Immanuel Lutheran Church Weekly Devotion

Advent Devotion - Sunday 2 December 2012

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    Psalm 25:4-5, 8-10, 14 --  ⁴ Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. ⁵ Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.
    ⁸ Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. ⁹ He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way. ¹⁰ All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.
    ¹⁴ The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes his covenant known to them.

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        I value my friends; they are near and dear to me. If you look at my Facebook page you may think that I have many friends. I may know many people and be acquainted with them, yet I would not call all of them my friends. My friends are a very select group, people that I care very much about. Some I have known for years, since childhood, others I have recently known. I have friends in Montana, Maryland, Missouri and Minnesota, as well as other states and lands. Our connections and relationship with each other have transcended time and distance.
        Yet how many of us would consider God or Jesus as a friend? Jesus or God offers us a friendship that is beyond our human understanding. God offers us steadfast love and faithfulness. To have God as a friend is to know that God is not fickle, God will not cast us aside. Yes, we have friends we highly value, but do they offer the faithfulness and love God offers us? Our friends may be by our side when the chips are down for us, but they have lives to live and they cannot be with us 24/7, the way God can. But to have a friend in God or Jesus does not discount our earthly friends. How can we know God’s love and faithfulness but through our friends who stand by us? When our friends care for us and are by our side we see the incarnational face of God through our friends  love and faithfulness. The psalmist is asking God to teach him divine truths and the path God will guide him upon. The eternal truth: God’s steadfast love and faithfulness given for us through His Son Jesus, who comes into our lives, our world. Jesus calls us to model this with those around us in our community, people we meet when our paths cross. If we want to experience this steadfast love and faithfulness of God, let us model this same steadfast love and faithfulness to not only our friends but all people who we meet in life. God’s steadfast love and faithfulness is to be shared with others, so we may know it ourselves.

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    We pray: Dear Lord, we long to have this friendship with you. Yet we are the ones who turn away. Forgive us, welcome us back to you, so we may experience your  faithfulness and  love for us. In Your Holy Name we pray.  Amen.

Immanuel Lutheran Church Weekly Devotion
    Monday 10 December 2012

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    NRSV Isaiah 12:2-3  Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the LORD GOD is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation. With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

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    Salvation - is a word used by the Church quite a bit, after all, it is our mission to tell people about salvation. In the study of theology there is even a special branch of theological study called soteriology  - the study of the doctrine of salvation. So how well have we done our job as the Church? How would you define salvation; what does it mean to you? I asked my congregation to ponder this question during my sermon. I had a father of a young man, who is a 6th grader, tell me his son’s response: salvation means to be rescued. This works for me. But what are we rescued from and what are we rescued for? Martin Luther said salvation means we are rescued from sin, death and the devil. This is one side of the equation, but what are we rescued for? We have to be rescued  for something otherwise why be rescued at all?
        Sin does take its toll on us. Because of sin we are in need of rescue, so our lives can be salvaged. We are like a ship, we are at the helm and we have ignored the charts telling us about the reef; we have turned away from the advise of our pilot who warns us to be careful of the danger of obstacles ahead; we have been clueless regarding the weather and the impending storm breaking around us; we and we alone are responsible for running our ship up on the reef and wrecking the ship. We are on the reef and we can’t get off. Jesus is in charge of this salvage operation, Jesus will rescue us. Why would Jesus do this? Jesus sees the value in us, even though we are a shipwreck. Jesus gives his life to rescuing, restoring and salvaging us. Jesus wants us to reach the safe harbor, safe from storm and strife, where we will know peace, the peace that passes all human understanding. That safe harbor is timeless reunion and restoration with God. Through Jesus, we are able to be rescued and experience this divine fellowship with our creator, because God loves us.
        Right now our life is on the reef, the wind and waves batter us; we are in peril of breaking up. We seek to be rescued from our destruction and have our lives salvaged so we can experience this love of God and be secure in our relationship with God. Jesus is our salvation, Jesus rescues us and will pilot us to God’s peaceful and loving harbor. We wait for the one who will come rescue us and save us from destruction.

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    We pray: We have turned from You, O Lord; we face destruction. Only through Your Son, Jesus can we be rescued, saved from destruction and renew our relationship with You. Help us to wait and watch, and be ready. In Your Holy Name we pray.  Amen.

Immanuel Lutheran Church Weekly Devotion

Monday  26 November 2012

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1 Thessalonians 3:10 - 12, NJB
We are earnestly praying night and day to be able to see you face to face again and make up any shortcomings in your faith. May God our Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, ease our path to you. May the Lord increase and enrich your love for each other and for all, so that it matches ours for you.

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      In this passage from 1st Thessalonians, I would say, Paul is being a little presumptive regarding his judgement of the faith of this worshiping community. Yet you can insert any congregation here. We all have shortcomings regarding our faith. But Paul’s prayer is an earnest request for God to be at work in this congregation. Paul wants to desperately visit with them. Paul loves them and cares for them. He wants them to grow in their love for Christ and for each other. It is my prayer, that Paul’s prayer would be for all congregations, in all times and places. Our human fallibility is not only open to doubts regarding our faith, but distrust, hostility towards one another. Unless you were living very primitively, far from American society, you were a witness to just how depraved and hostile we can be towards each other during this past political campaign. Our political campaigns now celebrate how debased this process has become, rather than being an enlightening and uplifting political process. We have sunk to the lowest common denominator, rather than aspiring to a virtuous ideal.
      Paul is calling on the Thessalonians to love each other and all people, but he is not saying they have to agree with all people. We all can love and care for each other. This is not that difficult to do. What is difficult to do, is setting aside our differences so that we can love and care for each other. Our humanity gets in the way of the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. We engage our divine calling of Kingdom building in fits and starts. It is hard to be a disciple and to be a Kingdom builder. Paul is calling us – with God’s help – to engage this process, to be faithful to this process, not to be successful at this process. We ourselves will never be able to bring about the Kingdom of God; only when Jesus returns will He be able to usher in God’s Kingdom. We start and work on building the Kingdom, Jesus will come and finish the job with us. This is God’s plan for us, this is how God fulfills the divine promise made to us. He sends His Son – to us. This is what we wait and watch for, patiently, with hopeful expectation.

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We pray: The apostle Paul prays for us to love and care for each other. Yet our human vices get in the way of our virtues. Forgive our shortcomings, help us to have courage to strive towards virtue and be righteous before you. In Your Holy Name we pray.  Amen.