We’ve a New Head

Text: 1 Samuel 17:32-58

One of William's and Alice's favourite episodes of Veggie Tales is a retelling of the David and Goliath story called Dave and the Giant Pickle which pits Junior Asparagus as David against a giant pickle.  The lesson behind the story is one we all know too well due to the myriads of children’s sermons we’ve heard on David and Goliath.  “All things are possible with God who can do great things with small people who have few gifts and so we’re all special to God just the way we are.”  I may be warped or jaded, I’m not sure which anymore, but I don’t think the core message underlying the David and Goliath story is the one we teach our children.  That message goes a long way or better yet, used to go a long way towards getting people involved in the institution we call the church.  Yet, getting people involved in the institutional church is not the purpose of the pulpit.  Ministers of the Word are called to proclaim that Jesus is Lord, the crucified and risen Lord.  Unfortunately, in order to do that from the story of David and Goliath we must talk about David beheading Goliath and parading the head all over Israel as the foreshadowing of the ultimate beheading of sin, evil, and death from God’s creation that God wrought by Jesus' death and resurrection. 

But, we don’t talk about sacred decapitation, do we…especially not to children.  In Dave and the Giant Pickle Junior the Asparagus certainly does not jump on the fallen gherkin and turn him into an appetizer, does he?  No, he only appears to have knocked a bully unconscious.  Yet, sacred decapitation is exactly what David did to Goliath and he went further and made a public and humiliating display of Goliath's head to terrorize the enemies of God and…and a very big and…to lift the hopes of Israel.  This story is one of the most barbaric moments in all of the Old Testament, but...its also one of its most important when it comes to understanding the New Testament’s most barbaric moment, the crucifixion of Jesus and that being the means of God’s triumph over death.

It is important we know a bit about Goliath and what he symbolized because there is more to him than just his being a mighty blaspheming giant bully whom everybody was afraid to fight.  Goliath was a descendant of the Nephilim who were an ancient race of giants of unholy origin who somehow managed to survive the flood in Noah’s day and until David’s day they stood as an ancient threat and foil to God’s plans for his creation.  Genesis 6:1-4 tells us that the Nephilim came about as the result of an unholy union between “the sons of God” and human women.  I Enoch, which is an extra-biblical writing by an ancient Jewish author tells us that the sons of God were rebellious angels who came down to earth and it was they rather than Adam and Eve who succumbed to temptation and introduced sin and death to the world.  They taught women sorcery and weaponry and the gigantic offspring of their unholy unions with human women filled the earth with violence, oppression, and death.  In the Bible, the Nephilim show up next at Numbers 13:33.  When the Israelites were about to enter the land of Canaan Moses sent spies to scope it out.  The spies returned with some monstrous grapes saying the land is very good but…the Nephilim are in the land and there is no way the Israelites could conquer them.  That lack of faith resulted in God sending the Israelites back into the wilderness for another forty years of aimless wandering.   Finally, by David’s day there are only five of the Nephilim left, Goliath being one of them.  Significant to note here is that in the course of David's reign as king, he and his men kill them all.  In fact, the history of David’s adult life begins and ends with the deaths of these giants.  David, the king after God’s own heart, the anointed king defeats and rids humanity of the menacing remnants of that ancient and so very real evil these giants symbolized.

Moving from David to Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark 4-6 we find Jesus in the midst of dealing with some Goliath's of his own.  Jesus manifests his power over nature gone awry by calming a storm and restoring the sea to peace.  He demonstrates his authority over the demonic by casting thousands of demons out of just one man and restoring him to peace.  He shows his power over death by restoring life to the dead daughter of Jairus a leader of the synagogue.  He removed the curse of being perpetually unclean from a woman who had an issuance of blood for twelve years by healing her.  And, he does all this only to be rejected as THE MESSIAH by his hometown of Nazareth.  So, he leaves there and sends the twelve disciples out on a very successful mission of proclaiming the arrival of the kingdom of God inclusive of them healing and casting out demons in his name.  When they return, he then pulls off the kingdom feast.  He feeds over 15,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. 

Having done these things in clear view there should have been no doubt among the Jewish leadership that Yahweh had himself come to be the Anointed King like David the we expecting who would overthrow all oppressors and once and for all establish God's reign here on earth.  But, they didn't accept him.  They were actually expecting somebody more like David, a king who would manifest his power over the powers by violence.  There is an interesting twist in this comparison between David and Jesus.  Jesus' toppling of the powers does not culminate in a horrific, blood-dripping display of the spoils of violence in the name of God.  No, it culminates in the restoration of peace, sanity, wellness, and true life not only to humans but to all the Creation.  He brings salvation.

A bishop in the early church known as Irenaeus taught of humanity's recapitulation through Jesus.  Jesus, God the Son by becoming human dying and being raised, as David did Goliath with Goliath's own sword, beheaded our old humanity controlled by sin and death and has given us his self, his life through the Holy Spirit and restored in us the image of God which was lost in our old humanity.  Irenaeus writes: "when He became incarnate, and was made man, He commenced afresh the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation; so that what we had lost in Adam—namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God—we might recover in Christ Jesus". 

God has given humanity a new head (leader), Jesus Christ to take the place of the old head we had in fallen Adam whose fallenness is epitomized in the Nephilim whom we are all like in one way or another.  Since Jesus and by means of the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit humanity has at work in itself the mind of Christ, which means we have in us the God-given capacity to live together in the image of the loving communion of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Our inner Nephilim, the old self was crucified with Christ so that it is no longer we each who live, but Christ living in us.  We each now have in us the capacity to bear the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Therefore, let us each live and bear those fruits each day as the living proof of God's steadfast love and faithfulness.

