All posts in category Theology

How to Disagree – Sermon Manuscript

Matt. 5:21-26, 18:15-20; Rom. 12:9-18; Titus 3:8-11; 1 Thess. 5:12-22

-Our world today seems to be dividing and fracturing at an ever-increasing rate. Fighting seems to be the new normal both online and IRL, and I think that COVID exacerbated these divisions. We forgot how to disagree, we forgot how to be charitable, and the church unfortunately wasn’t immune from those same issues. Masks became symbols of either oppression or freedom, medical choices became markers of orthodoxy, and meeting together in person determined your entire political ideology (at least that’s what I was told from someone). An articlefrom 2018 found that political disagreements made Thanksgiving meals shorter by anywhere from 30-50 minutes. I know 2018 feels like yesterday, but that’s 8 years ago now, I would have to guess the problem is worse today.

-Does anyone know why I took this selfie, or the significance of that pub behind me? That is the pub where a group called “The Inklings” met, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien would gather there regularly to share their writings and discuss various books or other things. Another one of the people there was George Watson who said Lewis taught him the art of disagreement:

-We, as a church, largely do this well! Which is why this is timely to talk about this: a good time to talk about disagreeing is before it happens, so that when it does happen you’re all on the same page.

-Remember to text in questions, and today we’ll have a live answering time at the end of the sermon. I’m just going to give you a waterfall of passages because I want the weight of God’s call to land on us this morning. Once we’ve gone through these texts, Micah’s going to share with us from a counselors perspective, and then Phil will join us both for some live Q&A to end this series!

PRAY

The Final Apologetic:

-Francis Schaeffer said the final Christian apologetic is found in John 13, they’ll know we’re Christians by our love for each other (John 13:35). The world is said to judge whether or not we’re Christians by our love for each other. I believe that the only way to push through disagreement is if you love someone, and specifically love them enough to deal with issues together.

-If we’re saved, there are implications for our lives, which means there are things in our lives that we’ll need to change. There are many lists in the NT of character traits that we’re supposed to take on, I want to look at just 1 of them from Rom. 12, and I love the way the CSB titles this section: Christian ethics. There are a number of things for us to take away from this text, but do you see how it begins with love? Let love be without hypocrisy, or some translations say let love be genuine or sincere, and not only be genuine and real, but we’re also commanded to love each other deeply, like family. That’s why I will often talk about us being a church family.

-Take the lead in honoring. (some translations: outdo one another). What do you think that would look like? It certainly wouldn’t mean you always assume the worst about a fellow Christian! I heard a pastor onetime say this is the only place where Christians should be competitive! Don’t let someone else outdo you in showing honor!

-Bless those who persecute you: if someone is speaking bad about you, what’s your response? To look to bless them! This isn’t where we’re supposed to outdo each other!

-Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Friends, come as you really are here with all the joys and sorrows at once. Story of our miscarriage.

-Live in harmony: what does that look like? As a musician I like that idea: harmony is what makes music interesting, different but complementary notes. Same in the church: difference is what makes the church interesting.

-Finally, vs. 18: As much as you can, live at peace. What is your impulse when some wrongs you? One of the commitments I’ve tried to make in ministry is that when someone has an issue with me that I’m made aware of, I will move toward the person and the situation – within reason! I’ve had to learn that I can’t be everyone’s best friend (trust me, that’s been a long hard lesson!).

-Here’s part of the difficulty in loving someone when it comes to a disagreement, in Eph. 4:15, Paul says we’re to speak the truth in love, which is hard to do! People tend to either just “love” or just speak the truth, it’s hard to find that line!

-Tim Keller quote. Since we’re in Christ and supposed to be like Him, this is supposed to be true of us too: speaking the truth in love to each other

The Unity of the Spirit

-One of my weekly prayers for our church is Eph. 1:3, which is way we’re commanded to walk worthy of our calling. It means we need to make EVERY effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

-Unity, not uniformity. Where’s the fun if everyone is exactly the same? The fact that we have different passions interests and gifts means we all have something new we can learn! People are endlessly fascinating if you just take the time to sit down and listen and ask good questions of them. But it takes work!

-Jesus also gave us instructions for how we’re supposed to approach conflict. One of the most quoted passages that we need to look at in relation to this is Matt. 18, the church discipline passage. But 1 preliminary remark before we look at it: the goal of each step in this process is reconciliation and restoration, not penalization.

-Begins 1 on 1. If someone sins against you – not just hurts your feelings, although to keep the relationship solid, you should also share if your feelings are hurt. But friends, be quick to overlook offenses, and always assume the best!

-Then it moves from there to bringing someone else in (again: if it’s sin). But do you see this move is ONLY after you’ve gone to the person you’re having an issue with? How quickly do people jump to talking to other people BEFORE they’ve talked to the person?

-One additional step that can be taken, and most churches I’ve been a part of have practiced discipline this way, is before it’s brought to the whole church, it’s brought to the elders for 1 last attempt at restitution.

-Then, it’s presented to the whole church. And one note on this: again, this isn’t punitive, we’re not just trying to air someone’s dirty laundry, but if a process gets to this point, we’re (rightly) questioning that person’s salvation. The church is called to be holy, we can’t let sin go unchecked in our midst.

-Another note, how does the text say to treat this person? Like a Gentile or a tax collector, aka an enemy. But how does Jesus tell us to treat our enemies? To love them! So we don’t ignore someone under discipline, but we do treat them like an unbeliever, which means we look to share Jesus with them so that they can be restored! Which means if we ever get to this place as a church, and that person repents, we welcome them back with open arms.

-Binding and loosing is what’s given to the church, this is related to the affirming or denying someone’s salvation. Now, that can be taken too far as RCC has done, but there is a role for the church to play in recognizing when someone is saved (baptism, the Lord’s Supper, membership). If someone acts like an unbeliever, the church should treat them like one. We should not be more gracious than God, if we refuse to hold others accountable for their actions, we’re disobeying God.

-2 or 3: church discipline

-But Jesus also tells us that not only is it on us to call out someone else’s sin when we’re the one sinned against, we’re also supposed to go to someone else when they’re upset with us! This passage begins with a matter of the heart. Murder doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from a heart that hates others, which means we need to be very careful in how we think about and talk about others, we need to keep short accounts. This says that our relationships with each other have a higher priority than our worship. If we come to worship God but have grudges against other people in the body of Christ, we’re supposed to stop worshipping and start reconciling!

-Next: Titus 3: in this text, we see what we’re supposed to devote our lives to: good works. This isn’t a works-based salvation, but when we’re saved we’re saved SO THAT we can do good works.

-As far as disagreements, this text tells us there are some things that aren’t even worth having a disagreement about, Paul calls them “foolish debates” here, things that don’t affect the gospel. For example, there was a guy at one church I served that claimed to have determined the day Jesus was coming back based on his study of astrology (stars). If my memory is right, we all missed it, because it was supposed to be last October. Sometimes debates can be fun, but don’t use that as tools to tear down others or divide the church. Another one Paul talks about is “matters of the law” – our job isn’t to hold others accountable for our convictions. Here’s one from my life: what school should Christians send their kids to? Or can Christians watch movies? If they can, what rating do they need to be below? Friends, there’s lots of room for different approaches to some of these ways of living that don’t slide into sin!

-Paul uses the same approach that Jesus used: warn them once, warn them a second time, and then treat them as an unbeliever.

-In his commentary on this section, Bob Yarbrough helpful summarizes: That’s supposed to be descriptive of us: we’re supposed to be the peacemakers.

-The final passage we’ll look at today is from 1 Thess. 5.

-First, one way of ensuring unity is by recognizing and affirming leaders in the church. Similar to what we saw last week from Heb. 13:17. That is one way that we are able to “be at peace together”

-We’re also exhorted to work at helping each person based on what they specifically need. We see 4 different things here: warn the idle, comfort the discouraged, help the weak, and be patient with all. Laziness isn’t allowed in the church, we’re all supposed to be contributing from our gifts. If someone’s discouraged, we’re supposed to look for ways to come alongside them. If someone is weak, we help where we can, and we need to be patient with everyone. That one makes me chuckle because I feel like it’s easy to get impatient with everyone at some point!

-Always pursue what is good individually and corporately, and then he goes on to list how we’re supposed to do that, and every verb he uses is 2^ndperson plural, these are things we’re supposed to do together, not individually. Is that true of us?

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by mikethestrand on September 6, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Life, Relationships, Sermon, Theology

Tagged Bible, church, Disagree, discipline, Jesus

Posted by mikethestrand on September 6, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/09/06/how-to-disagree-sermon-manuscript/

Deacons – Sermon Manuscript

-Sleeping bags have changed since I grew up! When my family went camping, or weren’t sleeping in our beds, we had this giant fabric sleeping bags that were always very neatly rolled back up and tied off so they’d be ready to go for the next camping trip. Today’s sleeping bags aren’t taken care of the same way. Today’s sleeping bags are all made of a synthetic material that makes you slide around everywhere, and they all come in this mummy style which is great for 1 person to stay warm, but not as enjoyable for a married couple.

-These new sleeping bags are meant to be packed a little differently (and much less carefully. You get 1 end in, and then just keep shoving until the sleeping bags all stuffed in!

-This sermon series is a little bit like packing these new sleeping bags. I’m trying to pack in so much information and history into 1 sermon, which means there’s only so far we can go with each part I’m talking about. So if you have questions about anything that’s brought up, please text this number on the screen.

-Today, we’re looking at the church office of Deacon, which was officially added to our bylaws as a church this past June. But that doesn’t mean we’ve answered all the questions about this office, or that we have specifics around what this office is and looks like for us as a church. And today’s sermon is my attempt to answer why it’s difficult to have specifics about this office. I’m also working on a position paper for our church to define why we have the offices we do, as well as what those offices focus on for our church family.

READ/PRAY (971, 1052)

I preached on both church offices in January ’25, so if you were here then, this will be some repetition, but that’s ok! I got a question about this particular office, and I’d forgotten what I preached about, which means it’s worth a repeat (at least for me!)

Church Politics

-Most people I know either roll their eyes or gear up for a fight when I say something like “church politics,” but it doesn’t need to be that way! All we’re talking about when I say this is the way the church governs itself, because there needs to be some way to keep order and accountability across an organization.

-What makes the church unique is 2 things: it inverts the typical power structures, and we rely on an ancient text called “the Bible” to serve as our guide. All church political structures appeal to the Bible to support their position. As for the inversion of the power structures, instead of viewing movement as “upward” in an organization, I think we need to view it as a move “downward,” because the call of Jesus is to grow in the service of others.

-I’ve shared this story before, but my first pastoral ministry was in Cheyenne, WY (which is in the part of the state that looks like Nebraska). Cheyenne is home to FE Warren AFB, and I learned quickly that military leadership is different than leadership modeled after Jesus. I was told from one military leader (who was also an elder) that Jesus’s leadership command to serve others was for a different time period, but not today. I disagreed then; I disagree now!

-There are 3 primary ways of organizing the church today:

-Episcopalian (Episcopal and RCC) argue more for a natural outgrowth from the Bible instead of explicit biblical texts. Make a big deal out of the “bishop” title and make it distinct from elder (I, and many other scholars, would argue they’re synonymous)

-Presbyterian: church elects elders (called a session), those elders are part of a “Presbytery” (state, city) (taken from GRK), some of the elders from the Presbytery are a part of the General Assembly (nation)

-Congregational: congregation itself is the highest governing body of the church, from the doctrine of the priesthood of ALL believers (1 Pet. 2:9), corresponds to the way the early church functions (things are presented to the whole church), but among congregational there is a WIDE variety of thoughts and opinions, here’s the list of examples from Grudem’s Systematic Theology.

-I like to describe myself as an aspiring ecclesiologist, that is someone who studies the doctrine of the church. I love the church, I’m committed to the church, and I want to see the church flourish around us. So as I’ve studied and read over the years, I’ve landed on some language that I like to describe the way our church functions. If you’ve been coming for a while, you should have heard this before, but it is: Christ ruled, Elder led, Deacon served, Congregationally governed. I’m sure I stole all those pieces from somewhere, but I’ve lost track of where I found it!

-I tried to make it look like Grudem’s chart here:

-First and foremost: Christ ruled. This cuts against much of the American ideal because we don’t like Kings! But for Christians it’s a different story, we serve under the reigning and ruling King Jesus. Friends, the church is a theocracy, not a democracy. That means our job isn’t to vote people in and out of office, or to try to find a constituency who represents us, our job is to submit to His will.

-Story of person who voted no to everything because nothing should be unanimous.

-If we’re working to submit all our decisions to the will of God, and we’re all keeping in step with the Spirit, there should be unanimous votes on a regular basis! And notice the arrows connecting God to each position below: since we’re a theocracy, God is the one who appoints, the church looks to affirm and follow where God has called.

-Congregationally Governed: this means the highest form of authority in the church is the congregation, but again, this is not a democracy. The congregation is charged with affirming leaders in the church, looking for ways to honor each other, working to keep the unity of the Spirit in our midst, but it’s not the congregation’s job to make every decision in the church. I like the way I’ve heard my dad summarize what this means in the EFCA: everyone gets their say, but not everyone gets their way. There will be times where you may not affirm the direction of the church, that doesn’t mean it’s time to find a new church, it might mean the Lord has you here to learn something new, or to demonstrate how you can willing submit to where it seems God is leading, or maybe that your thoughts were wrong on a topic! That’s happened to me before, where I thought something was a great idea, but I was missing some key information that made it not work out very well. That gets us to what I know is viewed as a 4-letter word today: submission. The Bible does command us to submit to the leaders of the church. Because of the baggage attached to that, let’s chat about it:

-I think Heb. 13 needs to be read in this conversation, the 2 verses that have 7s in them (makes it easy to remember!). Vs. 7 says part of the role of church leaders is to speak God’s Word to you, that comes up repeatedly in the qualifications lists for elders in the church. But it also tells us there’s supposed to be emulation, copying those leaders. So when we’re looking to vote on affirming elders, 1 of the questions you should be asking is: do I want to be like that person? Now, obviously they won’t be perfect, there’s only 1 Savior, but does spending time with them help you become more like Jesus, or as I like saying it, does time with them help you take 1 step closer to Jesus or not?

-Vs. 17 gets more explicit and uses that 4 letter word: submit. But friends, that’s not a negative thing! In God’s kingdom, the people you’re submitting to should have your best interests at heart, will love you deeply, and will work their hardest to faithfully point you to Jesus. But the author goes on, and this is where this text kind of scares me: they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account. When I stand before Jesus, I will give an account for my leadership of this church family. Now, there’s different levels of account based on the closeness of the relationship (this is one of the many reasons I believe you should pursue membership in a local church, you can go back and listen to other sermons on that). But then for those who are submitting, it says to let them lead with joy. The question for you is do the leaders of the church look forward to your emails, notes, or conversations, or do they dread them because you’re making it difficult? That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to share your thought or opinions, but HOW do you voice those things with leadership? As I’ve shared before, you can be right but be a jerk about being right!

-Elder led: God raises up qualified men to serve in this office. That means we are complementarian in our convictions (look up the EFCA affirmations and denials if you want to see more about that). This group is intentionally on the bottom because in God’s kingdom those who are called to leadership roles are called to be servants, putting others interests above their own. The world views authority solely through the lens of exploitation and selfishness, but that’s not the way God’s kingdom works.

-Finally, what we’ll be looking more at today: Deacon served: God also gifts certain people in His body to help in various service-oriented roles to help the congregation operate well. I like the way pastor Matt Smethurst has summarized the distinction between elders and deacons:

-I don’t see these offices as optional in the church of Jesus Christ – if God has given us instructions for how best to operate and function as His bride, we should follow them!

Who Are Deacons?

-Once again, we start with the name. Deacon is used all over the NT, but most of the time it’s translated as “servant,” and once Latin became the common language, it got translated into “minister” (do you see why I think everyone’s confused about terms today!) Here’s a couple verses that you may recognize where the word is used:

-So in one sense, every one of us is called to “deacon” each other, we’re all supposed to look for opportunities to serve each other. But there’s a difference between a general gift and being called to a church office, and this is also true of the elder/shepherd role. I know some women who are MUCH more gifted than I am pastorally (as shepherds), but that doesn’t mean they should be serving in the OFFICE of pastor/elder. Same here, just because all of us are called to serve each other doesn’t mean everyone is called to serve in the OFFICE of deacon, offices are recognized by the church to help serve in some specific way, we need to make a distinction between gifting and office.

