,
your thoughts, your neglect, that you have broken God’s commandment. And not only
that, you say that you deserve not just a slap on the wrist, a timeout, that you deserve
his temporal and eternal punishment, temporal and eternal. In other words, the first thing
that the Christian knows, the first thing that we know about ourselves is that we are
guilty, that we are condemned, that we are lawbreakers, that we are sinners, that we
have fallen short of the glory of God. If you don’t know that, you are not a Christian.
If you don’t know that you have broken God’s law,
you don’t have that first knowledge of what it means.
But that’s not the only thing we know.
The Christian is not interested in
picking the speck out of everybody else’s eye
while we recognize the great log in our own.
We know that the problem is us.
We know that I deserve the Lord’s wrath and punishment.
But we know something more.
We know that Jesus is gracious to sinners.
We know that Jesus is the Savior of sinners.
We know that Jesus came to seek and to save the lost.
Now, we talked about what other unbelievers think about what happens in the church, but
I also think it’s interesting to think what most Christians think happens in church.
I’m going to hazard a guess here.
I think that most Christians, even, who are baptized and who call on the Lord’s name,
most Christians think that their Christian life is about their own progression in good
works, their journey to get holier and holier, their works and their efforts.
In fact, it’s one of the tragedies of modern Christianity that the gospel, the kindness
of the Lord Jesus in His death on the cross is preached to the people who are outside
the church, but then once you’re inside, once you’re baptized, now you’ve got to get busy.
Now you’ve got to get after it.
You meet Jesus at the door, but once you’re inside, it’s all Moses.
Your efforts, your striving, your works, it’s one of the dangers, I think, for those of
you who are being confirmed today,
it’s one of the dangers that you think,
because we’ve been going to class for six months now
on Monday nights, studying the Lord’s Word,
and it seems like maybe Christianity is a little bit
about our efforts and our doing, our journey to heaven,
but this is not the case.
Christian life is not about ascending to Jesus,
or climbing to him, or journeying to him.
Can you imagine that, just that you’re gonna meet Jesus,
Listen, he’s in Alaska and you’re here in church
and you call him on the phone and you say,
all right, we got to meet.
Should I come there to meet you?
He says, no, no, no, no.
He says, well, do you want to meet halfway in Washington?
Oh, no, no, no.
Well, what about a third of,
what should we meet in Colorado
or whatever’s in between here and there?
No, no, I’m going to come to you.
You say, okay, well look, I’ll meet you in Waco.
No, he says, I’m gonna come to you.
And he says, okay, okay, Jesus.
Well, I’ll meet you outside.
That’s closer.
But then you hang up the phone and look
and he’s sitting next to you already.
When he comes, this is the point.
Jesus comes all the way to you.
It’s not you finding him.
It’s really quite beautiful in the gospel text.
That word found, look, it comes up over,
he found Philip, he says to him,
follow me.
It’s Jesus who does the finding.
Jesus is the good shepherd
who leaves the 99 in the wilderness
and goes to find the one that’s lost.
And he tracks you down.
And he puts you on his shoulder
and he carries you home.
Christianity is being found by Jesus.
It’s being known by Him, sought by Him,
blessed by Him, forgiven by Him,
declared holy by Him who was crucified, died,
buried, and risen on the third day for you.
That’s what it’s about.
It’s not about us,
but about the Lord Jesus Christ.
If you want to know the most Christian thing
that we do in this life,
it’s this.
We listen to His voice.
Jesus said it like this,
my sheep, remember,
my sheep hear my voice
and they follow me.
We listen as the Lord comes to us in the midst of our sin and trouble and says,
I forgive you. We listen as He comes in the midst of tribulation and says, I’m
with you. We listen as He comes to us in the darkness and says, I am the light. We
listen as He comes to us in sickness and says, I am the good physician. We listen
as He comes to us on our deathbed and He says, I am the resurrection and the life.
All who believe in me will not perish, but have life everlasting.”
We listen to His voice, and He gives us promises, and He cannot lie.
So we rejoice that Jesus found Philip, that He found Nathanael, that He found Andrew and
John and Peter and Jordan and Nate.
We rejoice that He found us, that He delivered us, and that He’s bringing us to life eternal.
Now, I don’t know, again, what the world thinks it means to be a Christian, or even what Christians think it means to be Christian,
But this is what Jesus thinks.
You are baptized.
You are part of his family.
You are the children of God.
You are loved with a love that will bring you
from life through death to life eternal
to stand with him in the resurrection.
And we know that whatever trouble comes,
height and depth and death and life
and whatever sort of trouble comes,
that He is with us, that He is ours, and that we are His.
May God grant us the confidence then in being the disciples of Jesus, being His sheep, and
being His.
And may this confidence carry us through every trouble until we see Him face to face.
May God grant it for Christ’s sake, amen.
and the peace of God which passes all understanding. Guard your hearts and
minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
