The King

Readings

1. Old Testament: Exodus 32:21-34

2. Psalm 47

3. Gospel: Matt. 5:11-16

4. New Testament: 1 Thess. 1:1-10

Devotional
Do you ever hear something so many times that the word starts to sound funny?  At a certain point, it’s as if the word is lost of its meaning because of the repetitive use.  Often, the phrase “Jesus is King” likely has the same effect.   It’s a phrase that we hear so often we are likely to gloss over it without really considering what it even means.  Pair that with the fact that a king hardly bears any cultural relevance for our particular context, and it becomes almost dismissive.  Psalm 47 is here to make sure that doesn’t happen.

This Psalm is known as a kingship psalm, and, not surprisingly, it’s aim is to proclaim the kingship of God.  As God’s story of redemption unfolds, we find out exactly what that means.  Jesus is the true and better king that all of God’s people have been longing for.  Even the best kings of Israel stumbled and proved to be imperfect leaders.  But the king described in Psalm 47 exceeds whatever expectations we could have formulated for a worthy king.  This king subdues all nations, including his enemies (v. 3).  He sits on a holy throne (v. 9).  And it isn’t just that a particular land belongs to him, but the entire world is his (v. 7).  This is a king, as the psalmist exclaims, who is worthy to be praised! 

If those descriptions sound familiar, it’s because Jesus reveals himself to be the king this psalm had in mind.  He conquers his enemies while protecting his people.  He is enthroned in the heavenly court, surrounded by cherubim praising his name.  And he upholds the entire universe by the word of his power.  With so much uncertainty surrounding us, we long not just for a king who is aware of our needs, but we yearn for a king who has control over all circumstances.  Yes, Kanye got it correct.  Jesus is that king.  And what would people do in response to a good king?  They would submit to his rule.  Not because they were afraid of him.  But because they loved him, and they knew they could trust him to care for their concerns.  Despite our persistent attempts to gain control in our own lives, we have the freedom to rejoice that God doesn’t give us what we want.  He gives us what we need.  A king we can count on.  

Hymn
The Lord is King

Prayer
O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son
Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven:
Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to
strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior
Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Does He Remember?

Announcement
Join us for "drive thru communion" this Sunday! We will worship together via Zoom at 5 pm. During our worship service, I (Soren) will let you know where I will be from 6-7 pm, and we will serve communion at that location. Jesus is with you spiritually, he remembers you, as you remember him in the bread and the wine, even now. 

Readings

1. Old Testament: Job 23:1-12

2. Psalm 139

3. Gospel: John 12:20-26

Devotional
I wonder if you had an experience that so many seem to have had at some point during your youth.  You are in a public place invested in whatever endeavor occupied your young mind.  All of a sudden, you look up, and, to your horror, your parents are nowhere in sight.  As you scrambled to try to find them, your sense of desperation and panic only gets worse. Granted, young kids aren’t the most capable of rational thought, especially in panicked situations, and it is highly unlikely that your parents completely forgot, never to return, but the fear in the moment is overwhelming.   It isn’t just that your parents seemed to have forgotten you, but they seemed to have forgotten you when you needed them most.  In your sense of despair, they are nowhere to be found.  “Will they ever remember me?” you think to yourself.

In so many words, Job is asking the same question of God.  “Will He remember me?”  Job has lost almost everything he has, and his friends are of little help.  Rather than simply being a loving presence suffering alongside Job, they try to offer airtight explanations and theological elucidation.  But Job is less concerned with why things have happened as he is with the pressing question of what will happen.  Will God remember me?

Does it strike you as odd that this honest confession is in our God-inspired Scripture?  It should.  Because it means that faithfulness it not synonymous with a certainty of having all of the answers of your trust in God worked out.  There is room within faithfulness to confess to God your inadequate understanding of His will.  However, Job’s questions don’t lead him away from following God, as ours tend to do.  It can be easy to look elsewhere for comfort when it feels like God is distant, but Job does the opposite.  His reasoning is just as astounding as his original confession.  “When He has tried me, I shall come out as gold.  My foot has held fast to his steps; I have kept his way and have not turned aside.”  The pursuit of trust in the midst of uncertainty is the catalyst whereby Job’s faith is elevated.  If we strove to make that our pandemic prayer, is it possible that God could do the same for us?  That in the fire of these present trials, we could come out on the other side with a “golden” faith?  God’s Word sure gives us reason to believe so.   