-Let’s start with the primary Bible text, and there’s a lot less clarity around this office than the office of elder. One pastor argues that the primary use of the word “deacon” means they are assistants to the elders, based on the way this whole range of Greek words was used, and that’s an option! But here’s what Paul says in 1 Tim. 3, and it takes some work to get at Paul’s underlying argument (I think)

-First, he says Deacons LIKEWISE, which subordinates this section to a previous word he used, the word “must be” in vs. 2. So that verb is assumed here, deacons likewise MUST BE, that verb is carried over in our English translations to help us see it, but it’s not in the Greek, the Greek just says “Deacons, likewise, worthy of respect.” Now do you notice anything special about this list of qualifications for Deacons? First, it’s very similar to the expectations for Elders in the previous section, but they’re primarily character traits. The big difference is that Deacons don’t need to be able to teach. This tells us there’s a different purpose to this office than Elders, so we shouldn’t view the Deacons as future Elders, or view Deacons as the stepping stone to other leadership roles. Churches need both offices distinguished from each other to obey God’s Word!

-The other thing we need to talk about from this section is can women serve as Deacons? And I would argue yes, based on this text, another Bible passage, and church history, and you’re going to need to put on your thinking caps to trace this flow of thought, ok? Here’s what I think is the outline for what Paul is saying here, and in order to get this we need to trace Paul’s use of the word “likewise,” I also color coded this outline, and the text to try to help you understand Paul’s flow of thought. 1 other note: the word for “deaconess” didn’t exist yet. It didn’t come into use until much later, so Paul didn’t have a way of distinguishing male from female deacons.

-Paul begins with the qualifications for this office of Deacon, then moves to some brief notes for women deacons, then goes back to men deacons, and finally wraps up this section with the reward for serving as a deacon. So in the text we begin with notes for everyone, vs. 11 begins a section on women, 12focuses on men, and 13 is back to all of them. Why do I think that?

-First, the word Paul uses here that our translation puts “wives” in for is a more general use word that is often translated as “women.” If he’d meant the deacon’s wives he could have used a word that is more common to refer to wives instead of the general word for women.

-Second, I don’t think it makes sense for the qualifications to include wording for wives here if the section on elders doesn’t have anything about wives. It would make more sense to include something about elder’s wives instead of deacon’s wives.

-Third (and this is what clinched this position for me), this is carrying on a bigger argument Paul has made previously. In 1 Tim. 2, Paul similar compares the 2 genders in the church, he says men are to pray, and then he uses the exact same Grk word, translated here as “also,” to call out the women.

-1 other reason I believe this office is open to women is found in Rom. 16. Our translation says “servant,” but it’s using the same word that we’ve been studying: Deacon.

-Now, there are 2 other passages that I think help us flesh out how these 2 offices function together. First is Phil. 1:1, which tells us that churches quickly began adopting these 2 offices. The second is Titus 1:5, which tells us the necessity of Elders, but not Deacons. That means a church can function with only 1 of these offices, but as a church grows, in order to remain healthy, they should call Deacons.

-Some church history for us to be aware of:

-Church history: Didache (GRK Teaching) (“The Lord’s Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations” late 1^st century), limits it to men, but either that was a mistake or a typo, because just 2 decades later we have this account:

-And continuing further through church history.

What Should Deacons Do?

-Most people believe that the prototype for what eventually became the office of Deacon is found in Acts 6:

-First, we see the focus of “the Twelve” and this isn’t meant to denigrate the serving of tables, remember the way the kingdom of God inverts the normal power structures of the world. What’s interesting is the names chosen of all these men are Hellenistic, not Hebraic, so in order to ensure the unity of the body, they chose men who were from that group of people.

-Second, it’s not fair to limit this to only table ministry, because as we continue reading in Acts, Stephen becomes the first martyr who preaches the best sermon that summarizes the OT message I’ve ever read, and Philip performs miraculous signs in Samaria.

-Finally, look at the outcome of this work: the unity of the church is preserved, the word of God continues to go out, and the church continues growing.

-So I take this picture to mean that the deacons are responsible for various sorts of ministries that build up and unify the church. I like the way Gregg Allison summarizes this point:

-I think the lack of specificity around deacons is intentional in the Bible to allow for a wide level of flexibility for churches to determine which deacons they need for their church to remain unified. This means we can have deacons of music, facilities, kid’s ministry, youth ministry, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, kitchen, welcome team, safety team, IT.

-One other note is that deacons don’t need to serve in perpetuity. That means there could be deacons called to serve for a set period of time, then be done. One recent example is during COVID. I wish we’d been able to put together a deacon of COVID response to help the elders read and understand all the reports that were coming out to help us know the best ways to meet together. That would have had an end date of when things got back to “normal.” Another example is we could create a deacon team to help with building remodeling that would help us collect bids, be involved in the planning process and communicating updates with the church, then when the remodeling is done, we no longer need those deacons to serve.

-We also could have deacons who are appointed and then build a team around them to accomplish the task they’ve been given! There are all sorts of different options for this office, none of which are prohibited in the Bible, which is why we need to spend some time talking about this.

-And I want to share my current thoughts on a way to talk about these 2 offices because churches should have them both, but what do we call them?

-Churches have people who serve in these roles both as paid and unpaid, so in order to help us clarify which office we’re referring to, I’m working on a position paper that lays out these titles.

-Where this gets confusing today, is people often use the word “Minister” to refer to pastors, but tracing the history of that word it’s actually used to refer to the Deacon office. So my proposal is that we have deacons who serve unpaid (similar to having elders who serve unpaid) and ministers who serve in a paid role (like we have pastors who serve in a paid role).

-I’m not sure if this is the best proposal in the world, but it’s what I’ve got now! It both brings clarity to the positions and also helps us to elevate the role that we call people to when they serve on staff at the church. I think it’s more than just a director role, there’s too much ministry expectations for to just use “director”.

-And as many of you know, I care greatly about the words we use! That’s why I don’t have an office, I have a study, that’s why this room isn’t called a sanctuary, it’s called an auditorium, it’s why we don’t have a worship team, we have a music team – if any of that sounds weird to you, text this number on the screen!

-I believe that God has designed the church to have 2 separate and distinct offices: Elders and Deacons. Elders serve by leading, overseeing, shepherding and teaching. Deacons lead by serving in a wide assortment of practical and ministerial ways under the authority and oversight of the Elders.

-I’m also excited for us to officially recognize both of these offices and would invite you to pray with the Elders as we work to solidify both our church’s needs and ask the Lord to bring the right people to our church to help fill these needs so that what we read in Acts 6:7 could be true at South Suburban:

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by mikethestrand on August 30, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, History, Sermon, Theology

Tagged Bible, Christianity, church, deacons, God, polity, Theology

Posted by mikethestrand on August 30, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/08/30/deacons-sermon-manuscript/

The Order of the Ordinances – Sermon Manuscript

-We’re taking 4 weeks to look at some questions I’ve gotten over the past year. Last week we looked at the EFCA, which is our denomination. And we needed last week to set us up for this week, because this week we’re looking at the 2 ordinances or sacraments of the church (hold on to those terms, I’ll explain them in a bit).

-One of the realities that we need to be reminded of in our world is that there is a spiritual realm that we can’t taste, touch, or see. Sometimes we get glimpses of it where the barrier between the physical and spiritual becomes thin, but that’s not our normal human experience, and our world has been so shaped by the scientific revolution that we sometimes forget or neglect that there is a bigger spiritual reality behind the physical world that we can see. We also neglect that there’s an interplay between those 2 realms, where what we do in the physical realm has implications spiritually and vice versa. That means that the choices and actions we do today have implications for eternity.

-I share all that because we’re talking about things that from a physical perspective don’t seem to do much, but spiritually they’re an act of war where we’re pledging ourselves to Jesus as the King and (to use the phrase from the old baptismal recitation), “renouncing the devil and his works and effects.” That means these are things that shouldn’t be taken lightly or flippantly, but it also means that these things are gifts from God for us that do something to us in both the spiritual and physical realm.

-Text in any questions

READ/PRAY (pgs. 1001, 1018)

-we have a LOT to cover today, so I’m not going to be digging too far into any of these issues so we can at least get an overview of the significance of these practices.

-Here’s what the EFCA believes about these ordinances:

-The EFCA is making a distinction between “true church” and “local church” the way that’s often expressed is the visible vs. invisible church. Every individual believer when they are saved are brought into the church family of God (spiritual/invisible), but that also means they should identify themselves with a local church family (physical/visible)

-The marker of the family of God is that they are the ones who practice these 2 ordinances, which express the gospel. Each time either of these are celebrated they are visible reminders of the spiritual reality of what Jesus has done, it helps our eyes see what our ears and hearts know: the gospel. The Belgic Confession, written in 1561, tells us the 3 markers of a true church. These markers must bepracticed to be considered a church. Now, when we talk about a church, there’s different categories of churches, I got this chart from the book Sojourners & Strangers. And if we see the 3 markers of the church, if an organization that claims to be a church doesn’t practice 1 of these 3 markers, are they a church anymore? Similarly, is the trajectory of a church making them more or less holy?

-THE means of salvation, they are A means of salvation (grace) in that they confirm and nourish believers. Historically, the church has labeled these “means of grace,” things that God uses as gifts to make us more holy and more like Him. Here’s the way the EFCA has said it:

-It’s also important to note that these are markers of the church, which means they’re not something you practice by yourself. I can’t go baptize myself, I’m baptized by and into the church. Similarly, I can’t take communion by myself, I participate in communion as part of the church (meant to mark our union). This also means this is something we shouldn’t do on our own, this came up during COVID when we weren’t meeting in person, some churches encouraged people to grab their own elements and “do” communion in their homes, I was opposed to that because we are embodied people and not meeting together is abnormal, and I wanted us to feel it! There are other implications to this too, like I won’t serve communion at a wedding if it’s just for the couple, it’s not something individuals do together, it’s supposed to be for us all to celebrate, but that’s all I have time to say about that now!

-Where we’ll get to at the end: Jesus gave us these 2 ordinances (or sacraments) to practice as the markers of His people until He returns.

-Sacrament vs. ordinance. I will use them interchangeably; both can be used legitimately. Sacrament means something sacred or set apart (which they are). Early Protestants preferred the term “ordinance” to refer to something “ordained” by Jesus and to distinguish them from the RCC position on them. I think either one is appropriate for us to use today.

-This is a different sermon (in a bit of a different series), but to help you understand what we’re doing today, we’re going to begin: exegesis (reading the text), move to historical theology (what has the church historically believed), that will get us to systematic theology (summarize and systematize what the whole Bible says) and we’ll land at pastoral (or practical) theology, working to answer how do we live this out today?

-1 other note (I promise this is the last one!) but I want to help us understand how to “triage” this issue. 1^st you HAVE to believe to be a Christian, 2^nd is why we have different churches and denomination (need to take a position, but can make different biblical arguments), 3^rd should be able to have a fun conversation about but not condemn or divide over. The reason this is tricky is because the EFCA is unique in that we’ve put the timing and mode of baptism as a 3^rd issue, in most churches it’s a 2^nd order issue, but everyone agrees this issue has 1^st order implications. The way these are practiced are 2^nd order issues, but that they are practiced are 1^st order issues, which means these must be practiced in order to be an obedient church.

What is Baptism?

-The first and most important reason for this is to be like Jesus. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist (which also shows us the significance of this act). It’s talked about in all 4 Gospels, we’re just going to look at Matt. today to save some time.

-The end of this Gospel also talks about baptism, it’s often referred to as the great commission. Jesus says that the way we make disciples is by baptizing them and teaching them. Once again, notice is that this is given to the church as a whole, not for individual Christians to do by themselves (this will come up later, I just want to mention it now so you can see it) the commands are plural.

-Then in the book of Acts repeatedly we see 2 things connected to each other: repent AND be baptized. The first time is in Acts 2, after the first disciples have been filled with the Spirit and Peter preaches the most impact sermon ever. God is at work, the people are convicted of their sin, and look at what Peter says:

-This tells us that the marker of someone who has repented of their sins is baptism, and can you imagine being at this baptism service? The church went from a house church to a megachurch in a day!

-1 other passage that we read earlier (so I won’t read it again) Rom. 6. Paul seems to assume that everyone had been baptized. He also tells us that baptism serves as a picture of our union with Jesus. We go down into the water just like Jesus went down into death, then we are raised up from the water, just like Jesus was raised up from the dead. It serves as a physical reminder of the spiritual reality of what has taken place. Our old self has been crucified with Jesus.

-The NT also tells us that there 3 OT stories that point to the reality of baptism: crossing the Red Sea, circumcision, and the flood

-The first is found in 1 Cor. 10, where Paul says that the church must be careful that they remain faithful in their confession because even the Israelites participated in the pictures of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but they weren’t all saved. Similarly, we can participate in these practices today but not be saved.

-Circumcision is seen in Col. 2, this connects back to Deut. 30:6 when God said He would circumcise the hearts of His people, here Paul is connecting the NT practice of baptism to the OT practice of circumcision (hold on to that, it’ll come up later!)

-Finally, the flood of Gen. 7. Here Paul says baptism corresponds to the way Noah and his family were saved through the flood, centered on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now, notice that it’s not baptism itself that is salvific, it’s what baptism points to: the resurrection of Jesus.

-Throughout the book of Acts, the normal order was repentance then be baptized, and it was almost immediate. Things changed in the 4^th & 5^th centuries when Christianity became much more prevalent (and legal). People started to join the church just for social standing, which meant they weren’t truly Christians. So the church added a period of training before you could be baptized (for a season it was an entire year). The other shift was that the church quickly moved to infant baptism as the general practice (as most rigorously defended by Augustine).

-The church also had conversations (debates) around what “counts” as a baptism? And the general agreement was 2 things: Trinitarian, and water. So a picture of the church in the 1^st century can be found in the Didache (teachings), here’s what they said:

-Do you see all the caveats? Living water (moving), cold, pouring onto the head, fasting at least 1 or 2 days. In Geneva, Switzerland, they’ve uncovered a church from the 4^th century with a baptistry. What’s fascinating about this is if you look closely you can see that this was “living” water because it was connected to the river.

-To put all the pieces together into a systematic overview, I like the way John Frame defines baptism:

-Today there are 2 positions about who should be baptized: paedo, credo. Credo think of Creed, someone who can confess to believe in Jesus.

-Everyone practices adult believer’s baptism; the question is what do we do with children? For those who are credo, we do dedications (which my Presbyterian friends tells me is a child baptism I just forgot the water)

-As I said earlier, remember the baptism connection to circumcision that Paul made in Col. 2? If baptism corresponds to baptism, then should it look the same in the NT as the OT? Protestant paedobaptists would argue yes. Both of these serve as the initiatory right: if you a part of this covenant community, you will practice this rite as the beginning of your journey into the church, therefore children should be baptized.

-My position: credobaptist, with a preference for immersion because of Acts, Rom. 6, and the Didache but I have strong with sympathies to and appreciation of paedobaptism who strive to see the children as part of the family of God. My leaning right now (subject to change) is that we should be more willing to baptize younger children than we often are! If God is at work in children, we shouldn’t prevent them from following in obedience to Him, so parents if you see the Holy Spirit at work in your children and they express interest in being baptized, reach out to someone on staff! We’d love to help your kids move towards publicly identifying themselves with Jesus!

-The primary thing is if you are following after Jesus, you must by baptized. I like the way Wayne Grudem summarizes this in his Systematic Theology:

-EFCA says similar: by saying that it is essential, it means that it is required. So friends, if any of you haven’t yet been obedient to Jesus’s command, what’s stopping you? We’d love to baptize you! Reach out to us!

What is Communion?

-Remember, Jesus gave us 2 ordinances (or sacraments), baptism which is the marker of entrance into His people, and communion (or the Lord’s Supper, or the eucharist) as the ongoing reminder that we are a part of His body. That was practice is 1^st order, the way we practice is a 3^rd order issue.

-Far fewer passages on this topic, but it’s just as important as baptism as these are the 2 things that mark out the people of God as unique. And just like baptism, we trace this practice back to Jesus, and because we used this Gospel earlier, I’ll stick with Matt.

