Words of Encouragement for October 21, 2009
Paul’s Letter to the Believers at Colosse (continued)
“And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.” Colossians 3:14
A mark of the new nature created in the heart of believers by the Holy Spirit is “charity” – not just as we think of the word today, but in its older meaning: selfless love – the kind of love that God showed toward us in giving His only-begotten Son to die for us and redeem us.
The Greek word translated as “charity” in the King James Version and “love” in most modern translations is “agape” (agape). The Bible speaks of such love when it says: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
This is the kind of love spoken of in what is often called the “love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13.
Paul calls this love the bond of perfectness (or completeness) because it is such love which God requires in the hearts of all, and it is such selfless love which moves people to obey God’s commandments.
Paul wrote to the believers in Rome: “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:8-10).
When asked what was the greatest commandment in the law, Jesus responded: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).
Why is it that love for God and love for our neighbor are the greatest of the commandments and the fulfilling of the law? Simply put, love is the motivation of the heart – which God requires in us – which moves people to obey all of God’s commandments. If one loves God with all his heart, mind and soul, he will not have other gods or serve them. Nor will he neglect to set aside time to consider God’s ways and worship Him. He will gladly and willingly read and study God’s Word, listen to it and heed its message.
If one loves his neighbor – other people in this world – as he loves himself, he will not dishonor or disobey parents and authorities. He will not hurt or kill, adulterate God’s design for marriage, steal, lie, slander or covet.
The problem is that, since the fall into sin, people do not love the LORD God with all their heart, mind and soul. Nor do they love others as much as they love themselves. Thus, our lives and the lives of all people in this world are full of selfishness, rebellion against God, disregard for parents and authorities, abusive and selfish relationships, evil thoughts, murders, deceptions and thefts.
That is why God sent His only-begotten Son into the world to fulfill the law for us and to bear our punishment by suffering and dying upon the cross!
Make no mistake. The command to put on selfless love is not the gospel of salvation; it is the law of God. We sinners cannot hope to achieve God’s favor and be saved by putting on love; we put on love because God first loved us and sent His Son to die for us and win for us forgiveness and life everlasting. “We love Him, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Because God loved us and sent His Son, Christ Jesus, to die for us, and because He graciously brought us to faith in Jesus, washing away our sins in our baptism and raising us up to new life in Christ Jesus by the mighty working of His Holy Spirit, we seek to live for Him – indeed, to be like Him – and to love others as we have been loved by Him.
Thus, as we continually acknowledge our sinfulness and failures to love as God demands, as we put off our sinful and unloving nature which was punished upon Christ’s cross, we also put on the new and loving nature which has been created in us by God’s Spirit – a nature which loves God and others with His kind of love, a love which moves us to live in accord with God’s holy and perfect will revealed to us in His commandments.
As You have loved us, O Lord, and given Yourself to redeem us and make us Your Own, create in our hearts faith which receives Your merciful love and forgiveness; and move us to put on Your love so that we love You in return, and also love our fellowman and live our lives in accord with Your good and perfect will. Amen.
Pastor Randy Moll
We All Believe in One True God:
A Summary of Biblical Doctrine
By Wallace H. McLaughlin
(The entire book is posted under Pages on the Church Web log)
VII. The States of Christ
Every Christian believes that when the eternal Son of God, “true God, begotten of the Father from eternity,” came into the flesh, became “true man, born of the Virgin Mary,” He entered into human flesh not without, divested of, His divine attributes, but with all His divine attributes intact; for it is written: “In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). The fullness of the Godhead does not exclude but includes omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc. Therefore it will not enter the believing mind to suppose that Christ in His state of humiliation should have lost possession of anything pertaining to His Godhead, to His divine nature, much less that He should have laid aside that Godhead as such. If, as some false teachers have ventured to assert, Christ laid aside His divine nature when He humbled Himself and reassumed it when He entered His state of exaltation, then He is not and never was the God-man, and the personal union, so clearly taught in Scripture, as we saw in the preceding article, would never have taken place. The Christian position over against such an error is clearly defined in 1 John 4:2, 3: “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.”
