Sermons

In the vision, water flows out from the new temple and rises from the ankles to the knees and then the waist, until it becomes a river no one can cross. It was the revelation of a promise that captive Israel would be restored.

The order in which the water rises can be read as the stages through which a believer’s faith grows. Faith starts out in a flower garden and makes its way past stumbling blocks, over mountains and through valleys, and across a storm-tossed sea, until it reaches the place where it soars like an eagle. A flower-garden faith makes blessing its condition and gives way at the first frost. An eagle’s faith perseveres through the Word and through faith, and it recognizes the workings of Satan.

The vessel of faith differs from one Christian to another, so it is not right for believers to criticize and condemn one another. God does not want a showy flower garden. He wants a steadfast faith that gives thanks without conditions. Those who know their priorities and live according to God’s will come to stand like great trees that not even a typhoon can shake.

A man who is deaf and can barely speak is brought to Jesus. Jesus takes him aside, away from the crowd, puts his fingers into his ears and touches his tongue. Then he looks up to heaven, sighs and says, “Ephphatha.” At that moment the man’s ears are opened, his tongue is set free, and he speaks plainly.

Without ears to hear, a person may hear the mysteries of God yet neither understand them nor pass them on. Like that sick man, we too had ears closed by the noise of the world, and we had grown so used to the darkness that we could not see the light. It is the cross of Jesus Christ that has opened those ears and eyes. Now we have become people who can tell good words from evil ones, and the narrow way from the broad.

Only where we deny ourselves and take up our own cross can fruit be borne, just as an acorn falls to the ground and puts down roots. God gives even rebuke and discipline as an opportunity, not because he hates but because he loves. When someone realizes this and repents, the miracle of Ephphatha always takes place in that life. Proclaiming the truth we have heard, and so bringing that same miracle to other souls, is the offering of ourselves we give at Thanksgiving.

A twenty-six-year-old woman held hostage by IS was killed after eighteen months in captivity. Threatened to make her convert to Islam, she held fast to her faith to the end, and it was while caring for the girls imprisoned alongside her that she departed this world.

Though the earthly tent in which we live is torn down, there is an eternal house in heaven, built by God. However great the body’s suffering, it gives no reason to give up the eternal Kingdom; rather, it becomes an occasion for sins to be forgiven and for faith to grow. On the last day, when believers stand before Christ, what kind of faith they lived by while still in the flesh will be brought to light.

It is now, while still clothed in this tent, that heaven or hell is decided. Poverty and painful circumstances are no excuse for failing to stand firm in faith; the faithful must not give their hearts to a world that will pass away, but must lean on God, who gives eternal life. God, who sees that devotion, will certainly grant a time of peace.

As the world grows harsher, people lose the strength to endure. When hardship comes, some hide behind their troubles, and others choose to take their own lives. Job lost his children, his wealth and his health all at once and begged to die, and Elijah, too, faced with Jezebel’s threats, prayed that God would take his life.

Such suffering is Satan’s way of shaking people’s emotions to thwart God’s plan of life. Yet even when his wife turned on him with bitter words, Job did not sin with his lips, and when Elijah was worn out, God sent an angel to touch him and restore him with bread and water. Jesus calmly walked through the crowd that meant to push him off a cliff. In the same way, darkness can never overcome the light.

The way to overcome Satan’s attacks is to stay alert, keep a sober mind and pray. God does not hand over those he loves to Satan, and he turns even a curse into a blessing. Those who lay their heavy burdens on Jesus Christ and endure will find that this road is not an end but leads on to another beginning.

Paul confesses that he dies daily. Fearing that the faithful might stumble at the sight of his weakness, he risked his life to guard the truth.

He lived this way because he believed in the resurrection. Once it truly sinks in that Jesus Christ died for him, a person can give up family, wealth and reputation without a second thought. So it was with Elisha. He did not begin with a full measure of faith; his faith grew as he stayed at his master’s side like a shadow, humbly obeying.

God does not require his people to have wisdom, wealth and reputation. He asks only that they show themselves trustworthy through a good heart, gratitude, obedience and a character that does not change. No one gets it right from the start. The spirit in which a person answers when called is the way to becoming one of God’s people whom he can trust.

The apostle John proclaims that in the beginning was the Word. In his day a teaching had spread through the church that held the spirit to be good and the body evil, and so denied the resurrection of the body; John refutes that falsehood by making plain that Christ came as fully human.

Christ came as the light, yet the world did not know him, and even his own people did not receive him; but to those who believe in his name is given the right to become children of God. Even as he fled from his enemies, David leaned on God alone, and the prayer he offered there shows what worship in the Spirit and in truth looks like.

To the crowds who flocked to him after seeing the five loaves and two fish, Christ said to seek the food that endures to eternal life, and that the work of God is to believe in the one he has sent. God holds fast to the end those who worship in the Spirit and in truth, and leads them into a life kept safe.