-The other key text is 1 Cor. 11, Paul’s instructions, very similar to what we say in Matt, but here we see that Paul connects this back to Jesus’s practice.

-It’s likely that the early church practiced this weekly, as inferred from 1 Cor. 11:18

-For the historical practice of the church, I’ll once again quote from the Didache, which lays out clear parameters around who should participate: you must be baptized. This tells us that the practice of the early church was not only that baptism was expected for everyone following Jesus, but it was required before anyone could partake in the Lord’s Supper.

-Over time, the restrictions got more and more narrow, which meant that before the Reformation (1517) the RCC only allowed some people to take the bread (if they were allowed to take at all), no cup, because that was too holy for the “common folk.” (Sidenote: the pre-Reformation church largely became a spectator sport where the preaching was in a language you couldn’t understand, the singing was done by professionals without the congregation, and full communion was reserved for the priests. It seems like many mega-churches today are moving back to that model)

-In more recent history, Spurgeon’s practice was to use tickets that had to be turned in before you were given the elements. They used this system to both track attendance and fence the table. Fencing is the word used to lay out who is allowed to participate in this meal. Spurgeon went so far as having his congregation vote on this practice for visitors (Aug. 13, 1856). He required people to be both baptized AND members of a local church.

-So now a systematic definition once again from John Frame:

-Baptism is meant to be a 1-time thing (can you be born twice?), communion is meant to be observed “perpetually.” There’s some debate about how often that means, we’ll talk about that later!

-4 views of communion today:

-Transubstantiation: RCC, the elements are TRANSformed back into the body & blood.

-Consubstantiation: (Lutheran) CON is Greek for WITH, Christ is uniquely present in, with, and around the elements but they are not TRANSformed.

-Spiritual presence: Christ is spiritually present in in the practice of communion in some unique and special way

-Pure memorial: (“Do this in remembrance of me.) This is often the default position of many Protestants, but I love what Millard Erickson says about the potential negative of this position.

-Who can participate in this sacrament? There’s more to 1 Cor. 11 then we looked at! This says it’s not open to just anyone, and that each person is supposed to examine themselves, which many people have taken as needing to confess all your sins before communion. But that’s not what Paul is saying, there’s a specific examination we’re supposed to do, but it’s not internal. We’re supposed to be repenting of sin all the time, but in communion we’re supposed to examine how we are in relation to the rest of the church (body). This means that you should not participate in this meal if you have unresolved issues with someone else in the church. This tells us that one of the purposes of this celebration is to unite us together (spiritually).

-Vs. 30 is why I’m spiritual presence, because there’s something more than just a memorial meal that’s taking place in communion.

-This is also where we get the idea of “fencing” the table, this isn’t open to anyone to come take a piece of bread and shot of grape juice, I believe there’s something else going on spiritually here that we shouldn’t be flippant about.

-This has led to the church having 3 approaches as to who can participate. One note is every church believes there is some limit to who is allowed to participate, but they draw the boundaries in difference places.

-Closed communion: in 2 ways, either a baptized member of that denomination, or some go so far as to say a baptized member of that specific church.

-Close would be say a baptized member of a church (Spurgeon)

-Open is this meal is for anyone who has been saved, without any other limitations.

-My personal position differs from our church on this, we practice open communion, but my position is “close” communion, but because this isn’t a gospel essential, we can dialogue and debate the merits of these positions without dividing over them (more on that coming in 2 weeks)

-The final question is how often should we celebrate? And once again, my preference is different than our church! When I first arrived, it was celebrated monthly, we have since moved to 2/month, but I would love to celebrate it weekly as the culmination of our worship service, where each week, we’re reminded of Jesus’s sacrifice and each week we can taste and see that the Lord is good.

-When we switched to 2/month, I got an anonymous letter from someone who didn’t like this transition. Just so everyone hears this, if anyone ever sends an anonymous letter, it goes straight into the garbage. The Bible tells us if we have an issue with someone we go straight to them, we don’t hide beyond anonymity. I will share all the push backs I’ve gotten to celebrating communion weekly, and why I think they’re wrong, are you ready? I can condense them down to 2:

-First, people have said it makes communion less special. What doesn’t make sense to me is why that doesn’t apply to: singing, or praying, or preaching. Or if we want to go a step further, if communion is meant to nourish us spiritually, I need food to be nourished physically, but eating 3x a day doesn’t make it any less special for me! Sometimes it’s a very special meal, but most of the time it’s just to get calories into my body.

-Second, I’ve been told it takes too much time. Which honestly just sounds lazy. I’m not sure if you realize this, but anything worth doing takes time. And since it’s something Jesus commanded, I think it’s worth “wasting” time on it! I had a conversation with someone once who’s a member of the biggest EFCA church in the country. That church celebrates communion 1/month only at their Saturday service, and they don’t let anyone know that’s the only time they celebrate it. Something’s off if it’s not an essential component of the practices of your church!

-So those are the 2 sacraments given to us from the Lord that are means of grace from God to us to confirm and nourish us as believers.

Does the Order Matter?

-I think the order to these does matter, because they’re both connected to being a Christian, but they’re connected to different parts of being a Christian. Baptism is connected to the beginning or entry point. Throughout the NT, the command is repent AND be baptized.

-But here’s where there’s room for some disagreement. I can’t point to a specific chapter and verse for this ordering. It’s a logical argument that they should be sequential, but that’s where I’ll stop. The way I’ll say it is I think the preferred order should be: you’re saved, then shortly after that you’re baptized, and then only when you’ve been baptized (as the entry rite) should you participate in the Lord’s Supper (the ongoing rite) because why would you willingly only participate in 1 of these 2 practices? Both are commands (not optional) therefore both need to be done. You may be asking: what about if someone gets saved today during this service, would you ban them from the table until they’ve been baptized? No! But I would hope they would want to be baptized ASAP. I’ve said before that I would love to fill this baptistry up every week because people were being saved. The logical ordering from what the Bible teaches seems to be: salvation leads to baptism which then leads to the Lord’s Supper.

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by mikethestrand on August 23, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Church, Life, Sermon, Theology, Worship

Tagged baptism, Bible, church, Communion, God, Jesus, ordinance, sacrament, Theology

Posted by mikethestrand on August 23, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/08/23/the-order-of-the-ordinances-sermon-manuscript/

In One Lord – Sermon Manuscript

-We’re spending 4 weeks looking at the Nicene Creed because it helps provide a foundation for what we as Christians need to affirm. It’s the 1 extra-biblical document affirmed by all branches of the church and helps us learn how we should talk about the God of the Bible. Today we have a special treat, though, because there’s 1 word in here that’s not found in the Bible, which we’ll get to in a little bit.
-Also, remember that this wasn’t written to determine the books of the Bible (I don’t like that terminology anyway, humans didn’t determine the books that God inspired, they affirmed them, feel free to ask me about that sometime if you want)
READ Col. 1
-But just like we had a bad creed last week, I have another really bad creed that went viral a few years ago during a livestream from a “church” in Edina (I won’t even mention the name of it), called “The Sparkle Creed,” and it is as bad as that makes it sound. Are you ready to hear it? DO NOT recite this one with me because it is horrible:
-non-binary doesn’t work to a being that isn’t gendered, God is spirit so that’s a category mistake. Also, He always reveals Himself in the singular and masculine throughout the Bible, so why aren’t they using God’s preferred pronouns?
-I have no clue what fabulous tunic Jesus wore, Joseph wore a fabulous tunic in Genesis, but not Jesus (maybe they confused the 2 people?). Jesus also didn’t have 2 dads, this completely ignores the mother of Jesus, you can’t create a baby with 2 dads!
-And on and on the nonsense goes (what does an AIDS quilt have to do with Jesus? love is love is love?) What are they actually confessing to believe in and where is their unbelief here? This whole thing is merely a humanistic statement that aligns with all our modern culture’s little-g gods. I shared last week that it’s significant that the Nicene Creed begins with WE believe (although some manuscripts said I in terms of one being baptized), but look how this one begins. Friends, this is one of the biggest problems in our world today: excessive focus on the individual. Even for Christians in the West, we view our faith as something we pick and choose. We jump from church to church whenever we want, we run from commitment and complain when things don’t perfectly align with what we want. And in that world, Jesus offers us something radically different: an invitation into a relationship with the triune God, who has eternally existed in a loving relationship of 3 equally divine persons, and our job as Christians is to invite others into that relationship that happens from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit.
-The question before us today is point one in my outline:
Is Jesus God?
-Think back to last week, I said the primary question the early church was working to determine was in this world, where there’s God, then a HARD line that separates Him from His creation, where do you put Jesus? Arius (4^thcentury pastor) argued that the Son has to go below the line because God is one, so he used the phrase “There was a time when the Son was not” as his motto. But is that what the Bible actually reveals about God? I alluded to this last week, but Dan Brown (who just used an argument from Bart Ehrman) in The da Vinci Code spun a funny story about the Nicaean council meeting to “create” the Bible that ostracized people and didn’t represent “true” Christianity. That’s nothing close to what happened! In fact, this debate pushed people back to the Bible, and many of the early church fathers had the entire Bible memorized! Their writings are dripping with quotes from the Bible, which is why the Nicaean creed is similarly dripping with the Bible.
-One of my favorite professors in seminary said he wished instead of asking “what do you believe” when talking about this creed, pastors would ask “In whom do you trust,” because this creed is focused on the God of the Bible, not in what we do. So I’m going to ask you to recite it with me again this week, and following my professor, church, in whom do you trust?
-I want to look at 2 passages from the Bible before we work our way through the creed that will help us answer this question and will help us hear where some of the wording from the creed comes from!
-First, John 1. John begins by alluding to the creation account of Gen. 1, and then goes on to tell us that the Word (who John later reveals is Jesus) was in the beginning. And this Word was with God and was God. With and was, separate and together. And then we see our preposition that we got from Fred Sanders last week: through. From the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. He’s also described as the light (which is important for the creed)
-Second is what we read earlier, the Christ-hymn of Col. 1. Building up to this, Paul has been saying focusing on what we have in Jesus, then He bursts into this praise: the image of God, if you want to know what God looks like, look to Jesus. Firstborn (but not in terms of being created, this is priority) and we see that creation was THROUGH Him (visible and invisible). He is before and holding together everything, and He’s the head of the church. AND the Firstborn from the dead (pointing to another resurrection that we will experience). God has ALL his fullness dwell in him. How much is all? All! Nothing’s left out of God’s fullness dwelling in Him (that’s another way of saying He’s God). Jesus also provides the way to peace: through His blood.
-I don’t know if you picked up on it from those passages, but those pretty clearly seem to be saying that Jesus is God, don’t they? And just in case we missed it, look at what Jesus says in John 10:30. And this is the point where the Jews know exactly what He’s saying and pick up rocks to kill Him! The question is: how do we talk about that? And that’s where the debate came from at Nicea:
-We’ll take this in 2 parts, the first is the divinity of Jesus, second is the work of the incarnate Jesus.
The Only-Begotten
-First thing to note is just as we confess one God, we also confess one Lord, but then it goes on to describe the HS as the Lord! That’s intentionally done so that we understand that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are also united. This word has a wide range of meanings throughout the Bible: used in the Greek translation of the OT to translate the divine name (Yahweh). In the NT it can refer to Jesus as God, and in other places it can be a sign of respect (such as calling a ruler my lord). In this case, it’s referring to Him as His divine name.
-Jesus Christ, transliteration of Joshua, the one who led his people into the promised land, and Christ is the anointed one, the long-awaited Messiah from the OT.
-Now we get to the good stuff! The only-begotten. Taking language from John 3:16, the creed states that Jesus is the only one who was begotten from the Father, and that this “begetting” is eternal.
-This is where Arius got off, because it’s a category error to assume that God is exactly like us, and this is also where this is good news for us. Begetting is a way of referring to the relationships within the Trinity, it’s not the same way that we “beget” today. So even though the Father “begets” the Son, there was never a time where the Son wasn’t “begotten” from the Father. What that means is we can’t apply the limit of time to this relationship; God has forever existed as Father and Son (and we can add Spirit to that list).
-And what makes this good news for us is it’s because of this relationship that we’re here today. One of the realities about God that we read in 1 John 4:8 is that He is love, but love assumes that there is someone else to love, otherwise that love turns inward and becomes self-love, which is gross! Love requires there to be someone else that the love is directed towards (which is, as the EFCA SOF says, why God eternally existing as a loving unity of 3 equally divine persons is so significant). Contrast this with Muslims who believe that Allah has 99 names that describe Him, one of which is “the most loving.” But who has Allah been loving? Muslims emphasize the unity of God and call those who believe in the Trinity heretics, strong words about Christians! But who has Allah been loving for eternity? And the word is specifically supposed to refer to love of someone else. If that someone else means that Allah loves his creation, then suddenly he’s not a completely independent god, he’s reliant on his creation to allow him to be loving, that’s not the case with the Christian God. That’s why we can say that God didn’t need to create us, He is completely independent in himself, but out of the overflow of God’s perfect trinitarian love, He created everything to be brought into that pre-existing relationship, which means our purpose in existing is to love God, and then represent that love to the rest of creation (doesn’t that almost sound like what Jesus said is the summary of the law? Love God, and love your neighbor) And once again, we see the importance of the prepositions from Fred Sanders: from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.
-God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. Jesus is God, light, and the true God, and He’s also the Son who is sent from the Father: unity and diversity at the same time.
-They then clarify what they meant when they said begotten: not made, meaning that God’s begetting is different than a human begetting. This is another way of attacking Arius’s argument that Jesus was a created being.
-And now, finally, we’re at the one word that isn’t found in the Bible. One note: it’s not wrong to use extra-biblical words to attempt to describe things that are true about God, it helps us understand what we’re talking about! The Greek word they used is the word homoousios which is of the same essence (or Being as the translation we’ve been using says).
-And there’s a fantastic story that goes along with the choice of this word! The bishops kept attempting to use only words from the Bible, but Arius and his crew kept sitting in the corner chuckling to themselves as each word was proposed because they could use those same words with different dictionaries to stick with their perspective that Jesus was a created being. Here’s what Athanasius wrote about 20 years after the council:
-Dissimulation is a fancy word for hiding one’s internal thoughts and feelings to trick someone else. Arius and his followers (called Arians) were able to take the biblical words and twist them to mean what they wanted them to mean, which is why the council needed to come up with a word that couldn’t be twisted by them. And do you see how this discussion drove them back to the Bible to try to summarize what the Bible says in a way that can’t be debated?
-And the debate became which of these 2 words is the best description of the Bible’s definition of Jesus? And it’s been said that never has so much hinged on a single iota (the Greek letter i). The first word: homo (is a common word today, means “same”) the second word is ousia (“essence” or “being” or “substance”) some of the trick is in translation there isn’t always a 1 for 1 correlation, and words change meaning over time, so I like the way this translation has “Being” with the capital letter. The second proposed word changes the first word from “same” to “like”, which means Jesus is like the Father in essence, which Arius could have affirmed in his own way. And after much debate and discussion, the word homoousios became the orthodox way of referring to the Son, that is He is of the exact same essence or Being as the Father. Because of the unique relationship within the Trinity, people had to carefully determine how we would talk about it, which words adequately describe it, which words make it more difficult, and how can we all come to the same dictionary definition? You may remember this picture from last week, the 7 statements to describe God (which 1 book I read this week said is still not helpful because it looks like there are 4 instead of 3! Do you see why this is so difficult to discuss?) But what it’s trying to communicate is what we just talked about, which can be seen like this: The words they landed on to make sure that Arius couldn’t sneak by was “being” or “essence” which the three were referred to as “persons.” If you want to know about why they landed on persons, email me!
-But that doesn’t get to everything that Jesus did, as we see in the next section:
Was Incarnate
-What is the incarnation? We established from the first section that the Son is God, but then what about all the other stuff that He did, like taking on flesh and living as a human (like we saw in Colossians earlier). And it’s important for us to realize that even when the council that met at Nicaea was done, the debate wasn’t done. We heard from Athanasius earlier, who wasn’t even a bishop at the time, but spent his life defending the Nicene creed against misinterpretation. Then after Athanasius was another guy who continued refining what it was that the Bible revealed about Jesus, and here’s why we needed Jesus to become incarnate:
-Essentially, what he’s arguing is that if Jesus wasn’t completely human, then we can’t be completely saved. As an example, what if Jesus didn’t have a physical body (as some early cults tried to argue)? Then the only thing that could be saved is our immaterial parts, which is one of the things that this creed makes clear didn’t happen. Jesus was fully and completely human so that we could be fully and completely saved.
-It begins with the entire reason Jesus came: for our salvation. Did you notice that this is the first time it turns any attention to us? This is all focused on God and what He has done for us to bring us into relationship with Him. And then after mentioning us, it goes back to focusing on the second person of God:
-And I think it’s helpful for us to see the 10 verbs in this section that provide a summary of what Jesus did, and do you see how there’s what He did in the past, what He is currently doing, and what He will do in the future.
-First He came down from heaven, he humbled himself is the way Phil. 2 says it. Was incarnate comes from the Latin translation of this word, but the Greek word used is something like “was fleshified.” This is a unique term that describes something that only God could do. One author stated that this is different than embodied because “every living human being is embodied, but only Christ is God incarnate.” The Greek word emphasizes the fleshiness of this, the reality that Jesus entered into a fully human existence. This is a slight tangent, but I’m not a fan of people who say we as Christians are supposed to do “incarnational ministry.” I understand what people mean by that in that we’re supposed to represent Christ to the world, but I worry that it conflates what only Jesus could do with what we can do. We can witness and point to Him, only Jesus can be incarnate.
-And see how He became incarnate: from the HS and the Virgin Mary. We’ll look closer at the HS next week, but the first description of the HS in this creed is the life-giver. Just as the Spirit was hovering over the waters in the first creation, here He was involved in this special creation of the God-man, Jesus Christ, as Luke 1:35 tells us.
-And to make it explicit that Jesus was fully human, a literal translation of this next phrase is “in-humanized.” This is where Arius’s famous statement didn’t go far enough: there was a time when the Son was not human, but there was never a time when the Son was not existing. And friends, this is the craziest part of the whole story of Scripture. God eternal, who existed before time and space lowered himself down to our level by entering human history and being born as a baby. Again, I think Gregory of Nazianzus is helpful here: at no time during His earthly existence did He stop upholding the universe, but He also added humanity to what He was. Somehow and some way the eternal and invisible God added humanity to Himself, and with that said we’re at the mystery card again! Now, think of what the author of Hebrews says about Jesus:
-I remember pondering this verse when I was in high school, and theologians love to debate: could Jesus have sinned? As if sin is inherent to being human. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it is. But that was not a part of God’s design of humans, sin actually is a marker that we’re not fully human, so Jesus was the most human person to ever walk the earth.
-After ensuring that we understand Jesus’ humanity, we get to His work on the cross. He was crucified under Pilate, pointing to the historical reliability of this event as well as God’s sovereignty in guiding even a Roman governor!
-Then it says he suffered death, but could the eternal and all-powerful God even suffer, much less die? One of the truths we confess about God is that he is immortal! I appreciated with Phillip Cary said about this:
-And this creed goes even further in saying that He was buried. He died all the way, even facing the realm of the dead, which means when we die, we don’t need to be afraid, because Christ has already conquered that, too!
-And then we get to the reason to be a Christian: Jesus didn’t stay dead. On the third day He rose again! And this resurrection isn’t just for Jesus, this resurrection is the first fruits of death itself being undone! Jesus, in death, ensured that we never have to live apart from Him, so even when death comes for us (if the Jesus doesn’t come back before that day), we have nothing to fear! Jesus is with us here and there, and this was God’s plan “according to the Scriptures.”
-After 40 days, He ascended back into heaven, the place where He came down from. But now there’s something different about Him: He now has a body, forever. Jesus, the 1^st century Jewish man, is now living in heaven as a fully incarnated human, which blows my mind! Now, heaven isn’t some place that we need to go into space to enter, it’s an invisible realm that we can’t see with our physical eyes right now, but somehow God can still see and interact with us here. And Jesus, the Son of God is currently sitting at the right hand of the Father, and a better way of thinking of sitting would be “is enthroned” as David describes in Psalm 110. While Jesus’ atoning work is done, the Bible tells us that He lives to constantly intercede on our behalf, to constantly lift us up before His Father.
-And lastly, this isn’t the end of the story. He has promised that He will return, the same way He left, in glory. This return won’t be humble, this return will be as the conquering King who will judge the living and the dead, which means no one is off the hook. And when He returns, that’s just the beginning of the end, because His kingdom will never end!
-And if we are in Christ, if we have been saved, if we have believed that Jesus is the Son of God, then we are brought up into this perfect trinitarian relationship because the of what Jesus has done for us.
-He came down, was incarnate, and was made man. He was crucified, he suffered, and was buried. Then he rose again, ascended into heaven, and is seated at His Father’s right hand, from where He will come again in glory, and all of this was: for us and for our salvation.
-This is the miracle of the Trinity, that God became a man to enable men and women to become children of God. I can’t think of any better news, of any better hope then trusting in this God of love.