Whoever believes “that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” will therefore not be tempted to suppose that He abdicated His throne on high when He came on earth to die or that the Infant born in Bethlehem is other than the Godhead veiled in flesh. This “veiling,” then, cannot consist in the loss of anything that is essentially His from eternity, but only in the temporary and voluntary refraining from the full use through His human nature of those divine attributes which were communicated to His human nature when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
In full accordance with this Scriptural teaching on the Person and States of Christ, we read in two of the most precisely worded answers in the Explanation of Luther’s Small Catechism commonly used among us the following definitions: “Christ’s State of Humiliation consisted in this, that according to His human nature, Christ did not always and not fully use the divine attributes communicated to His human nature. Christ’s State of Exaltation consists in this, that according to His human nature, Christ always and fully uses the divine attributes communicated to His human nature.” (Answers to Questions 134 and 148). Thus it is entirely clear that the difference in the States of Christ does not in any way affect His possession of divine attributes but only His use of them, and that even in this respect the difference is not one of use and non-use but of full use and partial use according to the human nature. No change whatever is brought about in the divine nature either by the humiliation or by the exaltation (“I am the Lord, I change not,” Mal. 3:6).
While all this, however, may be, and indeed must be, entirely clear to the Christian on the basis of Holy Writ, there is still a possibility that one may unwittingly confuse Christ’s humbling Himself with the incarnation itself, since the two coincide in time. But this confusion would logically lead to a consequence which no believing Christian would be willing to draw, namely: If Christ’s humbling Himself consisted in His becoming man, then His exaltation would consist in His ceasing to be man. This inference would contradict everything that Scripture says concerning Christ’s coming into the flesh, which produced an eternal union between the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and our human nature. It is Jesus, who “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin,” who now intercedes for us at the throne of the Majesty on high (Heb. 4:15). “There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). And when He comes again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead, those who brought about His death “shall look on Him whom they pierced” (Zech. 12:10; John 19:37; Rev. 1:7). Yes indeed, the incarnation, which took place at a definite time in the days of Herod the Great, at the time of the census ordered by Emperor Augustus, lasts unto all eternity. Now it is quite conceivable that God’s Son might (if He had so chosen, and if that had accorded with His plan for bringing about our redemption) have become man without any humiliation whatsoever, as He shall come again at the last day “in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him” (Matt. 25:31). Our Lord’s humiliation did not consist in His becoming man but in the manner in which He became man and in the sort of life He led and the kind of death He died as a man upon the earth. The state of humiliation, beginning, as it does, at the very same moment at which the incarnation took place, does, nevertheless, logically follow after the incarnation and is consequent upon it.
The logical sequence of incarnation and humiliation is taught most clearly in that great passage, which more than any other in Scripture teaches us all we need to know of the States of Christ, Phil. 2:5–11; for there, as in the definitions quoted from our Catechism, we are told that both humiliation and exaltation took place in and according to the human nature of Christ, which prior to the incarnation did not exist. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
“Being in the form of God” does not refer to the Son’s eternal divine existence before the incarnation, but it means that when the Son of God was made man, divine attributes, majesty, and glory were given to the human nature. This “form of God,” then, He actually possessed throughout His state of humiliation. Occasionally, as in His miracles, He gave men a glimpse of this form of God, but as a general rule men who came into casual contact with Him in His earthly life did not perceive this in Him but regarded Him as an ordinary man like other men, or at best as a great prophet like one of the prophets of old or a teacher come from God (Matt. 16:13, 14; John 3:2). The glory which His disciples saw in Him (John 1:14) was seen with the eyes of faith. And this hiding of His glory was His own voluntary and purposeful act, for a full manifestation of His divine glory during His earthly ministry would have impeded the great work He had come to do in suffering and dying as our Substitute. Christ’s conduct in refraining from the full use of His divine attributes through His human nature in His state of humiliation is described in Phil. 2:6 by the peculiar phrase: “thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” This expression refers to a common practice of those days. When a victorious general returned in triumph from foreign wars with abundance of booty and captives, he would parade through the streets of Rome with his army, displaying the spoils of battle, and thus make a public show of the trophies and slaves which had been taken from the enemy. “To consider as a robbery,” then, is simply, in the speech of our day: “to make a show of,” “to show off.” Christ was really throughout His state of humiliation “in the form of God,” and hence “equal with God.” But He did not make a show of this equality with God. Although He was “in the form of God” He appeared to men in “the form of a servant;” although He was “equal with God” He was “found in fashion as a man.”
