Faith and Life Podcast

We must utterly despair of our own ability before we are prepared to receive the grace of Christ. Luther wrote, “The thirst for glory is not ended by satisfying it but rather by extinguishing it.” This is the cross story that stands in direct opposition to the glory story that is our default view of ourselves. Forde writes, “The most common overarching story we tell about ourselves is what we will call the glory story. We came from glory and are bound for glory.” BUT, “Our story is not that of the exit from and return to glory of an undying soul. The cross destroys all that.” All of our schemes for gaining the glory we imagine that lost come to an end at the cross of Christ. They are ashes - for we are dust and to dust we shall return. Our only hope is that when we die with Christ, we will also live with Christ. (2 Timothy 2:11)

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In our world today there is so much out of our control. If we focus on those situations and people beyond our control, we will end up frustrated and anxious. When we stay focused on what we can control, we can respond to life with peace and self-confidence. Jesus stayed focused on what he could control and the mission God had him on despite the swirling political and social pressures of his day.

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Having a safe place with safe people is vital to strong mental health.

Because Jesus inhabits our vital friendships with other Christ-followers with his grace and forgiveness, He empowers those connections to equip us with strong mental health. The symptoms of disconnection are evident, depression/mood; anxiety/fear; acting out/impulse problems; addictions; distorted thinking (negative/worrisome). The outcomes of a vital connection with others who are in Christ are more evident: peace, security, acceptance, truth is spoken in love, fortified resilience, and the capacity to love others as Jesus loves us. This fosters strong emotional health.

Next step: Find a safe place with safe people who follow Jesus.

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What is mature love? Humanity has a tendency to curve on itself, where all we think about is ourselves. One way through mental health issues is by seeking to better another person’s life through kindness while we ourselves are seeking to be better. Jesus’ way of love lifts our heads from seeing only ourselves to seeing others around us.

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When we are honest and vulnerable before God and one another regarding our faults, we put ourselves in the place to experience being fully accepted by God and others. This gives us a solid foundation for strong mental health. The central teaching of our evangelical faith is that we are saved, accepted, and justified by grace through faith in Christ. All of our efforts for making ourselves good and accepted fall short and come to end at the cross of Christ. We are left with only Jesus and his work to make us right with God and each other.  

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It’s wise to fight.  The foolish avoid conflict and thus let resentment, misunderstanding, and bitterness fester. Every relationship will experience conflict.  What matters is not whether or not people fight, it’s how they fight that matters.  The measuring line for successful relationships is not the frequency of fighting, it is in the quality of the conflict.  Wisdom teaches us that we can fight fairly and find a resolution to our conflicts regardless of their intensity and duration.  

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Pastor Tyus Nedd joins us from International Christian Center to share five pieces of w.i.s.d.o.m to take with us as we journey through life. 

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It’s wise to grieve.  Avoiding grief leaves our wounded hearts open like a cut that will not heal. Every person experiences grief.  It follows as we experience loss in our lives, whether it be because someone we loved has died, we lose physical ability, friendships end, or hopes and dreams for the future die.  The wise allow themselves to grieve.  If we don’t allow ourselves to grieve, the emotional toll we face are physical and relational difficulties.  

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God’s wisdom for our lives is the cost of dying so that we will be able to love God and others.

Everything in what Jesus taught and the way Jesus lived and died reveals the hidden wisdom of God for our lives – to die to ourselves so that we will be able to love God above all else and to love others as Jesus loves us. One cannot be raised to a new life without first dying. This hidden wisdom of God is upside down and backward from the “wisdom” of the world. It is the message of the cross which is foolishness to those who yet do not know Jesus.

Next step: Identify one bit of the world’s “wisdom” that you are relying on more than you should. Put it in its proper place of your priorities. Recommit yourself to trust in the message of the cross above the wisdom of this world.

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Paul describes Jesus as the “wisdom of God”,  Thus, Jesus embodies the entirety of wisdom.  He is the Savior of the world and the wisdom of God. The beginning of the year is a time for us to look ahead at what will be.  We envision, make plans, set goals…but wisdom will be the way it is accomplished. The world today may be filled with incredible knowledge, but be bereft of wisdom.  Google is knowledgeable, but not wise.  

Next step:  Ask for wisdom for the way through the year.