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by mikethestrand on May 17, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Church, History, Sermon, Theology

Tagged Bible, Christianity, Creed, God, Jesus, Nicene Creed, Theology, trinity

Posted by mikethestrand on May 17, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/05/17/in-one-lord-sermon-manuscript/

Zechariah – Sermon Manuscript

-God’s people at this point at looking small and insignificant. They were under the rule of a different kingdom, the temple they had was described by God as “nothing” in comparison to the old temple. So the midst of that world, how do you think they were feeling? I would guess pretty discouraged. Things weren’t going their way, and they only had dreams about the way things “used” to be. We saw that last week when we looked at the people pining for the glory days!

-And in the midst of that discouragement, Zechariah gives us a different perspective from the Lord for His people, the message to the people is to hope. God is aware, God sees everything that’s going on, and none of it has caught Him by surprise! It struck me this morning, this is VERY similar to the message of the book of Rev., and not just because John uses all sorts of language and imagery from this book, but because the messages are the same: hope in God because He’s in control! We’re going to read the last chapter together:

READ/PRAY (pg. 848)

The Message of Zechariah

-Similar to last week, we don’t have a lot on the prophet, but we do have a lot about the timing of this word, dating it to Aug. 29, 520 BC.

-God begins by talking about the way the people’s ancestors angered the Lord. Their ancestors refused to repent, refused to obey God’s commands, and that’s the reason God sent them into exile. So this people now has a choice to make: are they going to obey God now, or will they be like their ancestors? If they repent and return to God, God promises that He will return to them. And we saw this last week in Haggai: even though God swore to Zerubbabel’s grandfather that his descendants wouldn’t sit on the throne, God redeemed and restored the Davidic line, which tells us there’s always the potential to turn back to God. But isn’t it interesting that this book begins with a call for the people to repent? The Lord is setting the tone for the rest of the book with this call. I liked one commentary I read about it that said that repentance always comes before blessing.

-The choice is in front of the people: you have 2 choices before you, either return to the Lord now and receive His blessing or be like their ancestors and face God’s punishment. But just to make the decision a little easier, look at vs. 5-6: where are those ancestors? They’re all dead! And where are God’s words? They’re being spoken over the people right now. God is showing His hand here, no human can last forever, but God is eternal, which means His Words are never fail or stop.

-And reading this from our perspective today, there is a sense of irony to this letter, because while the people repent here and turn to God, it doesn’t take long for them to go back to disobeying and disregarding God’s law. It’s almost as if they can’t help themselves and can’t escape the reality that they’re sinners! And I think we can see that today too. For those of you who are parents, have you ever found yourself saying something and then realizing you just became your parents? So much of who we are is caught by osmosis instead of carefully and intentionally worked through, and that’s true of all of us! That’s where Jesus offers something completely new and unique, where He offers us the Holy Spirit who works to transform us and make us more like Him. But it takes work, it takes a LOT of work! And part of the reason it takes a lot of work is because it means opening yourself up to others and allowing them to speak into your life, including the broken and messy parts of your life that you don’t want others to see. God brings us into a new family to expose us to new ways of living and moving so that we’re not just stuck doing the same old things our ancestors did. With the arrival of Jesus there’s hope that we can change and impact our future descendants, and I think this is why God says He punishes down to the 3^rd and 4^th generation but blesses to a thousand generations!

-The point: God doesn’t change, His Words are always faithful and true, so if we trust & obey, we will be blessed by Him and we will be a blessing to others. That’s the starting point of this whole book, and then it gets weird. And I’ll be honest, I’m still not really sure what to do with all these visions he has! I trust God’s plan to have them in here, I believe they’re inspired and authoritative for us, but it was a struggle for me to work to interpret them this week.

Visions (1-6)

-Zechariah is given a total 8 visions and at the end of 6 he’s told to do something that serves as a picture of a point God is trying to make. While this isn’t explicitly apocalyptic literature, it has apocalyptic elements to it, similar to Rev. Apocalyptic writings paint vivid pictures for us of various events that stretch us and force us to view things from a different perspective. Think of the difference between reading something versus seeing it on TV. Apocalyptic is meant to put flesh on the stories.

-One caution is to not try to force meaning onto the text. For example, the first vision includes a list of horses, as well as colors of those horses, but the colors don’t have any significance apart from being able to tell them apart. The point is what the horses do. Thankfully, if you’re confused as you read through it, you’re not alone, because Zechariah struggled to figure out what was going on, too! He repeatedly asks his angel guide what in the world he’s seeing. An overview of these visions is that the 1-5 point to God moving toward His people to bring healing and blessing. Then, 6-8 is God casting out sin and wickedness. Because there’s more to the book than just these, we’ll go through these as quickly as I can so we can get through the rest of the book!

-First vision: a man riding a horse standing in a grove of myrtle trees with 3 other horses nearby. These are sent by the Lord to patrol the earth, and they report to the Lord that everything is currently calm and quiet. And since the horses have returned, the Lord says that it’s time for Him to return to Jerusalem and bring prosperity again.

-Second vision: Zechariah see 4 horns who are a stand in for those nations who have caused God’s people to go into exile. But even though the horns look tough, God sends 4 craftsmen who deal with the horns so that they can’t stand again God’s people any longer. This serves as a reminder that God is more powerful than all the nations of the world, even though they look powerful, they can’t stand against God.

-Third vision: a surveyor who goes out to measure Jerusalem, but he’s stopped because the restoration of the people isn’t done. Not only is it not done, but they won’t need walls because God will be their protection and their glory. And as we’ve seen multiple times throughout these prophets, God will call people from every tribe, and tongue, and nation to join His people, and He will live among all these people.

-Fourth vision: focuses on the high priest Joshua (we saw him last week), with the introduction of (in the Hebrew) “the accuser” (which is translated as Satan). But notice why Satan is there: to accuse. But He’s never even given the opportunity to speak, God rebukes Satan and then focuses on Joshua (who’s representing all the people here). The angel of the Lord takes his filthy clothes (signifying the removal of the people’s sins) and instead puts celebration clothing on him. This act is a picture that God is going to bring “The Branch,” a way of referring to the descendant of David who would fulfill God’s promises. And look how vs. 9 ends: the sin of the nation will be taken away in 1 day.

-Fifth vision, last one that deals with the blessing: Zechariah see a menorah, which is a lampstand with 7 lamps that is placed between two olive trees. The point of this image is that God will ensure that His plans come to pass, as the angel quotes in vs. 6. God is promising that even though they’ve only placed the foundation of the temple, if they rely on Him, it’s guaranteed to be finished. But Zechariah is still confused, so he asks about the olive trees, which are defined in vs. 14. Some think it’s referring to Joshua and Zerubbabel (civil & religious leaders), some think it’s Haggai and Zechariah, some think it’s Joshua & Zerubbabel who are pointing us forward to the Branch who will unite both roles of king and priest, then the oil that flows from the olive trees to the Menorah is the Holy Spirit who empowers this service, I think some of this is getting into the realm of speculation! The point remains: God will make sure this comes to pass through the means that He has planned. Now, this comes up again in Rev. 11 so we can’t just ignore it, but God could be using themes and patterns to bring about His plans, so I think He’s referring to 2 different people who are used to bring about His plans.

-This is where things shift, and in the sixth vision Zechariah sees a flying scroll that serves as a curse on the evil. Anyone who disobeys the words on this scroll are cursed, even though it may look like they’re going unpunished. This seems to be referring to the book of the law from Moses (Deuteronomy) and specifically Deut. 27:26.

-The seventh vision: the focus is on a women of wickedness or sin who is in a basket and stuck there with a lid. She is then cast off into Shinar, far away from where God’s people live (think of it like a garbage dump). Shinar is important because it was both the place where God’s people were living in exile and where Babylon is (or Babel, where God confuses the people). This is meant to contrast with the 6^th vision because the 6^th one tells us each individual will be held responsible for their sin, this one tells us that God will also teach with sin and wickedness itself and cast them far away from where He will live with His people, and not only is it cast off from His people, those who aren’t following Him are going to look to it as their place of worship! There’s only 2 ways to live: either on God’s side or opposed to Him.

-The eighth and final vision is back to horses: chestnut, black, white, dappled horses driving chariots which are the 4 spirits of heaven going to patrol the earth and exert God’s rule over the surrounding nations who had often defeated Israel (Egypt to the south and Assyria to the north). This vision is picked up by John in Rev. 6as God’s continued oversight and judgment over the world at the end of time. Last time they brought reports to God about what was happening, this time He’s sending them out with his authority to accomplish his plans.

-We end this section with a sign-act: a crown (kingly rule) being placed on the high priest. He’s also called Branch (do you see the capital letter there) picking up the Davidic line: build the temple and reign, which most people take to mean that the coming Messiah is going to be both a priest and king (some other Jewish groups even took this to mean that there would be 2 different Messiahs, 1 who would be the priest to fix the religious side, and another who would be the king and rule politically) God’s plans are so much better and He sends Jesus to be both!

Desolation or Restoration? (7-8)

-This section is marked off as distinct from all the previous parts we’ve read by not being about visions, but also because it’s 2 years later. And it begins with a question from the people of Bethel. Now, in order to understand what’s happening here, we need to think back to the very beginning of this series (so sorry if you missed it), but to catch you up, I said God reveals future things to the prophets, but He doesn’t always distinguish between the near future and the far future, so if you’ve ever been to CO you’ve seen the mountains off in the distance, but it’s really hard to tell how far away they are, how many there are, how much space is in between them, that’s the same thing with the prophets. They’re told what God is going to do in the future, but He doesn’t tell them WHEN. So some things God talks about take place, and are fulfilled, in Jesus, other things won’t happen until He comes back again in glory. So as we work through this section, we need to keep that reality in mind! Some of the things brought up are fulfilled in Jesus, other things are waiting for Jesus to return and fix all the brokenness in the world.

-Chapter 7 begins with a question about acts of worship. The people had taken to mourning and fasting on the anniversary of the destruction of the temple, and now that the temple had been rebuilt, they realized that it didn’t make sense to continue mourning the loss of the temple.

-But God knows their hearts, and He asks them a question: why were they fasting? God didn’t demand it, didn’t call them to it, it was something they had decided to do on their own. What’s more important that keeping these rituals they decided was to live lives marked by justice, bringing justice to their nation. God is basically asking the people if they’ve learned the lesson they were supposed to over the 70 years in exile, or if their hearts are still far from Him.

-In chapter 8, the focus shifts from God asking the people the questions about their motivations to the future when God will bring blessing to the people. He says the cities (which have been laid desolate because of all the invading armies) will become places of peace and prosperity. And how is this blessing going to happen? God says how in 16-17: speak truth to each other, love your neighbor, sounds oddly similar to many of Jesus’s commands, doesn’t it?

-But it gets even better, look at vs. 19: fasts will turn to feasts and parties. Where there previously had been mourning and lamenting about how difficult things were, in this future time there will be nothing but parties! But we still have 1 more section in this book:

Two Oracles (9-14)

-You can see just be a quick glance at this text that this begins a new section, even the formatting in our Bibles is different! The first oracle (pronouncement from the Lord) is in 9-11 and focuses on the coming shepherd-king. The Lord begins coming through the way most of the invading armies came to attack Judah: from the north, and just like none of the nations could push back against the invading armies, none of these cities or nations can push back against the Lord. But what’s incredible about God coming in is that even as He comes in judgment against these nations, they will begin to follow after Him!