Hymn
Nothing But the Blood

Prayer
O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people;
Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who
calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with
you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever
and ever. Amen.

What is God Like?

Readings

1. Old Testament: Exodus 19:16-25

2. Psalm 38

3. Gospel: Matt. 3:13-17

4. Epistle: Col. 1:15:23

Devotional
What is God like? That is a question we have to be careful answering: careful because God has told us in His word what He is like, so that some answers are better than others, but also careful because we must make sure that our answers say something about God and not just something about ourselves. It is so tempting to reduce God down to a simple maxim: God is love, God is holy, God is you fill in the blank. And those things are true: God is those things. But reducing him down to just those things is dangerous...

Some of us focus on the love and goodness of God. Creating a good world, saving his people from Egypt, the blessings of grace given to us in Jesus Christ, even the benediction of kindness pronounced when God comes down in Matthew 3:13-17... all these events demonstrate the quality of God's goodness. We cling to these truths, because we know that we desperately need God to be good, and we delight to find that he is!

Some of us focus on the holiness and otherness of God. Examples abound in the Old Testament: his treatment of the Egyptians, the Psalmist writing that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, even the way that God appears to his people in Exodus 19:16-25, in a cloud of thunder and the danger of death. And this sense of the awesome otherness isn't confined just to the Old Testament... when the disciples encounter Jesus in his authority and power, their response is usually wonder and fear (cf. Mark 4:41).

The reality is, God as revealed to us in Jesus is both fearfully loving and graciously other. He is both of those things, and the life we live before him must acknowledge both. We must fear him; we must trust him. We must delight in him; we must obey him. These different character traits seem to be in tension, but the tension resolves when Jesus walks into the room. How can God be both just and merciful? Other and with us? When the person Jesus walks into the room, a light bulb goes on: "Ohhhhhh. That's how."

What does the fact that God is both of these things mean for us? Simply that we cannot use Him (or maxims about him) to control him or domesticate him. Rather, we must worship him. Perhaps St. Augustine said it best: "A thief was saved: do not despair. A thief was damned: do not presume."

Or with the old hymn:
O tell of his might, o sing of his grace,
whose robe is the light, whose canopy space
whose chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form
and dark is his path on the wings of the storm.

Hymn
O Worship the King

Prayer
Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant
us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way,
the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his
steps in the way that leads to eternal life; through Jesus Christ
your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity
of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Prove Yourself

Readings

1. Old Testament: Exodus 19:1-16

2. Psalm 26

3. Gospel: Matt. 3:7-12

4. Epistle: Col. 1:1-14 

Devotional
The tryouts were exhaustive. What is your bench press? Your squat max? Your 40 yard dash time? Height? Weight? Can you catch? Can you throw? Prove it. Prove yourself. And the emotional stress of the tryout increased in proportion to its exhaustiveness. Will I be accepted? Am I good enough? Have I earned a spot on the team? 

Tryouts are stressful. Yet for some reason (perhaps we are worried a tryout is always ongoing?) we insist on living all of life as a tryout. Build the resume, show off your best qualities, hunt for likes on social media. Even our relationships become a tryout- lets prove ourselves to one another, then perhaps we can trust one another. 

God is different. Always has been, always will be. Exodus 19 makes it clear: "You yourself have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you up on eagle's wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore be holy, as I am holy." God's order is the opposite of ours. He bestows grace, mercy, and salvation, and then calls us to respond to it. He doesn't ask us to prove ourselves; he proves himself to us! Whether you are an ancient Israelite wandering in the desert saved from Egypt by the exodus, or a modern day Christian saved from death by the resurrection of Jesus, you have this in common- the God of the Universe has proven his love for you, over and over. So our motivation to holiness, our motivation to seek justice, our motivation to grow as people is very different: we strive not out of fear but out of gratefulness, we strive not out of anxiousness but out of rest.