Thus the humiliation of Christ took place in His human nature (which alone could be either humiliated or exalted, the divine nature being unchangeable), and it consisted in this, that in His human nature He did not always make full use of the divine attributes that had been imparted to this nature (as nothing could be imparted to the divine nature, which from eternity possesses all things). This being clearly understood from Phil. 2:5–8 with regard to the state of humiliation, it is very easy to see from Phil. 2:9–11 that the state of exaltation, which also has reference to the human nature only, is simply the reverse of what has just been described. The divine majesty, which His human nature possessed from the very moment of its conception in the womb, was and is fully manifested through this nature in His state of exaltation (beginning with the descent into hell), in which He, also in His human nature, makes unrestrained use of the divine attributes given to His human nature from the beginning of its existence. “As the humiliation was the non-use of divine majesty, the exaltation is the full use thereof.”
To speak in detail of the several acts of Christ’s humiliation: “Conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried;” and of His exaltation: “He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead” — this would indeed be a delightful task, but it would lead far beyond the limits to which this brief summary of Christian doctrine has confined itself. We shall therefore proceed, God willing, to consider in the next chapter of this book the Office and Work of Christ, especially His Priestly Office, specifically the Vicarious Atonement, as wrought by His active and passive obedience.
What Do We Believe?
What do we believe about Good Works? Consider the following summary statement and look up the supporting Bible passages:
GOOD WORKS
We believe that, while good works cannot justify a man in the sight of God or merit God’s grace and favor, good works are commanded by God in the Holy Scripture (Romans 3:10-20,28,31; 10:4; 12:1-2; Galatians 2:16; Ephesians 2:8-10; Titus 2:11-14; Psalm 119:1-5,35). Good works are those things a child of God does, speaks, or thinks which are in accord with God’s commandments, are for the glory of God and the benefit of his neighbor, and are motivated by love for God and neighbor (Psalm 119:9,133; Psalm 19:14; Proverbs 12:5; Deuteronomy 10:12-13; Matthew 15:9; 22:36-40; John 14:15; Romans 13:8-10; 1 Corinthians 10:31; 13:1-3; Luke 10:25-37). We believe and teach that no man can perform such works unless he first has faith in Christ as Savior and is regenerated by the Holy Ghost (John 15:1-5; Hebrews 11:6; Ephesians 2:8-10; Titus 2:11-14; 3:3-8). Good works of believers are acceptable in God’s sight only for Christ’s sake – because God, for the sake of Jesus Christ’s innocent sufferings and death, pardons the sins and impure motives of His children (Isaiah 64:6; 1 John 1:7ff.).
Bible Study in Preparation for Sunday
The Adult Bible Class continues its study of the Gospel of John. To prepare, read John 1:1-18. Who is the Word in 1:1? What does the Bible say of the Word in v. 14? How did this happen? Why is this all important to man’s salvation? How have we received of His fullness? What was given through Moses? What came by Jesus Christ? What does verse 18 mean?
The Catechism Class will continue studying the Second Article of the Apostles’ Creed and learning of Jesus and what He has done to redeem all mankind. Catechumens may prepare by reading the second article of the Apostles’ Creed and Luther’s explanation of it in the Small Catechism. Who is Jesus? What are His two natures? How many persons is He? How did this happen?
Sunday School Classes are scheduled to study the account of Naaman and Elisha. Bible texts behind the lesson are in 2 Kings 5.
The Sunday Sermon will focus on the Reformation Day theme. Martin Jackson will be the preacher. Consider how God has blessed you through the courageous work of Dr. Martin Luther centuries ago. What was the central theme or focus of the Lutheran Reformation? What are the “Solas” of the Lutheran Reformation? Why are they so important yet today?
Remember to Pray
Remember to pray for our church and for all our members that none be lost to Christ’s kingdom, but continue in repentance and be strengthened and built up in the true and saving faith in Christ Jesus through the hearing and study of His Word. We continue to pray for any who have been sick or suffering among us, and for our adopted soldiers. Pray for the Lutheran Churches in the Philippines who have suffered much from repeated Typhoons. Pray for Junior Slaughter, uncle to Georgia, who suffered a stroke and has been hospitalized.
Upcoming Events
The Voters of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church met last Sunday and considered and adopted recommended bylaw changes regulating meetings and offices in the congregation. Copies of the bylaw changes and copies of the constitution and bylaws will be available to anyone desiring one.
A Reformation Hay Ride is scheduled for 6 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 24, at the church. A sign-up sheet is in the back of the church.
The Choir will sing “Salvation Unto Us Has Come” this Sunday in our worship service.
Information for bulletins or newsletters may be sent to Pastor Moll by calling him at 479-233-0081 or by e-mail at randy@mollfoto.com.
“But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.” 2 Peter 3:18
[Scripture in this Newsletter is taken from the King James Version of the Bible]