-And then God says something about how this will happen: the King will come on a donkey, that’s a marker of peace, the opposite of coming in on a horse (that means He’s coming in to fight). Can you think of anyone in the Bible who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey? We’re not that far past Easter; it was Jesus on Palm Sunday!

-In the next 2 chapters, God condemns the leaders of the nations by calling them poor shepherds. God also tells Zechariah to act out this reality by taking a flock and abusing them. At the end of his caring for this flock, he tells the people to pay him for his prophecies, but they only view it worth 30 pieces of silver (what a slave cost according to Ex. 21:32). And once again, this serves as a picture pointing us to Jesus, because Jesus was betrayed by the same amount.

-Second oracle begins in chapt. 12, same wording as we saw previously. This oracle begins with the Lord saying that people will try to destroy Jerusalem, but He will protect them, and then there’s a bit of a weird verse (10) and it’s weird because it seems to say that God Himself will be the one who is pierced. Do you see all the first-person pronouns that are being used? This would be completely unexpected! But it goes even further, look at the beginning of chapt. 13:

-A fountain will be opened that will wash away sin and impurity. If you’re thinking of an old hymn, this was the inspiration for it! “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins. And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.”

-And God continues saying that this persecution will continue, and Jesus at the last supper in Matt. 26says this verse is about Him.

-One last piece from this that points us to Jesus is seen in the last chapter. When “that day” comes, living water will flow out of Jerusalem, which Jesus says in John 4 is once again talking about Him. Friends, do you see how Jesus takes all this promises that God has made and fulfills them in Himself?

-Now, besides being really cool in seeing how God revealed His plans, what should we do with this book? First, and most significantly is to rest in the promises of God! Nothing stands against His plans, no one can interfere, and He will remain faithful to everything He’s said.

-But secondly, is what do we do as we live in this time in between Jesus’s two comings? From Zechariah’s perspective, it was all in the future, but for us we live after the coming of Jesus, so I think there’s a few passages from 1 Peter that tell us what we’re supposed to do as we live in-between.

Living In-Between

–1 Peter 1:1-2. First, Peter’s introduction tells us how we’re supposed to view ourselves. First as those chosen. It’s not an accident that you’re here today, and Jesus knew exactly what He was doing when He went to the cross for you. It was because He knew exactly what was going to happen.

-How are those chosen living? As exiles who have been dispersed abroad all over the known world. Just as God said in the past that He would draw everyone to be His people in Jerusalem someday, we’re looking forward to the NEW Jerusalem! Where there will be no separation between us and God. And just a reminder of who this God is, Peter says all 3 persons of the Godhead were involved in this: The Father plans, the Spirit indwells and sanctifies, and the Son purifies with the sprinkling (living water and fountain that we saw in Zechariah)

-The second text: 2:11-12 – since we’re strangers and exiles how do we live? We abstain from sinful desires. That is, we work to keep in step with the Holy Spirit who works to daily make us more holy, who daily works to make us more like Jesus.

-Not just do we run away from something, we’re also supposed to run towards something: good works. Our good works do 2 things, they show us as different from the world, so they’ll complain about us, and they serve as a witness to the world of what God is like. I don’t know about you, but every time I think about that reality, I cringe a little bit. I am supposed to represent Jesus will enough that when other people look at me, they see Him.

-The last text comes from the end of the book: 5:6-9 (if you want, go read this whole chapter this week, the first verses talk about the kind of leadership God wants taking place among His people). First, we start from a position of humility, acknowledging that we’re not God, but He is. Then He will bring us up at the right time, and we do that by casting all our cares on Him because He does care about us. This gives me all sorts of confidence that God’s going to see me through. I can trust Him completely because He does care for me.

-At the same time, that doesn’t mean it’s a passive sit back “let go and let God,” it’s a daily work to be sober-minded and alert. Pay attention to today because we can’t control the future. And the reason we need to pay attention is because the devil never takes a day off, he works his best to fight against everything good that God is doing. But friends, we have the ability to resist him, we can endure any of the temptations that he throws at us, and Peter ends by reminding us we’re not alone. Even if it feels like no one else is chasing after God, we have other brothers and sisters across the world who are in the same fight as us!

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by mikethestrand on April 26, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Relationships, Sermon, Theology

Tagged Bible, Christianity, faith, God, Jesus

Posted by mikethestrand on April 26, 2026

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2026/04/26/zechariah-sermon-manuscript/

Generous with our Treasures – Sermon Manuscript

-We have some “Table Topics” at our house that our kids love pulling out and asking us at dinner. One of the questions in the box is “if our house was on fire, what 1 thing would you take with you on your way out the door?” We tweaked it slightly, because the parents both wanted to take the kids, so assuming everyone in your family was safe! Now this is slightly abnormal, but I’m going to ask you to 30 sec. right now, and share what you would take with the person sitting next to you, and if you don’t know them yet, introduce yourself!

-What things would you take with you, go ahead and shout out a couple of them! When this question first came up, my answer was a guitar that I really like, and that’s probably what I would stick with, but I’m not sure anymore because most of the things I have are replaceable (minus some of the old pictures I have of my grandparents)

-The issue in front of us today is how do we grow in generosity with our treasures, and my guess is whatever you would take with you if there was a fire is your treasure. So now that you all have your treasure in your mind, what would it look like for you to be generous with that? For me, my guitar has been a way I’ve made money to provide for my family, a way of encouraging others with music, I’ve let other people use it when they didn’t have a guitar – it’s been a tool that has fostered relationships and meaning beyond just something for me!

-I would argue that treasures is more than just money, but not less than that. Treasures are any gift God has entrusted to you to take care of.

-Theologians have long argued that there are 3 conversions every Christian faces: conversion of the head, then conversion of the heart, and finally conversion of the pocketbook. Story of Sam Houston.

READ/PRAY

Gray Matters research

READ/PRAY

Grow in This Grace

-When do you start being generous? Many people I talk to view it as something that is reserved for those who have already “made it” or those who have a lot of expendable income. The difficulty with that is even if your income increases, the expenses tend to rise with the, so each time there’s a raise, it doesn’t give any room to be more generous, it gives more room to expand your portfolio of things.

-In the midst of this comes the churches of Macedonia. Not sure what the affliction is, but compared to the capitol city of Corinth, Macedonia would have been relatively poor. Not only were they poor, but Paul describes them as facing a severe trial. Most likely, this would be due to them becoming Christians and being ostracized from many of the work places and not being able to participate in the local economy. And even in the midst of that persecution and poverty, they continued looking to be overwhelmingly generous. Friends, do you look to do the same?

-The privilege of sharing (4)

-Ordering: give to the Lord, then to others. Connected, can’t separate. Almost as if you can tell where someone’s heart is by the way they live.

-Connect to Rom. 12:9-13

-Giving as an act of grace (7)

-If you love, you will give. Refusing to be generous is the mark of an unrepentant heart. Even people I would have major issues with theologically would argue this point! Think of all the people who trumpet that “God is love,” but don’t go on to be generous. That’s an oxymoron, according to this text (kids, if you don’t know an oxymoron it’s 2 words that together don’t make sense, like “jumbo shrimp”)

-The call for anyone who is following Jesus is to daily strive to become more like him, and how did Jesus act with generosity? He used his generosity to elevate others. He gave everything away.

-But this doesn’t mean taking a vow of poverty. I’ve shared this with a few people this week, but I read an article recently talking about the ways pastors approach ministry has shifted between those retiring or getting close to retiring, and my generation (my dad vs. me) It used to be that being called to be a pastor was being called to poverty! There was a funny article that poked fun at this back in 2016 that included lines like “Congregation members began to question his opulent lifestyle in early April as he was spotted eating at Denny’s with his wife for their fourth wedding anniversary, but the scandal didn’t fully break until he was seen rolling up in the gaudy $1,500.00 vehicle, complete with sunroof, cassette deck, FM radio, air conditioning, and a full three out of four automatic windows functioning properly.” And “As part of the official referendum, Coles must donate the Corolla to charity and get something more appropriate for the ten-mile commute he makes seven days a week, such as a reliable, modest Schwinn or Huffy.” Thankfully, this approach has changed dramatically over the last 20 years (sometimes going too far the OTHER way), but notice in our text, giving is done “according to what a person has,” (12) and friends, as your pastor I’m not of the hook! I also give to the church and other ministries as the we can. This is for all of us!

-Paul goes on to say it’s for equality. (13) God brings people together for the purpose of sharing with each other. Start being generous now, so that when you have a surplus you’re already trained to be generous!

-This was first modeled in Exodus, where the everyone had just enough manna. That was meant to serve as a picture of how God would continue providing for all of God’s people in the future.

-I shared this passage a couple weeks ago, but I think it bears repeating again because at the heart of this is where are you banking your treasures? You’ve got 2 options: earth or heaven.

-And then Jesus says that you can tell where your heart is, what you truly believe in, by the way you handle your treasures. Do you view your treasures as a gift for you to steward, or do you view it as your right to continue accumulating more and more? I onetime read that we have so much storage space in America (ANOTHER place to hold all our “stuff”), that if we converted storage units to apartments we could solve the housing problem in our country. What does that tell us about where our priorities as a nation are?

-And I think this helps us make sense of another parable Jesus tells in Luke 12. A man has been getting more and more wealthy, accumulating more and more things, and he finally reaches the point where he thinks he’s made it, where after years of toil and trouble he has reached the point where he can live and do whatever he wants to do. And Jesus calls him a fool, because what the rich man doesn’t realize is that’s his last day on earth. He’d spent his life working to a point of building treasures on earth and neglected building eternal treasures.

-And church, this runs completely contradictory to most financial planning, even Christian financial planning! We’ve so often equated stewardship with just saving, but what if that’s wrong? Now again, please don’t hear me saying that saving is bad or wrong! We’re back to what is the motivation leading you to save? Is it to be a rich fool who can sit back and pursue a life of ease, or is it to allow you to expand your generosity toward others?

How Much is God’s?

-This should be an obvious answer, but I think it’s worth considering together because I think we often forget this, and I think a large part of it is because the news focuses on doom and gloom to sell and keep us coming back. In 1970, an environmentalist named Paul Ehrlich stated:

-Does anyone know how many people died of starvation last year? 9 million. Now each one of those deaths is an image bearer who is worthy of honor and respect, but how close was the environmentalist? God has actually designed the world for the flourishing of His creation. The original task in the garden was to fill the earth, and let me tell you, as someone who used to live in the least populated state in the country, there’s more room to be filled! (If you don’t know, that’s Wyoming, which is significantly less than the population of just Minneapolis & St. Paul)

-The reason this question is important is because I think it gets assumed in any conversation about money instead of carefully and intentionally reflected on. God knows exactly what we need, AND often provides for us in abundance so that we can be a blessing to others.

-Friends being wealthy isn’t a sin! Being wealthy CAN be a sin if you don’t use that wealth to bless others, just as being poor isn’t a sin, but it CAN be if even in your poverty you’re not blessing others. We’re back to that see-saw I talked about a few weeks ago.

-One of the passages that gets to this concept is in 1 Tim. 6. We looked at these first verses a couple weeks ago, but this text goes on. And the last verse in this section is one that often gets misquoted, I remember hearing that the love of money is the root of evil, but that’s not what the verse says, is it? It says, “A root,” and that changes the way we interpret this passage. It also doesn’t say money is the evil, it says the love of money. Friends, money can disappear in an instant. I’ve heard some stories from 2008 that are a reminder of that reality, and there was some irony to when I took this class on generosity, because it was when the stock market dipped in relation to the announcement about tariffs, so the professor on the first day said to not check your retirement accounts!

-So when we think about the question: what is God’s, the answer is everything! EVERYthing is His, and He gives it to us as gifts (James 1:17) to steward, to take care of, for a season.

-Friends, this is where we start to see that everyone is not exactly the same, which should be obvious. Some of us are tall, some are short, some have good rhythm, and some of us can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Which is also true with treasures. Some of us are good at making money, and others aren’t as good, and this is why God calls us together into a church body to come alongside each other in our times of need. Did you know that we have a benevolence fund that is used to help people out in times of crisis in our church family? Since I’ve been here, we’ve used that to pay for medical bills, car repairs, rent, food, and that account continues growing, so if you need help, please let us know!

-BUT there are some caveats to that (1 Thess. 3:10), and there’s an understanding that we can’t help everyone around us.

-God has provided for everything we need – sometimes if the money doesn’t come in, it’s because God is leading us in a different direction, (which is why I said last week our annual budget is a step of faith), but if we’re keeping in step with the Spirit, following faithfully after Him, and trusting that He’s continuing to guide us we can trust God will provide for us for everything we need.

-I was talking to a friend after we found the lightning struck and wrestling through how much that was going to cost, and at the end of the conversation he prayed for me (and us) and in his prayer he thanked God for the lightning strike as something that didn’t catch God off guard, which was the gut punch I needed! Instead of complaining, do we trust that God is working all things for our good and His glory? That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but that gives us hope even when it’s hard, or expensive like a lightning strike!

What About Tithing?

-Under the old covenant, God’s people were required to live in a way that showed the world what life under the one true God could look like, which Micah led us through this year! God gave good rules for how to be able to live with a holy God. What we see as oppressive should be viewed as a good gift of God’s mercy, grace, and love.

-And under the old covenant, a tithe was the way God’s people provided for many of the social, religious, and civil services they needed to operate as a nation. Therefore, tithing was a legal obligation for Israel (just like paying taxes is a legal obligation for us today). AND there were 3 different “tithes” in the OT: Levitical tithe (Lev. 27:30-33, Num. 18 regular to cover the work of the Levites in caring for the temple), festival tithes (Deut. 14:22-27 to provide for the many festivals celebrating God’s provision) and a charity tithe (Deut. 14:28-29 taken every 3^rd year to provide for the less fortunate: aliens, fatherless, widows, orphans) this last one would be like us giving a 10^th to all the poor and needy in the southern suburbs! Add all these up, and annually the Israelites tithed about 25%! How close is the average Christian to THAT tithe?

-But I think we can take this a step further and I would argue that tithing has passed away with the Mosaic covenant. We no longer need to follow the same rules and laws because now we have a new rule under a King who has fulfilled all the laws demands because we never could. Tithing was a part of the Mosaic covenant, and tithing was the means God used to support that covenant. And we could look at each of those 3 tithes as things Jesus has fulfilled: instead of Levites we are ALL priests now so we’re supposed to care for each other, instead of festivals celebrating Passover, harvest, or booths, we have a festival each week to celebrate the salvation won by Jesus, AND we have a new community called ‘the church’ that comes around those who poor and can help provide for them in the midst of their needs.

-So tithing isn’t required for those of us who are in Christ, but Jesus calls us to something even greater: extravagant generosity. Quote.

-Friends generosity is a high calling, and it’s completely contradictory to our natural way of living. Generosity is only possible if Jesus has transformed your heart and baptized your wallet. Generosity is the means God has chosen to provide for his new covenant people today, and it demands all of us being extravagantly generous to each other, and those around us.

-A heart that has been transformed by the gospel will be demonstrated by a baptized wallet! And that also includes us as a church.

-One of the things I’m coming back from sabbatical hoping for us is a renewed focus on our whole church being generous. This isn’t just for us as individuals, this is for us a community, too! And friends, we have a generous church! Over the last 2 years we’ve had 3 years’ worth of giving come in. We have financially supported 2 churches in the area (1 in Bloomington and 1 in St. Paul). When I came here, I was focused on church health, and we’ve gotten a lot healthier. The reason I want us to be healthy is so we can be a place to be a blessing to other people and churches in the area, and we don’t always know when those opportunities will come up!

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by mikethestrand on August 31, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Sermon, Theology, Worship

Tagged Bible, Christianity, faith, God, Jesus

Posted by mikethestrand on August 31, 2025

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2025/08/31/generous-with-our-treasures-sermon-manuscript/

Our Generous God – Sermon Manuscript

-The elders read through various books together to help us grow in our understanding of God, the church, leadership, etc. Over the summer, Micah took them through the book that God used to call me into ministry called ‘Worship Matters.” The bulk of the book is taken up with what the author calls “Healthy Tensions” things that we need to keep in mind to have a healthy music ministry in a church. But as I’ve thought about that concept over my life, I think it applies to our Christian faith much more broadly, and these tensions prevent us from sliding into heresy. And I’ve thought of this through the lens of something they have at playgrounds. Any kids know what this is? A see-saw! Has anyone ever seen a seesaw sitting in its natural state perfectly balanced like this? No! It always leans 1 way or the other. And if you trace the history of Christianity, you can see the theological see-saw going back and forth. A few examples:

-Is Jesus God or a man? Yes! And if you start emphasizing one over the other you end up in heresy!