Hymn
Nothing But the Blood

Prayer
We thank you, heavenly Father, that you have delivered us
from the dominion of sin and death and brought us into the
kingdom of your Son; and we pray that, as by his death he
has recalled us to life, so by his love he may raise us to eternal
joys; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Where Are You From

Readings

1. Old Testament: Exodus 18:13-27

2. Psalm 15

3. Gospel: Matt. 1:1-17

4. Epistle: 1 Pet. 5:1-14

Devotional
What's the first question you ask somebody when you meet them? The question right after "What's your name?" A peculiar pattern holds in cultures throughout the world. In a large, cosmopolitan city, the first question is "What do you do?" In a smaller city or town, the question is "Who are your parents?" In either case, these questions come first because they give us what we believe is the most information about somebody that can be gained from one question: we learn something about their social status, something about history and background, something about their character, and maybe even something about their intentions.

When Matthew gives us a list of Jesus' parentage, he is not attempting to give us an exhaustive one. Instead, he is attempting to give a bunch of information to his first readers about who Jesus is in one fell swoop. Consider:

1. the word for the "genealogy" of Jesus is "Genesis," which would have been familiar to first-century Jewish readers as "beginnings." It is in many ways the beginning of the title of Matthew's whole book: the new beginning.

2. "Jesus" was the every day name of the person, but "Christ" meant annointed, and points back to David, the highest and holiest example in Israel of a righteous king. 

3. Abraham sits at the headwaters of the Jewish people, and mediated the presence of God to the world.

4. The names in the list are not uniform: there are men, women, Jews, Gentiles, heroes and prostitutes, and hero-prostitutes. The story of Jesus and God's New Beginning involves everyone. 

Do you see what Matthew is saying? Here, in the person of Jesus, is the New Beginning. God's Kingdom is coming, all things are being made new, as Jesus mediates God's presence to the world! And there is no one who is excluded from this new beginning. Not even us. 

Hymn
Nothing But the Blood

Prayer
O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people;
Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who
calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with
you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever
and ever. Amen.

You Are Not Helpless, Because You Are Not Alone

Readings

1. Old Testament: Exodus 16:23-36

2. Psalm 16

3. Gospel: John 16:1-15

4. Epistle: 1 Pet. 3:13-4:6

Devotional
There’s a reason the “buddy movie” is such a popular genre in Hollywood.  Countless permutations of it have been made, and each has a common theme.  You know what the “buddy movie” is.  It’s the misfit duo off on a collective journey to secure some task or goal for one or both of them.  You also know that the formula doesn’t quite work if both characters are the same.  Because at some point throughout their journey, one of them will encounter some hurdle that they are insufficiently equipped to solve on their own, which creates the perfect circumstance for the buddy to lend his particular contribution to solve the dilemma and send the duo continuing on their way.  The formula is so familiar that you know it’s coming, yet in spite of its unsurprising emergence, we still flock to them.  Why?

It must reveal something about our nature and our desires.  Instead of denying our weakness, we long to acknowledge it and seek the help of a companion to aid us where we are helpless on our own.  Is it any wonder, then, that in Jesus’s final hours, He makes a promise to His people that they would never be without a helper?  Jesus is preparing to go to the cross and leave the world, but He isn’t leaving His people alone.  The promise of His Holy Spirit’s presence was true for the disciples, and it is true for us.  I wonder how much we would be transformed if we considered that reality:  for every believer, God dwells within you wherever you go.  And this Helper doesn’t just pick up the slack of an otherwise pretty good attempt at life.  This Spirit equips for every good endeavor.  All that is good in us is good because of the Holy Spirit, and it is the same Spirit upon which Jesus relied when He was tempted in the wilderness by Satan (Matt. 4). 

The purpose of this Spirit dwelling with us, Jesus explains, is simple.  He is to convict us of sin, and lead us to righteousness.  That isn’t how we often think about the Holy Spirit.  Frequently, our requests of the Spirit revolve around decisions of vocation, relationships, or calling.  But the liberating news of Jesus’s description is that it takes the guess work out of following God’s will for our lives.  Not only that, but He also empowers us to do it!  The same Spirit upon which Jesus relied for obedience is the Spirit that dwells in us.  Sin doesn’t have the final say in your life no matter how helpless you feel.  In the best buddy movies, you realize that the opposition was no match for the buddy all along.  So it is with our Helper. 


Hymn
O Christ Our King Creator Lord

Prayer
Pray Psalm 16 aloud.