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When Mary visits Elizabeth, Elizabeth is shocked and says, “Why am I so favored…?”  The NRSV re-words her question, “Why has this happened to me…?”  Regardless of how it is worded, Elizabeth is surprised and taken aback by the grace she’s experiencing by Mary’s visit.  Mary, in whom the Savior of the Word dwelled in bodily form, visits Elizabeth and gives her a day she would never forget.  Might we do the same for others?  What if we set out to make someone’s day this holiday season?  After all, the risen Christ dwells in our lives as well.  God, through Mary, gave Elizabeth a day she would never forget.  Might God be asking us to do the same for others? 

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In the morning, many of us ask, “What should I do today?”  We think of tasks and obligations and make plans to carry them out.  Do we ever ask, “Who should I be today?” or as we look at the holiday season, “Who should I be this Christmas?”  What difference would it make if you did?  During Advent, we anticipate the coming of Christ, his first coming in his birth in Bethlehem and his second in glory.  He comes as a who first...a person in the flesh.  He shows up intentionally before he does anything.  The readings this week lead us into how we might show up during the holidays:  joyful, attentive, gentle, generous, peaceful...not as an obligation, but in response to all God has done and is doing in our lives.  

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As you look at what is happening in our world and individual lives, you may be thinking, “Evil seems to be winning. Where is the God of justice?” God brings justice through Jesus alive in us and everything is made new. The Hebrew prophets Malachi and John the Baptist proclaimed that God’s justice was coming. God’s justice came in Jesus. God’s justice is backward from the world’s justice. God’s justice flows from God’s grace found in Jesus and not from the world’s karma justice. At the same time, God’s justice calls for a response of trust in God and living in obedience to God’s values. When we trust in Jesus and seek to live by the Lord’s values, God’s justice overcomes the evil injustices of our time, and lives are changed to be more like Jesus.  

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Decades ago, U2 sang, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”  The phrase is not only a great lyric to a legendary song, it reflects the condition of our hearts at different points in our lives.  The deeper question becomes, “What is your heart looking for?”  Contentment?  Peace?  Love?  Joy?  Acceptance?  When we live in Christ, we find what our hearts are looking for and what our souls long for.      

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God makes our generosity extraordinary. God takes what we give to his mission and multiplies it to produce an extraordinary and eternal difference in our lives and the lives of others. When we sacrificially and cheerfully give first to God, our lives are extraordinarily changed. God uses all our offerings to bring his extraordinary mission into reality.      

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As Christians, we live our lives always in view of the cross.  God has generously given us all things, including himself, and asks us to live in this way of generosity.   The question Capital One asks consumers is, “What’s in your wallet?”  God asks, “What’s in your heart?”  God doesn’t need our time, talents, and money, but we need to be generous.  It is not only good for us, it is also what God desires of us, that we live with glad and generous hearts.  

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Hope is the confident expectation that what God has promised will happen. The dictionary defines hope as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.” But hope is less about feeling and more like trust. Faith and hope are synonyms in the theology of the Bible. Hope is forward-looking and, therefore, hope is less about proof. But our hope becomes more confident when past events provide proof for our hope.  

So, we hope in Christ based on the historical events recorded in the gospel narratives. We know, however, that our hope in Christ can fluctuate from a shaky wish on one end to a confident expectation on the other.

What can we learn about hope from the Apostle John’s account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead? Can what we learn move us towards a more confident hope that we will be raised from the dead to eternal life in the paradise that Jesus has prepared for us. How can a more confident hope change our daily lives?

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Luther dreamed and worked for a church that was free from the demands of the leaders in the church of his day.  The reforms he led became a movement founded in the freedom of the Christian.  The desire for freedom continues to this very day as Americans debate about what freedom means as it relates to government mandates about masks and vaccinations.  Christians today, in America, can model and help create a future for all of us as we use our freedom, not to do what we want and demand our rights, but to serve our neighbor in love.  We can help a culture confused and conflicted over the nature of freedom by living free lives in the Gospel in service to the neighbor.

“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.” ~Martin Luther

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Alisha joined the St Luke staff this year as Children and Families Ministry Director. Her message today centers on relating joy and finding joy at different times in her faith journey and the impact it has had on her. We hope this message encourages you. 

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Jesus is called a prophet, teacher, miracle-worker, Messiah, the Christ, Savior, and Redeemer among other things.  The writer of Hebrews adds two more, “Pioneer and Perfecter” of our faith.  (The King James Version uses the word “author” instead of “pioneer”.)

This week we’ll lean into the implications that Jesus is truly what Hebrews testifies to, that he writes the story and perfects the same story, of our individual and collective lives lived by faith.

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