-Is God 3 or is God 1? Yes!

-Are Christians for the world, or against the world? Yes! We’re for the world coming to know Jesus as the Savior of the world, but we’re against the world and it’s sinful desires!

-We could keep going, but the point is there are things about God that don’t make sense to our finite human minds. And generosity is one of those areas of living that doesn’t make any sense in our world. Why in the world should we give things that we work hard to acquire to someone else? In a purely materialistic world, being generous is honestly a dumb way to live!

-In April, I took a class at TEDS titled ‘Fundraising Principles and Practices.’ Not a class I was excited, not a class I really wanted to take, but it’s a class that really knocked my socks off! Because it connected some dots for me on how I (we) tend to approach money, but all the things we think are “ours.”

-I say “ours” intentionally, because what do you have that hasn’t been entrusted to you for a season? And what do you have here that you’ll take with you after you die? So I’ve spent the last 4 months sitting in this idea and praying about what it means for us to be a generous people.

-Book recommendation

READ/PRAY (pg. 1027)

Rich Through Poverty

-Background to 2 Corinthians: the upside-down way of living. One of my favorite descriptions of the early church is found in Acts 17. Paul is continuing to preach the gospel, arrives at Thessalonica (wrote a couple letters to them that we have later in our Bibles!), and the Jews become jealous and come before the officials and describe what’s taking place: turning the world upside down.

-A commentator put this summary of the book, just like the see-saw that I talked about earlier. This doesn’t make sense in our world! Paul is intentionally making these contrasts in this book that point to a cross-like way of living

-Paul making these contrasts that point to the cruciform (cross like) way of living, particularly in response to a group who claimed to be “super apostles” who proudly announced their accomplishments and pointed out all of Paul’s weaknesses. So Paul uses this opportunity to point out how these “super apostles” are only pursuing worldly recognition, which isn’t the way of Jesus.

-Think of Jesus in Matt. 10:39. In order to find your life, you must lose it. How does that make any sense? Until you understand the gospel message it doesn’t!

-This inversion leads to us being a people marked by generosity instead of hoarding, giving instead of taking, trusting instead of doubting.

-And I’ll put all my cards on the table here: this has been a stretching concept for me to engage, which probably means it’s exactly what God has needed to teach me! I don’t like talking about money, it honestly stresses me out! I’ve had to grow (a lot) in my engagement with money, in the ways I talk about money, and even in my own stewardship of money.

-I also don’t preach as someone who feels like they’ve arrived with this! I’m a pilgrim just like you, and just like many of you I preach far better than I practice! This is something I’m still working on and trying to grow in so that I can be better marked by generosity than hording. But I also know I’m not alone in this!

-And let me illustrate this by asking you a question: how would you feel if I asked to see your bank account, your budget, and your pat check? I’m not asking, and I won’t ask (unless you’re wanting to talk about it!) but why is it that we tend to feel comfortable talking about anything except money? I’ve had people share things with me that they’ve never told anyone else in the world, but those same people wouldn’t tell me what their annual salary is. And friends, I think that may be a way of revealing an area that we NEED to talk about. And I’ll make this personal, I think this is something I need to talk about, because I find myself cringing about this topic which I think is a way of God revealing an idol in my heart.

-I recently listened to a podcast from someone who said he has 2 guys go through his budget every year, and he calls them before he makes any purchase over $1,000. I’ve heard of other Christian guys who rented a house together out of college and literally pooled all their money together. Any purchase over $50 had to be approved of.

-I don’t know about you, but I hear that and start to get uncomfortable! Why should anyone else have a say in MY money. And friends, there’s the problem. What is truly mine? Nothing! This is starting to get to the point where I think Jesus wants us to be, and (Matt. 6) why he says where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is. Jesus says you’ll build up treasures somewhere, where are those treasures that you’re building on?

-The theme verse for this that crystalized this topic for me is found in 2 Cor. 8:9. In this section, Paul is urging the church to give generously, and he summarizes the gospel message in a financial way. Jesus became poor to allow us to become rich. This richness isn’t limited either, and Peter picks up this idea in 2 Peter 1.

-I loved the way my professor talked about this in the class I took. What’s left out of “everything”? Well the opposite: NOTHING! So friends, what do we lack?

-The temptation for all of us is to operate out of a scarcity mindset, where there’s a limited amount of resources, so in order for us to ensure our survival it’s taken at someone else’s expense. But what if that’s a worldly way of living? What if we serve and worship the God who has made everything out of nothing? What if we really have been given everything we need, but it requires a shift in thinking and approaching the world from us?

-We’ll get to this more in the Fall as we walk through 1 Tim., but look at how Paul describes the way Christians operate. What do we enter the world with? Our birthday suit! And you can’t even take that with you! But how many of you would honestly say you’re content with food and clothing?

-I’m guessing many of the kids in here aren’t even content with the food they’re served each day! I know in my house we often get complaints that it’s food they don’t like, or we’re not getting it to them fast enough and they’re “STARVING.”

-And noticed Paul doesn’t warn those who are rich, he warns those who WANT to be rich.

-Once again, as I say this, I feel the need to caveat, and it’s something I brought up in class: isn’t this prosperity theology? And once again, I think this brings us back to a tension point: because the opposite is also not true: poverty theology, and the Bible points us between those 2 extremes. See riches CAN be a root of evil, but it isn’t evil by itself. God blesses some people with material blessing so they can be a blessing to others. Think of Abraham or Joseph, men given material blessing so that they can in turn bless others. Or during Jesus’s ministry, when Luke tells us “many” were supporting Jesus and His disciples. Friends, riches isn’t a good barometer of either spiritual blessing or spiritual maturity. There can be mature people in poverty, and immature people who worldly rich, but the call for everyone who is in Christ is to grow in generosity. To grow in trusting God’s provision in your life.

Taking Versus Trusting

-Scripture begins with a story of a generous God who creates everything out of nothing and provides everything necessary for his creation to flourish.

-Generosity comes with stipulations: don’t eat from 1 tree. Could also say: don’t live beyond your means. But instead of trusting in God’s plan, Eve takes from the tree. The relationship between God and creation is broken, moves in the next chapter to human relationships being broken where Cain murders his brother. Doesn’t say why Abel’s offering was acceptable, but it describes Abel’s as “some of the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions.” (Gen. 4:4) Abel gives the best, where Cain gives “some.” I think this is where we see that God expects people to be generous.

-And I also think this helps us understand a weird story in Genesis 6 about the sons of God “taking” the daughters of men. Instead of trusting God’s rules and laws for the structuring of the world, creation continues taking things that God has forbidden. In contrast to this is Noah who is described as righteous and blameless.

-Noah began trusting God’s rules, but then what happens to Noah? Noah takes from fruit of the vine in excess and becomes drunk. What was initially trust in God’s provision became abuse and excess.

-This rebellion against God’s ways of living climaxes in Gen. 11 with the tower of Babel. People had refused to obey God’s commission of filling the earth, so they build a tower in order to build a name for themselves, or TAKE a name for themselves instead of entrusting themselves to the one true name that matters: Yahweh. Their tower is their picture of human continually trying to take what is rightfully God’s, instead of trusting His good design, so God forces them to be obedient by confusing their language and spreading them across the earth. This unfinished tower serves as a picture for us of any human efforts to reach God, it will always fall short.

-Side note: story of a church building a pyramid in the lobby of all their “accomplishments”

-God’s story shifts from everyone in the world to 1 man: Abraham (studied his story in the Spring) Abraham’s life is meant to be blessed by God so that Abraham can turn and be a blessing to the whole earth. We saw this in the way Abraham blessed others, and those who were close to Abraham received blessing, and those that stayed far off didn’t.

-Genesis ends with God’s people in Egypt, where they are taken into slavery. Yet God still cares for them and raises up Moses to deliver them to a land full of abundance, God’s generosity continuing.

-But even as God miraculously leads them out of Egypt, and his generosity continues in miraculously providing food for the entire nation, they don’t trust God. Each day God would send manna and quail for them, but as in the garden they were given stipulations: only take enough for that day. (Ex. 16:4) They were commanded to trust God’s daily provision in their lives, and how did they respond? They took more than they were supposed to, leading to their food spoiling. They took instead of trusting.

-After 40 years of God’s abundant provision of food, they finally enter the promised land that was supposed to have everything they needed, flowing with milk and honey, but they’re still not happy. They want to take a king to lead them just like the other nations, and what’s fascinating is God warns the people that a kind would take their kids and force them to serve the king! (1 Sam. 8:11, 13)

-Where God is generous, His people even the leaders aren’t so generous, and the rest of the history of Israel is people continuing to take for themselves instead of trusting God and being generous with their blessings.

-And then we get to the NT where God’s people are now subjected to life under a government that views taking as a normal way of life. If you’ve never read about the Roman empire, it was a BRUTAL place to live! And into that world comes Jesus who says it’s better to give than to get, better to turn the other cheek than lash back. And then went and lived that out, He trusted Himself to His Father instead of taking the honor and recognition that should have been His.

-He modeled a truly generous life where He freely gives His status to anyone who would ask by taking our poverty on Himself. He became weak so that we could become strong. He stewarded His riches in a way that allowed others to be blessed through those riches. He didn’t horde it for Himself or hold anything back, He freely gave to anyone who would ask!

-THAT is the history building to what we see in 2 Cor. Jesus through his riches took on poverty to enable we who are poor to become rich, and then go from there to share our riches with others. Friends, this should completely change the way we view our riches!

Which Way Are You Living?

-Would you say your life is marked by taking or by trusting? Just a few chapters earlier in this book, Paul says that what should compel us, drive us forward it “the love of Christ,”

-One of the markers of the love of Christ is growing in generosity. Is that modeled in your life?

-One of the assignments I had to do for this class was to write down my history related to generosity. Who modeled generosity for me and how have I modeled generosity in my life? This was an INCREDIBLY helpful experience for me! And one of the things that stood out to me was how much being a part of the church affected my views (yet another reason it’s important for kids to be in here on a regular basis!) I remember passing the plate, seeing people drop their hard-earned money into it every week. That starts to affect your views of money!

-Take some time this week to thing and pray through your history of generosity! Is your life marked more by trusting or taking? What would it mean for you to grow in this gift of generosity over the next month, 3 months, 6 months, year?

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by mikethestrand on August 17, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Church, Sermon, Theology, Worship

Tagged Bible, Christianity, faith, God, Jesus

Posted by mikethestrand on August 17, 2025

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2025/08/17/our-generous-god-sermon-manuscript/

Gender Roles in the Church – Sermon Manuscript

-Swimming, going off into the deep end today, as there’s some issues that we can’t paint with a broad brush on. Today’s message is one of those.

-Make sure you have your Bibles out! We’ve got a bunch of texts to look at today!

-We’ll also be dealing with some difficult hermeneutical issues where some verses at first glance seem to be contradicting each other, so it’s important for us to understand the way all the pieces of the Bible fit together, otherwise the Bible is prone to misinterpretation and mis-application.

Today’s topic is: gender roles in the church. We have talked about gender roles in marriage before, in our series through Ephesians, but today’s topic is a little different, and the question before us is: what does the Bible say are the appropriate roles to which we’re called? Is there anything that’s off limits to anyone?

-This is not a major, but it is a distinctive of the EFCA and of our church. Even if you don’t agree with us on this issue, you’re welcome to join us, get plugged in and involved, as long as you know this is where we land.

-Before we dive in, let’s read the first thing the Bible tells us about gender:

READ/PRAY

As we begin to think through gender roles, there are 4 primary “camps” that have different conclusions about this issue. We’ll begin with those 2 on the outside: first – feminism.

Feminism argues that women are superior to men, thus women should lead everything.

-I’ve actually gotten into trouble with people on this label before, so let me clarify. If your mind goes to women voting, working outside the home, or being fully equal to men when you heard the word “feminism” that’s not what it means today. If you search “fifth wave feminism” you’ll see a few articles talking about the way feminism has shifted over the past 100 years to focus now on things like intersectionality, or some even argue that 4^th wave feminism is reacting to being “postfeminist”

–Within feminism, there’s a tendency to appeal to cases of abuse, of domineering, and of aggression and use that as the reason why all men are evil. They also have a tendency to throw out the Bible for the sake of experience or philosophical ideas. NOW – experience in and of itself is not bad, nor is philosophy, the problem is when those become the measuring stick instead of using the Bible which is dangerous! This leads them to generally be pro-abortion and pro-homosexual marriage because the standard of judgment is simply what feels right or fighting for whomever is marginalized.

Patriarchy is the other side that we want to avoid.

This takes the opposite approach in that men are superior to women, thus women are expected to remain passive and unengaged while the men make all the decisions. This has led to some immense oppression and neglect for women, and has led to the detriment of the church because women have not been encouraged to use their gifts, meaning half of the church isn’t involved in the life of the church. Think of what it would be like if you neglected or marginalized half of your body! Unfortunately, many people view this and complementarian as synonyms, but they are distinct positions, and some who claim complementarian are actually patriarchalists, so it gets difficult to define.

-Neither of these are good, so we’re down to these 2:

Egalitarianism argues that gender distinctives were part of the Fall, thus in this New Covenant area that we currently reside in, there is to be no distinctive anywhere.

Any role that is open to men should be open to women as well. Where this is distinct from feminism is egalitarians will actually argue from the Bible, which is good! They appeal to passage like Gal. 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave not free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Their basic premise is that any gender role distinctive in the Bible are exclusively cultural, thus they are not applicable to today. This was the view of the college and seminary I attended, thus I’ve had to wrestle through this issue pretty intimately!

Where the EFCA, and South Suburban land is:

Complementarianism:

Coined in 1987 in Danvers, Massachusetts leading to the Danvers Statement, Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CAVEAT)

-QUOTE

-Complementarians believe that men and women have distinct and unique roles to fulfill in the home and in church. This is based on passages that we’ll dig in to later, like 1 Timothy 2:12 “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; rather; she is to remain quiet.”

-‘Where We Stand in the EFCA’

-Part of the difficulty, then is the old question: how far is too far? It’s one thing to ascribe to complementarianism theoretically, it’s a different thing to ascribe to it in practice. That’s where some who claim to be complementarian are practically patriarchs, and others who claim it are practically egalitarians. Within complementarianism there is a different scale. So those are waters we’ll be swimming in during our time together today: what does it mean to be complementarian, and what does that look like?

Both Men and Women Are Created in the Image of God (Gen. 1)

This is where God begin, thus it’s where we’ll begin, and it should be a bit of a “well…duh!” but if it’s important enough for God to say it, it’s important enough for us to be reminded of it.

-Both men and women are created in the image of God. Neither sex can claim to be “better” than the other because we both are created in the image of God. And both being created that way is “very good.” It is very good that we have men and women.

-But let’s look at 2:18, A helpmate, a companion, a suitable other. This isn’t demeaning or belittling to Adam or Eve, this is necessary. In fact, this word ezer helper here is used to describe God in places like Psalm 54:4 “God is my helper; the Lord is the upholder of my life.” Psalm 118:7, “The Lord is on my side as my helper; I shall look in triumph on those who hate me.” Adam needed Eve to fulfill God’s mandate in his life, just as Eve needed Adam to fulfill God’s mandate for her life. This is not a greater than/less than, this is a beautiful outworking of our genders for the fullness that God has intended in our lives.

-This is why we throw out feminism and patriarchy, BOTH sexes are equal in dignity, value, and worth. There is no better or less than in genders when it comes to salvation, to gifting, or calling. “The ground is level at the foot of the cross.” In God’s eyes, no gender is superior.

-At the same time, notice that Eve isn’t the one held accountable for her sin in Gen. 3, God comes to Adam and asks him what he’s done.

-This means that for men, there’s liability or accountability that women won’t have.

-Men – you will be judged for how well the set the spiritual climate of your home. Yet both men and women are called by God and used by Him, let’s look at some examples of that.