To Be Set Free

Readings

1. Old Testament: Exodus 16:10-22

2. Psalm 18:1-20

3. Gospel: John 15:12-27

4. Epistle: 1 Pet. 2:11-25

Devotional
I (Soren) long for freedom right now. Everything in me desires to be out, to resume normal live, to be unconstrained by rules and laws and the silent (or noisy) judgement of the social media mobs. I am the sort of person that sees laws and rules as suggestions, even when they aren't; it is tough to be my boss, because the thing I want more than anything else is freedom. Freedom is a good thing... isn't it?

Unequivocally yes. Peter makes it clear that God has set us free, having paid our ransom (1 Peter 1:18). But the biblical idea of freedom, the idea of freedom that Peter talks about in our reading today, is very different from the American idea of freedom. When we think of being free, we often think of being able to do what we want. It's this kind of freedom that I find myself thirsting after right now. I want to be able to go where I want when I want to; I want to be able to wear what I want when I want to; and on and on. But when the Bible speaks of us being free, it doesn't mean being allowed to do what I want; instead, it means being able to do what I ought. Before we became Christians, we were unable to conceive of serving anything except ourselves. This isn't as evil or malevolent as it sounds; after all, why wouldn't we do what was basically best for us? Sometimes that even includes doing what is best for the community or the world, to help us live our best lives now. 

Jesus has set us free from doing what we want, by giving us a different master (God) and a different goal (the glory of God). We have a new factor to take into account now- not just what we are allowed to do, but what we have been enabled to do when God opened our eyes to his purposes (1 Peter 2:16). This means that sometimes, being free to serve God will mean forsaking our desires, and serving others (1 Peter 2:11-15). Put simply, the goal of Christian freedom is not to be able to do what we want; its the ability to do what we ought to, even when we don't want to. 

In the coming days, there will be many discussions about freedom, and there should be. As citizens of a democracy, it is right to discuss the role of government in our lives. My hope is that, as Christians and as citizens, we use our freedom to serve others, even to the point of suffering unjustly. May we take our obligations more seriously than our rights.

Hymn
O Christ Our King Creator Lord

Prayer
O God, who for the salvation of the world brought about the paschal sacrifice, be favorable to the supplications of your people, so that Christ our High Priest, interceding on our behalf, may by his likeness to ourselves bring us reconciliation, and by his equality with you free us from our sins. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Divided By Space, Connected By Mercy

Divided By Space, Connected By Mercy

Readings

1. Old Testament: Exodus 15:22-16:10

2. Psalm 13

3. Gospel: John 15:1-11

4. Epistle: 1 Pet. 2:1-10

Devotional
You probably know what it’s like to move to a new city.  Along with the excitement of new places and experiences, there’s the impending dread and fear of not having “your people” anymore.  Perhaps it was your childhood friends, or maybe it was friends at work or at church that you had to leave for a new setting of loneliness.  It can be really difficult to move to a place where you hardly know anyone.  Hopefully, you’ve also experienced the inverse of this.  In your new environment, someone reaches out to you to do the thing that you wouldn’t have been able to do yourself:  they include you in something.  And by this inclusion, you begin to meet others.  You form new shared experiences.  It’s not just the fact that you are around people that makes it feel special.  It’s being part of something bigger than just you. 

Peter is writing to a group of people who are dispersed.  Though the nature of ours is different than the first century church, the idea of dispersion is familiar to us in 2020.  We’ve been dispersed of our routines, our comforts, and so much of what we love.  Yet the promise he iterates to them is that being reconciled to God also means being reconciled and inseparably connected to others.  “You were not a people, but now you are God’s people.”  There’s a collective nature to the church.  It isn’t just a group of individuals.  It’s a body.  You’ve been welcomed into “your people.”

The interesting thing about the context into which Peter is writing is that in this encouragement of unity, their experience has been anything but.  Yet amidst displacement, they find solace in the comfort of one another.  And the central theme of this unity, says Peter, is mercy.  “You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”  In other words, the primary link for all Christians is not geographic.  Rather, it is the transformative reality that in the sin that was killing us, God showed us mercy by uniting us to His Son in salvation.  This is good news in a quarantine, isn’t it?  Even though we are separated by location, we are still united in the Savior and mercy that gives us structure.  We can mourn the distance of the physical church that we all miss at the moment, but we can still rest in the unwavering hope of being united by mercy.  And mercy can’t be stopped by a virus. 