The people of Israel gather in one place. They have come together to judge the tribe of Benjamin, yet the first thing they settle is not repentance but an oath that they will not give their daughters. When that oath leaves the tribe of Benjamin wiped out, they turn and complain to God, asking why such a thing has happened.

They did wrong themselves, and then blamed God for the outcome. To cover that sin, they next sacrifice the people of a weak and innocent town and carry off women by force, making a show of honoring their oath. Outwardly they seem to be keeping the rules, but what comes to light is the true face of Israel: weak before the strong and cruel to the weak.

The whole story ends in neither repentance nor turning back. It closes with the words that there was no king, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. This is what came of living as they pleased, refusing to acknowledge God even though he was there as their King.

Traveling by night, a Levite stops to lodge in Gibeah, and when a mob comes for him he puts his wife outside to them. She is killed in the course of that night, and the Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them out to every tribe of Israel. Israel gathers at Mizpah and resolves with one voice to bring judgment on the tribe of Benjamin.

The Levite concealed his own wrongdoing and inflated the injustice done to him, and on his word alone Israel burned with anger. They inquired of God and were told that Judah should go up first, yet twice they suffered heavy defeat, which meant that God was not with them in this war. They wept and fasted and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings, but God did not accept sacrifice and prayer that came without repentance.

In the end Benjamin was all but wiped out, with only six hundred men left. Only then did Israel feel remorse, yet rather than coming to true repentance they put the people of Jabesh Gilead to death and heaped one more sin upon the rest. The sin of a corrupted Benjamin was the sin of a fallen Israel itself. The path God desires is this: to repent of one’s own sin first, before looking at the faults of a brother.

A Levite traveling with his concubine stops for the night at Gibeah. A crowd from the town gathers and threatens him, demanding that he be brought out; to save himself, the Levite hands his concubine over to them instead, and after being abused all night she dies on the threshold.

The Levite was the one who should have been teaching the people God’s word. For such a man to give up his own wife to save his life meant that the first button, the one that should have held Israel together, had already come undone. When the first button is fastened wrongly, every one after it is out of line as well; so too, when the Levite fell, the whole nation went down with him.

Setting things right again from the first button takes time, but the quickest way back is for God’s people to repent and turn around. However much the world is shaken, and even when no one is there to lead them, they must be people who lift high the lamp of the word for themselves.

Afraid that her son, who had stolen money, would be cursed, Micah’s mother covers over his sin and instead has an image made and dedicates it to Yahweh. A Levite with nowhere to go becomes Micah’s private priest for ten pieces of silver and a set of clothes, and Micah now expects that God will bless him.

A heart that can accept anything except a curse on one’s own son is in fact serving that son as an idol. When the desire for blessing comes before setting sin right, even the chance to repent disappears. Just as the priest, for the sake of a living, sinks to the place of merely praying for one household’s blessing, the thought that offerings and prayers have been given and so life should go well is also the talk of someone who has never met God.

Parents’ greed that wants nothing but worldly success covers their children’s sin and blocks the way to repentance. God does not exist for the sake of personal prosperity; he looks on honest faith and blesses in his time. Those who do not stand firm on the word wander like Micah and his mother, the Levite, and the tribe of Dan, and in the end lose everything.

Samson is handed over by the men of Judah and led bound before the Philistines. Once his hands are freed, he strikes down a thousand men once more. In the end he reveals the secret of his strength to Delilah, loses both his eyes and is made a slave grinding at the mill.

What collapsed was not Samson’s strength but his faith. He always laid the blame for his own actions on others and was shut inside the conviction that his own thinking was right, so even with all his strength he could not work alongside God. When he himself cast aside his Nazirite vow, a secret known only to God and to him, the power of God departed from him as well.

Samson let the twenty years he should have lived as a judge drain away in human revenge and lust. In the same way, no one who squanders the time entrusted to them can offer an excuse, for God has already made known the work to be done, its purpose and even its outcome. Those who examine themselves and live as though today were their last day can receive a salvation without shame.

Manoah and his wife had no child, so they prayed earnestly to God. The angel of Yahweh came to the wife in person and told her she would bear a son, commanding her to give up wine and strong drink and not to eat any unclean thing. For the sake of a child who would live as a Nazirite from the womb to the day of his death, the parents had to live the Nazirite life first.

God could simply have given them the child, but his purpose was first to make clean the vessel that would hold something precious. A life of not drinking what everyone else drinks is hard, but if people live just as the world does and do not want to be called odd, they cannot receive what God entrusts to them. The angel of Yahweh gave his name as Wonderful, which speaks of God’s nature beyond human understanding and is also a name the Old Testament uses for the Messiah.

Samson was born amid such special grace and his parents’ devotion, yet he failed to keep a whole character and a pure faith, and his great strength brought him ruin instead. Receiving God’s love is not hard, but how that love is kept and used is up to each person. This was the message: God’s people, too, are called as Nazirites, so they are to obey with broken and humbled hearts and prepare to take on the souls God entrusts to them.