Both Men and Women Are Used By God (Judges 4, John 4, Rom. 12, 1 Cor. 12)

-This point should be another “Well…duh!” point for you!

-Nowhere in the Bible does it say that ONLY one gender can be used by God to fulfill his mission of spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth. Think of just a few chapters later in Genesis 18 when the Lord tells Abraham and Sarah that they would have a kid in their old age. Sarah isn’t treated as lesser than or ignored, but God addresses her directly in confirming that they’d have a kid.

-Or think of Miriam, the sister of Moses in Ex. 15 after Pharoah and his army have been rushed by the Red Sea:

-Or one of the most often mentioned people is Deborah in Judges 4.

-This is one of the most cited examples by Egalitarians for their position that every position should be available to men and women.

-Question in seminary: “Deborah was a prophet, judge and leader in Israel. Does this affect your view of women in ministry today?” I didn’t score very highly on my answer, and the prof who generally didn’t interact with our posts sent me a lengthy reply about why I was wrong. So as complimentarians, what do we do with this idea that Deborah was a leader? It’s a GREAT reminder that we NEED to be encouraging women to use their gifts for the sake of the body!

-Imperative to distinguish between that which is DEscriptive and that which is PREscriptive.

-There’s a lot of things that are descriptive in the Bible that we shouldn’t emulate. Abraham had multiple wives. Moses had a temper and killed an Egpytian. Notice that after those stories it DOESN’T say “go and do likewise.” Or even closer to the story of Deborah – Samson, who was a hot mess! His life reads like a season of The Bachelor. Again, doesn’t say “go and be like Samson”

-One thing the text does NOT say: Deborah was a priest. Those who served as Priests in the OT HAD to be men. There is no instance of a women “priestess” in the Bible. So we already see that there is some distinction between the roles of men & women in the OT. But does that change under the New Covenant, as some have argued?

-John 4 the woman at the well. Verse 27 Think of this woman’s testimony! And she willingly runs and shares it!

-Jesus thought both men and women were crucial for faithful ministry.

-Think of Mary and Martha and Lazarus in John 11:5, Again, we see that Jesus ministered to both men and women, and both men and women were used by God.

-We also read that women traveled with Jesus and the 12 and supported Jesus during His ministry (Luke 8)

-BUT there’s again a distinction.

-How many of the 12 that Jesus called were women? 0

-Some have argued that Jesus didn’t want to upset the social norms, but do you really think Jesus had any issues upsetting the social norms that weren’t applicable to them? He seemed to push back to any and every issue that needed! Sabbath, tithing, lusting, giving, the law, relationships with Gentiles…to name just a few. So all that to say, that again there seems to be a distinction between the roles of men and women, even in how Jesus ministered to people.

-Also important, is that spiritual gifts are not gendered.

Romans 12:3-8. Prophecy, service, teaching, exhortation, giving, leading, mercy. None of these say only for women OR men.

-At the end of Romans, Paul beings by thanking Phoebe, a woman, and in the list of names are both men AND women who are using their gifts for the sake of the church.

-1 Corinthians 12:4-13.

Wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues.

-Again, doesn’t say only for women OR men. Open to everyone, regardless of the gender.

-We’ve seen God doesn’t care about which gender you are in order to use you, and that God equips everyone regardless of their gender for the sake of the church. But, that doesn’t mean that any role in the church is open to anyone.

-One of the greatest disservices in the church is encouraging people in areas of weakness for the sake of being “nice.” Front row seat to this with music, but you’ve all seen it on American Idol! I had a friend who only watched the first 2 episodes every season.

Everyone Isn’t Called to Every Role (Eph. 4, 1 Cor. 11 & 14, 1 Tim. 2)

-Before we dig into this, one note for us to keep in mind. God’s Word is sufficient, and I would argue a lot more clear on how the church is supposed to be ordered than many people want to admit. One of the things we need to realize is the church isn’t like any other earthly institution, it’s actually completely alien to the world! The church is supposed to be an outpost of heaven, therefore we need to order ourselves differently from the world and follow the Bible where it commands us, but no further, that’s where we start to get into trouble and start demanding people follow man-made rules.

–Eph. 4 Notice how the body builds itself up: “proper working of each individual part.”

-Don’t belittle or diminish your role and gift in the church! I think this is part of where confusion about gender roles come from, in God’s alien kingdom, one gift isn’t better than the other. Many of those gifts that aren’t seen are the most important. There are people that come here on a regular basis just to clean and organize this room! Yes, some gifts are more visible than others, but don’t belittle your gift at the expense of wishing you had a different gift. (1 Cor. 12:27-31 addresses this issue)

-There are a couple key passages that we need to deal with to understand this issue, and as I said, we’re going to go wading through some weeds here.

-1 Corinthians 14:32-35. (1020)

At first glance, this seems to be quite restrictive, doesn’t it? So how do we faithfully exegete these verses, and then apply them to today?

Remember: spiritual gifts are not gendered, so now turn back a page to 1 Corinthians 11.

1 Corinthians 11-14 are all a part of the same section dealing with the question: what should we do when we gather as the church? What does it look like?

-1 Cor. 11:2-16. (1017-1018)

-Notice especially verse 5. So this is in the gathering where women are praying and prophesying.

-So how do we reconcile these 1 Cor. 11 with 1 Cor. 14?

-Some have argued that Paul’s prohibition here is exclusively cultural, and not applicable to today. They compare it to a passage like: 1 Corinthians 16:20. “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” One commentator said, “Greet each other with a hearty handshake!”

-3 words: context, context, context.

-This whole section is a reminder that what we do when we gather is supposed to build each other up. Even the spiritual gifts that we are given are supposed to be used to build each other up and help us in our walk with the Lord.

-Let’s read 1 Cor. 14:26-35. Orderly Worship.

-We’ve got this leadership that oversees and judges the prophecies that are being made. This is a position of authority in the church, thus it impacts who can serve in this role. Paul’s prohibition here doesn’t mean that women aren’t supposed to do anything but attend on Sunday morning, instead he’s saying that in the judgment of prophecies, women are not to oversee. We don’t have time to get into the nuances of what constitutes a prophecy today, that’s a discussion for a different time, but we do see that women are encouraged to pray and prophecy in church, but not sit in judgment about the validity of the prophecies. There’s a big distinction between the 2!

1 Timothy 2:8-15 (991)

-Specifically verse 12, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”

-Once again, people have argued that this was contextual, and thus does not carry weight for us today. Letter was written to Timothy who was at Ephesus, primary god was Artemis who was a woman, thus many women in Ephesus were what we would call feminists. (false argument, Artemis also had male priests) But Paul doesn’t ground his reason for this in the Artemis worship – it’s grounded in pre-fall creation, signifying that as long as man is created first, and then Eve created second, this prohibition remains in effect. Meaning, it’s still in effect today, and will continue to be until Christ returns.

-There is an element that is counter-cultural here, look at verse 11: “Let a woman learn” Women had no place to be taught and learn apart from the home.

-Now, we have to ask the question here: what kind of teaching? Because once again this cannot be an absolute prohibition because we’ve got other passages like:

Titus 2:3-4

2 Timothy 1:5

Acts 18:26

Colossians 3:16

-We see other places in the Bible, even in Paul’s writings, women are encouraged to teach!

-Then what kind of teaching is Paul talking about restricting in 1 Tim.? Remember that we saw in the spiritual gifts passage that some people are given the gift of teaching. But not everyone is given that gift! So not everyone is called to teach. So just because you’re a man doesn’t mean you should be teaching in the church if that’s not your gift.

-James 3:1

-Doug Moo, “While the word [teaching] can be used more broadly to describe the generally ministry of edification that takes place in various ways, the activity usually designated by teach is plainly restricted to certain individuals who have the gift of teaching. This makes it clear that not all Christians are engaged in teaching. In the pastoral epistles, teaching always has this restricted sense of authoritative doctrinal instruction.”

-Thus 2 Timothy gives us 2 restrictions: women are not to teach Christian doctrine to men, and they are not to exercise authority over men in the church.

-That being said, when does a boy become a man? Where do we draw the line where we should be encouraging women to teach and serve in various areas, and not others? What constitutes Christian doctrine? What does it mean to “exercise authority over”? Great questions! I don’t have time to answer them today! I’m just trying to give an overview of this!

-Part of the difficulty is this position and idea has been used throughout history to marginalize women, which goes contrary to what the Bible commands! I think part of it is because many people are scared to disobey the Bible (good concern!) but that leads them to forgetting to encourage and foster women to serve in the church. (except for in women’s ministry and the nursery…)

-So what does that mean for us? Here at South Suburban, you’ll see women helping us worship God through singing, encouraging us through praying, reading Scripture to us, sharing their testimonies of God how is working in their lives to encourage us, in fact our staff is primarily comprised of women using their gifts, BUT you won’t see a women preaching. Again I don’t have time for this, but part of it gets to the role of preaching in the church being one of authority and speaking on behalf of God to his people (not something to take lightly!)

But this is also why I don’t want to end with the prohibition passages! Because:

Everyone Is Called to Serve Within Their Gifts (1 Cor. 12)

-Everyone here has been uniquely gifted by God for the sake of building each other up. Within the spiritual realm there is a unique sense of equality between all the gifts where we all need each other to function in a healthy manner.

1 Cor. 12:21

-Similarly, men cannot say to women “I have no need of you,” or women to men “I have no need of you.” Instead, we all need each other to build each other up and encourage each other to become more like Christ.

-Friends, this means none of you are off the hook from using your gifts to serve Christ’s body here! It requires all of us to give of ourselves, it requires us to be obedient to what God has commanded, even the sticky and difficult parts, but, it’s also completely worth it. God’s ways are best, and it’s only be faithfully following in His ways that we’ll find life to the full.

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by mikethestrand on January 19, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Church, Relationships, Sermon, Theology

Tagged Bible, Christianity, church, complementarianism, women

Posted by mikethestrand on January 19, 2025

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2025/01/19/gender-roles-in-the-church-sermon-manuscript/

Revelation 22:6-21 – Sermon Manuscript

-We did it! We’ve made it through the entire book of Revelation! After having someone tell me I should NEVER preach through this book because no one can understand, I was worried we’d end up with confusion and frustration every week, but I’ve already had a number of people tell me they finally feel like they have a grasp of how to interpret this book, which was my prayer when we started this.

-Today’s text serves as a summary, direct application to our lives, and some final reminders on what we’re supposed to do now that we’ve walked through this whole book, not only that, but it’s the last verse of all of Scripture, the last words God wanted us to hear regarding His plans for the reconciliation and renewal of all things. Because the reality is Jesus is coming soon. Now, it’s going to take us another 30 minutes to understand what that means!

READ/PRAY

Look to the Word (6-11)

-The first thing we need to notice is there’s wording and themes here that should sound familiar. Look at the parallels between chapter 1 and 22. It’s almost like there was a plan, purpose, and direction to this entire book to communicate these ideas! This section also sounds very different from all the stuff we’ve been reading over the past number of months.

-Said this in the first sermon I preached in this series: combination of apocalyptic, prophecy, and letter. We’re back to the letter part.

-Begins with the reminder that these words are faithful and true, exact same phrasing we saw in 21:5. God communicates and identifies Himself through words. Words that come from a God who is faithful and true are also faithful and true.

-Reflecting on why we have the written Word. What’s the best way to communicate something that can be saved and preserved for centuries? Write it down! Make copies of it! (working on digital stuff, have 3 copies of everything)

-Since God wants us to know Him, He had people write down what He wanted us to know, therefore the mark of a Christian is trusting that His Word is faithful and true. Friends, don’t give up on the Bible!

-God of the spirits of the prophets. What is that? True prophets only speak on behalf of God. John is identifying himself in that lineage. Just as God spoke previously to His prophets, He’s concluded His speaking here to John.

-Sent his angel, just like the beginning.

-Soon take place. Look I am coming soon. How soon?

-Is 2,000 years soon? God looks at time differently, think back to Rev. 6 where the martyrs beg God to return and He says “not yet.” My kids think waiting a half hour is FOREVER, and we laugh! Don’t you think that may be a picture of how God looks at time, even 100 years is nothing to Him! But whether it’s 2,000 or 20,000 years, the next step in salvation history is Jesus coming back.

-If you just think through the primary events in God’s plan of redemption: creation, fall, redemption, salvation, and then consummation is the only thing left!

-Blessed: Revelation beatitudes. Jesus gives beatitudes in Matt. 5, things like blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

-6^th of 7 blessings promised throughout this book. Review the blessings:

-Read, hear, and keep the words (remember there’s an end goal for us to DO something with this text)

-If we die in Christ we actually live!

-Alert and clothed: alert to not give in to the way the world works to seduce us, and clothed in Christ’s clothing (19:8: “fine linen represents the righteous acts of the saints.”)

-Invited to the marriage feast – those saved and washed by the blood of the lamb

-First resurrection, when Jesus returns and sets up His kingdom on earth

-Then here we’re back to the start: keep the words of this book (pointing back to the start), 1 more to come.

8-Reminder of who wrote this book: John! Once again, he’s tempted to worship an angel, one of God’s messengers. This happened once before in Rev. 19.

-All of God’s creation is meant to have 1 aim and goal in life: worship God. Worship isn’t just what we do on Sunday morning (though it includes that), it’s not a type of music (though it includes music), worship is an orientation to our entire lives, it’s what we do all the time, everyone worships something or someone. The most dedicated atheist worships something, but generally their worship is geared/focused on themselves

-I think this focus of this book is to force us to answer the question: what are you worshipping? Some people worship politics (the beast from the sea) and some people worship the power and influence that comes from politics (the beast from the land) but we’re all tempted to worship in worldly categories instead of heavenly categories, the way God intended us to. The temptation is to worship the gifts God has given that point us to Him, because if we pursue them as an end in themselves we will always be lacking. Augustine: our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. That’s why Revelation is so timely! Do you think anyone is looking to politics for salvation today? Do you think anyone is looking to power and influence for salvation today? Pastors aren’t immune! Why do you think pastors always question how big each other’s church is?

-Friends, what are you worshipping?

-We glance by this: DON’T seal up. Why does that matter?

–Dan. 12:4. God is telling John that the end is now here. It has been the last days since this book was written, 1900 years ago.

-Vs. 11 seems weird, doesn’t it? Where do we see God encouraging people to sin?

-Once again, John is picking up an idea from Daniel, where it’s not encouraging people to pursue sin, but it’s saying that sin blinds people, and until they are saved they will continue pursuing sin.

-Connection here is unrighteousness leads to being filthy, righteousness leads to being holy. The way you live has spiritual implications, we don’t just work to become a better human, we need a complete transformation.

-I love the way Jeremiah 31 describes it, it says God will remove our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. He’s saying even a quadruple bypass isn’t enough, we need a transplant, an inbreaking of something completely new and alien to us, we need to be spiritually raised from the dead.

Look at Your Works (12-15)

-Once again, a reminder that Jesus is coming soon! While He comes in judgment, He also comes with a reward that’s only given to those who live according to His will and ways.

-This comes about only by a transformed heart. You can’t offer good works to God without His Spirit changing you from the inside out. We talked about this idea in Rev. 19, so if you want to hear more about that go back and listen to that sermon, but the core idea is that faith comes by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, but then as Calvin says the faith that saves is never alone because it’s always accompanied by new good works that God has called us to

-And all of this is possible because in 3 different ways, Jesus identifies Himself with God and as the author of history: alpha and omega (A and Z), first and the last (and everything in between), and beginning and the end.

-Time itself only exists in God, that’s why He can speak with confidence and authority about the way everything is going to happen.

-Final Beatitude (blessing) in the book: wash their robes. What does that mean? Picking up a theme from the rest of the book.

-Multitude in Rev. 7 praising God, one of the elders asks John who they are, John says that the elder must know, so the elder responds:

-The way our robes are washed is by being washed in the blood of the Lamb. This is picking up another theme that God spoke about back in Isa. 1. The means by which clothes are washed is through faith in Jesus Christ, the outworking of that is “the right to the tree of life” and “entering the city by the gates”

-Remember back to last week where we saw this odd combination of a city and a garden. Reflections back to Eden with the tree of life and the water of life, but now remade as a city. The perfect place, the new Most Holy Place where God lives among His people.