Hymn
O Christ Our King Creator Lord

Prayer
Pray Psalm 12 aloud.

Waiting

Degas, Waiting. 1882.

Readings

1. Old Testament: 15:1-21

2. Psalm 6

3. Gospel: John 14:18-31

4. Epistle: 1 Pet. 1:13-25

Devotional
"Its time to go." Her words flowed through the couch and zapped me like lightning. The baby is coming. The panic hit next, like thunder. We aren't at the hospital. How long does it take to come? I WILL NOT DELIVER A BABY IN THE CAR. She gets up and goes to the kitchen. And starts washing dishes. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I'm in the car already, honking the horn. We break all land speed records getting to the hospital... only to wait for twelve more hours for my first son to be born.

Waiting is hard. You feel powerless and out of control, at the mercy of time, circumstance, and other people. And the temptation is to treat God like the fast forward button on the remote control, to escape the tension of waiting by having him fast forward to the moment when the tension is eased. But the readings today invite us to think about waiting in a different way. What if God is more concerned with *how* we wait than he is with the fact that we are waiting?

Two contrasting visions of faithful Christian waiting are presented in the readings today. In Psalm 6, the person who is waiting is in anguish. They want to be relieved, they want the waiting to end. But the Psalm is included in the hymnbook of the people of God that we might recognize something- that our waiting is from God, and whether in anguish or in hope, we must receive the delay of our gratification as the next step in the dance of relationship with Him. And we are are empowered to keep dancing, even in anguish, by the knowledge of his good intentions toward us.

1 Peter invites us to consider the question of our holiness in the midst of waiting. We are to see ourselves as exiles in a strange land, still beholden to the country of our Father from whence we came. We are to strive to live our lives according to our old Constitution. This waiting for Jesus is an active waiting- it actively resists the temptation to clutch at impermanent things for salvation. This waiting, more triumphant in tone than that of Psalm 6, nevertheless finds its strength in the same place: the promise of God's goodness to his people. 

How does the delay of your gratification shape your dance with God? Can you conform yourself to the kingdom of God in our present waiting?

Hymn
O Christ Our King Creator Lord

Prayer
Pray Psalm 6 aloud.

What Lasts Forever

Readings

1. Old Testament: Ex. 14:21-31

2. Psalm 1

3. Gospel: John 14:8-17

4. Epistle: 1 Pet. 1:1-12

Devotional on Psalm 1
One of the most obvious landmarks in Savannah are the massive oak trees which are everywhere. They are scattered around the city, sometimes clearly by design, as in Forsyth or Daffin Park, but sometimes as if by the hand of a profligate Johnny Appleseed god. There is a massive oak in the house next door to mine which looks as if it has stood for a thousand years. It dwarfs my house, and my span of life.

The last three or four weeks we have remembered what was always true, but which we in our arrogance are prone to forget- that the things which we take as permanent are no more permanent than the wind. Our health isn't permanent, our jobs aren't permanent, our wealth isn't permanent. And (even more disorienting), when we cry to God about our loss of permanence, we realize that the wind which blew all these things away is operating in some cases at his instigation, but always at least at his allowance. 

There is, however, something that lasts. Something that God doesn't blow away. Something like the oak trees of Savannah. Something that is still possible, even in the winds of change. Psalm 1 paints a picture of a follower of Jesus who sole purpose is delight in God's law (v. 1-2). This is no self-righteous, self-exalting holiness either; it yields fruit and blesses the community (v. 3). The self-obsessed schemes of the world, which sought to make us healthy, wealthy and wise, and which promised permanence pre-pandemic, have been blown away, and revealed that which lasts, and which God will not blow away. You want to do something that lasts forever? Learn to delight in God's law. Learn to delight in holiness. Learn to bless your neighbor by being faithful to God.

Hymn
O Christ Our King Creator Lord

Prayer
O MOST dear and tender father, our defender and nourisher, endue us with your grace, that we may cast off the great blindness of our minds, and care of worldly things, and may put our whole study and care in keeping of your holy law ; and that we may work for our necessities in this life, like the birds of the air, and the lilies of the field, without care. For you have promised to care for us, and have commanded that we should cast our cares upon you, who lives and reigns, world without end. Amen