-I also think it’s significant that we enter “by the gates,” where angels watch over them, and they point to the historical validity of Christianity. One of the reasons I remain a Christian is because of history!

-Think of this: for Buddhism, what would happen if we were able to definitively say that Buddha didn’t exist? Nothing! Hinduism, too many gods to articulate, but has no reflection in reality. Mormons: take away Joseph Smith and nothing happens to their faith (even when their religion is proven time and time again to be historically unverifiable). What is often called Liberal theology even argues that even if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead they would still be Christians (which honestly is just dumb!). Friends, part of the reason you should be a Christian is because of history. We look back to a definitive event where Satan was defeated, and we look forward to an end point in history where death will be no more! Where the gates will never be closed, where everything will be finally work in perfect peace and harmony.

-But not everyone will be there, only those whose lives are marked by Jesus, who are clothed with the righteousness of Jesus, who realize that they can’t do anything in their own strength but need Jesus to work in them.

-For those people:

Look to Jesus to Come (16-21)

-Another reminder who’s in control: Jesus. Everything centers on Him, all of History hinges on Him, and the End is held off until He comes back.

-He’s even in charge of the angels (messengers), notice that the angel’s job is just to serve as the messenger of Jesus.

-Who is the message to? Not to angels, to the churches, the churches which are comprised of those who have washed their clothes in the blood of the Lamb. Picks up the same idea at the very beginning where John recounts that Jesus sent an angel to John, who recorded everything that was revealed (Revelation) to him.

-Jesus is the root and descendent of David (the Messiah), picking up a theme from Isa. 11:1, Jesus is David’s promised son who sits eternally on God’s throne.

-Bright morning star: Num. 24:17. Balaam’s prophesy (mentioned back in 2:14, letter to Pergamum) Balaam hired by a king to curse Israel, goes to do it, but only blessings come out. Friends, God can use even greedy, wealth-seeking false prophets to carry out His will and plan! And the prophesy here is that some star will come to destroy the enemies of God’s people. What has happened over the course of this book? God’s enemies have been destroyed! All of them! None are left. The descendent of David has won!

-What word do you see repeated in vs. 17? Come! This is to anyone who is hearing this message (all of you), and it gives both a command and a commission:

-First the command: Spirit and the bride (anyone remember who the bride is? The church!) they say to come. Come and align yourself with Jesus, wash your clothes in His blood so that He can bring you near.

-Next, the commission: anyone who hears join with the Spirit and the church to say “Come!” Friends, this is where all of us are a part of God’s reconciling plan to bring all things under His sovereign rule and reign. This book isn’t meant to be us sitting in a room by ourselves trying to figure out if we’re living in the last days, because we are living in the last day, and even if Jesus were to come back tomorrow, it would change nothing about what we should be doing today! We’re supposed to be bearing fruit and inviting others to come to have their clothes washed in His blood. I shared this idea a few weeks ago, but I want to say it again: the point of a sermon isn’t for you to walk away with 3 new things to try to “fix” your life in your own strength, the point of a sermon is for you to behold God and remember what Jesus has done for you! And then we are sent back out into the world to continue inviting others to come!

-Which gets us to the third invitation: anyone who is thirsty. Thirsty for what? John 4 – eternal life. Jesus provides the solution to all the deepest longings of your heart. Jesus’ offer is for any and everyone. So if you’re here today and you haven’t yet trusted Jesus to be your Savior and Lord, why not? Your life won’t have any ultimate purpose or meaning until you do, you won’t find the answer to the deepest longings of your heart until you do!

-Then there’s a warning: do not add or take away from any words of this book, but that could also be extended to the rest of the Bible. If God has spoken, we must respond. This actually picks up almost the exact wording in Deut. 4:2.

-Tertullian: “Just as Christ was crucified between two thieves, so this doctrine of justification is ever crucified between two opposite errors.” 1 error is adding to God’s Word, this would be called “legalism.” This tells you not only what sin is, but how far you need to stay away from even the appearance of sin. But the opposite error is taking away from God’s word, this would be called “licentiousness” living however you want. We must be completely obedient to God’s Word alone, and the temptation is to lean one way or another and call it the gospel, but Jesus doesn’t allow us to do that, He perfectly embodies grace AND truth, not grace OR truth.

-Once again, we’re remined that Jesus is coming soon (in salvation history), and in response John (and we) respond with “Amen!” yes, we agree, come, Lord Jesus!

-This should be the prayer and cry of every Christian down through the ages. We’re supposed to live as Jesus comes back tomorrow, which means get busy being obedient to Him! Luther was asked if he knew Jesus was coming back tomorrow what would he do? He said he would plant a seed today. Where are you planting seeds today that will bear fruit in eternity? Where is God calling you to be faithful today so that you can be ready to see Jesus face to face? Because the reality is He is coming soon! No one knows when, but we need to faithful today because it’s one day closer to THE day.

-God’s grace (undeserving free gift) be with everyone. Amen. What an appropriate way to end this sermon! God’s grace is freely available to everyone! So come, and come Lord Jesus.

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by mikethestrand on November 24, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Bible, Blog, Church, Life, Sermon, Theology, Worship

Tagged Bible, Christianity, faith, God, Jesus

Posted by mikethestrand on November 24, 2024

https://pastormikesmusings.com/2024/11/24/revelation-226-21-sermon-manuscript/

Revelation 20:1-10 – Sermon Manuscript

-Think back to the most significant moments in your life. You can probably remember the smells, the feel, the emotions behind all of it, right?

-Receiving an award in high school, the day I got married, the day my kids were born (somewhat foggy due to lack of sleep after)

-In those moments, who was with you? Significant events don’t happen in isolation, it’s always with someone else, and Jesus wants to be that someone else for every human.

READ/PRAY

-What is this 1,000 years? One of the most hotly debated passages, with entire systems of theology built around interpretations of this.

-First thing to note: all of these positions are trying to make arguments from the text of Scripture, therefore none of them are heresy. You can believe any of these positions and still be a faithful, orthodox Christian, if anyone tries to tell you that you HAVE to believe certain things about the end times just give up the conversation because it won’t be worth your time!

-Second is this 1,000 years is used 6x in the entire Bible, and they’re all in vs. 2-7 that doesn’t mean we just ignore them, but keep them in perspective!

-Third: the main point of this entire story isn’t the 1,000 years, it’s the new heavens and earth! In the timeline of eternity, 1,000 years is nothing! 2 Peter 3:8 “Dear friends, don’t overlook this one fact: With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.” When we have eternity, 1,000 years is as significant as we count a day. It matters, but it’s not the main thing.

-So what MUST you believe about the end times?

1. Jesus is coming back physically, for real. He will return bodily to enact His perfect, just, and eternal reign. His kingdom will be established, and it will be a physical reality, not just a spiritual one. Everyone agrees on this point.

2. No one knows the day or the hour. The only thing we can say with certainty is each day gets us 1 day closer to THE day. That’s it! And if you try to predict it you’ll ruin it for the rest of us because NO ONE knows!

3. Jesus isn’t going to become King. You can’t become something you already are. Jesus is already ruling from His throne, and He invites us to join with Him in His work of reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19)

-3 positions (all of which have subsets of thought): premil, amil, postmil. None of these positions require the 1,000 years to refer to a literal 1,000 years (numbers are often signs) This is the only time I’ll use charts in Revelation!

-Amillennial: many prefer to call this “realized millennialism” “a” means no, they argue that this 1,000 years refers to the time between Jesus’ 2 comings, not future. This was the predominant thought among the church from the 400s until the 1800s, due to the influence of Augustine. They argue that the binding of Satan took place when Jesus died, and since then, God has regularly been working to draw people to Himself and conform them into His image, literally stealing them from the domain of Satan (we’ll get there)

-Postmillennialist: the gospel will continually spread across the globe until we get “1,000 year” time period where God’s peace and justice are the predominant focus across the world.

-Premillennial: Jesus returns before (pre) His millennial reign. This one has a sharp divide between historic (classical) vs. dispensational premillennial. Historic appeal to early church fathers like Papias and Irenaeus for their support, and dispensational premil didn’t come onto the scene until the 1800s. Dispensational argue for a secret rapture 7 years before Jesus’ return, and that was what most evangelicals in America believed in the 20^th century (if you ever heard teaching on Revelation it was probably this kind) I don’t agree with it for 3 reasons (1) partly because most of church history was dominated by amil, (2) nothing in Revelation points to a secret taking away of the church because the church remains throughout the entire book, and (3) the passages people appeal to for a secret rapture I would argue shouldn’t be interpreted as a secret rapture, but should instead be read as either punishment/judgment or being a part of God’s welcoming committee. If you want to talk more about that, let me know!

-There is a very tiny difference between postmil and classical premil, they both use the same interpretive tools for approaching all of Scripture, including this text. My caution to you is to not use this text as a way of trying to interpret the rest of Scripture. Remember: numbers throughout Revelation are symbols and not statistics. However, the reason I’m still in the premil camp (barely) is because nowhere in Revelation does time serve as a symbol for something other than time (which is my issue with amil), my issue with postmil is it’s too positive, and my issue with premil is it tends to be too pessimistic!

-Every interpretive option has “problem” texts, does better with some verses than others, as we work through today, I’ll be primarily arguing for the historical premil, but will also share how the other options make their arguments.

Serpent Bound (1-3)

-We’ve seen lots of angels! And we saw an angel holding the key to the abyss back in Rev. 9 to allow the locusts to escape. This time, instead of letting things out, he’s throwing something into the abyss.

-Apparently different than the lake of fire, as we’ll see in vs. 10.

-Binds Satan for a thousand years

-Last week we saw the 2 beasts captured and thrown into the lake of fire

-Lots of emphasis given to this binding: seized, bound, threw, closed, sealed.

-Premil believes this is part of Jesus’ return

-Amil believes this binding happened when Jesus was rose from the dead (based on Mark 3:27 “But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house.”)

-Do you think Satan is currently bound and not deceiving the nations? Seems to miss the way the beast has been the puppet master behind all the political persecution throughout this section.

-Released a second time, or is this recounting the same event we saw last week: the final “battle” where God’s rule is enacted?

-I believe this is referring to a second battle, but you’ll need to wait until the end to see why! It comes up in vs. 9

Saints Seated and Share (4-6)

-John’s focus shifts from the dragon to the saints. Some work needed to understand what John’s saying here!

-Thrones, people seated on them with authority. Rev. 2:26

-And the souls who had been beheaded, connects back to Rev. 1:2

-Don’t push the idea of beheading too far – most likely a stand in for all believers, who may be required to pay for their belief with their life, because the descriptions are true of all believers.

-They reigned with Christ, which we are currently doing! Eph. 2:6, right now we’re meant to serve as Jesus’ ambassadors, that is we represent Him and His rule and reign to the rest of the world.

-If what I’ve proposed on vs. 4 is true, then vs. 5 refers to the resurrection of the unbelievers. John calls this the “first resurrection,” but he never goes on to talk about a second resurrection, so we need to do some inferring.

-Blessed – every other time it’s used in the book (6 others for total of 7) it refers to all believers. Priests – same, every other time it refers to all believers.

-“Second death” John never refers to a first death, so once again we’re speculating.

-This is where the premil position is probably weakest and amil is strongest because there’s some things here that seem to not make sense to us. At face value, it appears that all believers will be resurrected to receive their glorified bodies, and will be living and judging on earth at the same time that unbelievers have their normal unglorified bodies for this thousand year time period (however long that actually is!) Is that even possible? Is that correct?

-I’m going to go ahead and argue yes! But why? Because God is FAR more patient than any of us, and once again in the grand scheme of eternity 1,000 years isn’t that long. I believe this 1,000 years is the final demonstration that even when people are no longer blinded and deceived by Satan, they’ll still reject Jesus and choose sin.

-The other reason I think this is because we already have an instance where a glorified body was here walking around the earth hanging out with people who didn’t have their glorified bodies yet, and people still didn’t believe Him, that’s Jesus. Believe it or not, we do have a picture of this reality and if God’s done it once, why wouldn’t He do it again?

-If this feels or sounds odd to you, it may be because of how culturally conditioned we are, and how much we tend to view the material as only bad and negative.

-I was at a funeral recently where the speaker mentioned that the important part, the spiritual and immaterial part was saved. But that’s wrong! That’s platonic philosophy, not Christianity! God’s plan is to renew both heaven AND EARTH. So God’s plan includes a period of time where the world will be operating as it should have been operating forever. Where He is on His throne and all of us are given a job to spread His influence across the world.

-The hard part for me is that I’ll have to find a new job when we get to this point, because I theoretically won’t need to preach anymore! But anyone who has a job outside of ministry will be able to take that vocation with you (we’ll get there in a couple weeks, this is just a teaser!)

-And remember, this isn’t the ultimate end for us. This is just a taste of how great it will be! Yet even when everything is as it should be, with Jesus on His throne and His followers faithfully following after Him, people will still reject Him. That’s just how depraved humans are, just how prone humans are to reject and walk away from Him, at the end of time no one will be able to blame God for being unkind or impatient with them.

-If you’ve ever read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, this is the closest you can find in the Bible as evidence for his beliefs in there.

Satan’s Demise (7-10)

-After these 1,000 years, Satan is released for what was earlier called “a short time” to conduct the true final battle.

-Similarities to last time, drawing the armies up, but where in 19 it only listed kings of the earth and their armies, now it says all nations. So interpreters argue that Gog & Magog are a stand in for the nations of the world (picking up on the terminology Ezekiel uses Ezek. 38-39). Much larger army than before!

-Shows that even after all this time where Jesus was ruling, the world was as it should be, as soon as Satan is released the people flock to him with their plans to attempt to overthrow Jesus’ perfect reign.

-“Beloved city” aka “encampment of the saints” which is Jerusalem, but not the Jerusalem we know today, because that’s a stand in/representative for the entire universe (which you’ll need to come back for in 2 weeks to see how!)

-Once again, a very anticlimactic battle.

-Saved the illustration for this week: end of ROTK, Aragorn and a tiny army of men and elves (with a dwarf and a couple hobbits) draw up against Sauron and all the forces of evil. Aragorn whispers “For Frodo” and charges. Outnumbered, impossible odds, and then the moment the ring is destroyed the earth caves in on itself and Mordor is destroyed, leaving only the good guys standing.

-Similarly here: fire consumes the army, reminiscent of another showdown in the OT (1 Kings 18) where Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal and attempt to call down fire from heaven. Spoiler alert, Elijah wins, and to connect it to last week, he wins by speaking and asking God to respond.

-Devil, dragon, ancient serpent, Satan (deceiver) finally thrown into the same place as the 2 beasts. Place of never-ending torment “day and night forever and ever.”

-We’ll look at this more closely next week, but the lake of fire is the same place unbelievers are thrown, too. After all this time to repent and turn to God, even at this late stage they refuse.

-Shared a story before of someone I heard at school saying he would just wait until he was on his deathbed to confess and get into heaven, this shows us that won’t actually happen. His choices even up to the end will be to turn away from God and pursue his own sin.

-Friends, everything we do has consequences, either positive or negative. That’s why you have to walk by a sign that say “One Step Closer” each time you walk into our doors. Every day is a new opportunity for us to grow closer to Jesus. Unfortunately, it’s also an opportunity to walk further away from him.

-PDT life isn’t made up of a few major decisions, it’s made up of millions of tiny decisions that turn into your life. What decisions are you going to make today?

-Talking with staff this week about technology – how do we use technology as Christians, as something that draws us closer to Jesus?

-Conversations with others: how do we engage with other people in a way that allows us to better model Jesus to them AND push them closer to Jesus?

-Watching the Vikings tonight, how can we walk that in a way that brings us closer to Jesus?

-Friends, Jesus wants every tiny little part of your life to be a way of engaging with Him. Will you allow Him in?

Pastor Mike's Musings

All posts in category Theology

How to Disagree – Sermon Manuscript

Deacons – Sermon Manuscript

The Order of the Ordinances – Sermon Manuscript

In One Lord – Sermon Manuscript

Zechariah – Sermon Manuscript

Generous with our Treasures – Sermon Manuscript

Our Generous God – Sermon Manuscript

Gender Roles in the Church – Sermon Manuscript

Revelation 22:6-21 – Sermon Manuscript

Revelation 20:1-10 – Sermon Manuscript

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