The neural pathway of the mind of Christ in us is prayer and so we must learn to pray without ceasing.  Ceaseless prayer is the way we get our inner Goliaths to shut up and go away.  Wake each morning and offer yourself for this day to Christ for his work.  Then live the rest of your day mindful of his presence with and in you.  Find a Scripture or a prayer to recite when your mind is idle or begins to worry, judge, grudge, or self-loathe.  Prayer, being in relationship with God the Father through and with Jesus the Son in union with him in the Holy Spirit is the living out of the new mind of the new head that we now have in Jesus Christ.  Therefore, pray!  The mind of Christ is a terrible thing to waste.  Amen.

Worship Is Good?

Text: Psalm 92

When I was almost a teen church wasn't exactly my favourite place to go on Sunday.  The minister's name was Dr. Bland Dudley, a very unfortunate name for a minister.  I liked him though.  He taught the catechism classes that me and a few others took.  I don't remember much from them other than the Apostle's Creed, Psalm 23, and the books of the Bible.  But, I do remember that he was likable even for a minister and for someone a little older than my parents.  But Sunday morning worship was a different story.  With all the robes and strange music and the sermon that fit Dr. Dudley's name, it was just so utterly different from anything in my real life experience.  Worship could be painfully boring, just something to be endured.  And, it seemed all churches were like that to me.  I sometimes went to my best friend's church which was a small country church and the same was true there as well.  The minister was a bit of an odd cracker; very educated, a bit of a fundamentalist, and a self-proclaimed expert on the end-times.  He was charismatic whereas Dr. Dudley was...calming.  Yet even though he was a bit more interesting to watch, worship in that church just didn’t grab me either.   The routine there was that we went to Sunday School and then to church.  After Sunday School, Ronnie and I would either go sleep in the church balcony or say we were going to the balcony and go sleep in the car.  Though this country church was not as high church as the one I grew up in, it was also so utterly different than my real life. It too was something to be endured.  Therein lies a contradiction: Christian faith, church, worship et al is supposed to give us strength to endure the trials of life, but in reality it seemed the other way around; the trials of life gave us strength to endure church. 

And then there is Psalm 92.  Back then it would have seemed to me that whoever wrote Psalm 92 must have been some hoity-toity churchy-fied hypocritical nut getting paid to write positive stuff about church and God and worship.  How could anyone say “It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre.”  Church/worship good?  No! Church/worship boring…painful!  It seemed to me there in my early teens that church/worship was simply an obligation that good, God-fearing people just had to do…and why?  Did they do it just to remind themselves that they were good, God-fearing people, the backbone of society?  How could they say that their lives just wouldn’t be the same if they didn’t go through this routine every week?  Psalm 92 calls itself a Psalm for the Sabbath.  The Jews back then and many still today read this Psalm every Sabbath, and they do so because it tells of what worship is supposed to be.  It is supposed to be a good thing to do, a God created everything and called it good kind of thing to do.  Yet, back to me as a young teen, “good” just wouldn’t have been the way I described worship. 

That would have been the late 70’s.  Just fifteen years from that fateful year of 1965 when all mainline denominations began to decline.  Even then, the fact that I was a teen who occasionally went to church made me an anomaly.  Most of the people I went to school with did not go to church.  Today people my age are beginning to have grandchildren who will have absolutely no idea what church is, what worship is, or even believe there is a God.  One cannot call our culture Christian anymore nor assume that good, God-fearing church-goers are the backbone of our society.  Those days are gone.

I’m on the Congregational Life Committee of Presbytery and we’ve been discussing how to address this problem at an upcoming Elder Training event this coming October.  The older folks wanted J.P. Smit to come and share about any congregational turn-around success stories he has seen in the course of his work with Presbyterian churches here in Ontario; more of the “what-did-they-do-that-worked-so-we-can-do-it-too” stuff.  The younger folks on the committee, mid-40’s and younger, would like him to come and talk about spirituality, about the role of the Holy Spirit in our churches.  Then discussion went on and uncommon to me, I went on a bit of a rant about how we as churches need to foster an environment in worship, in whatever, where we are open to people having a life changing, indeed saving encounter with Jesus Christ, an encounter in which he acts upon us each to deliver us from our own fallenness, heal us, and transform us to be more as he is – a saving encounter where Jesus actually deals with our own sin and brokenness.  The Gospels are full of such stories about how Jesus saved people in the right then and there of their lives.

After my rant, one of the older members of the committee (and it is amazing how the breakdown here is along generational lines) insisted we should tell our people that there are prison ministries and ministries to the poor and destitute in our Presbytery that they can go to and minister.  She wasn’t getting it that she needed Jesus just as much as a convict does.  She needed the saving transforming work of the Holy Spirit to come to her, the good church-lady, just a much as to someone whose sin is more obvious.  Sunday morning worship needs to be the place where Jesus the Lord, our resurrected and ascended Lord, comes in the power of the Holy Spirit to really bring salvation to them with respect to their fallenness and brokenness in the course of the events of the daily lives.

I think I have the Psalmist in my corner on this one.  Why does he say that it is “good” to give thanks and to sing praise to the Lord and declare his steadfast love and faithfulness?  The Psalmist answers, “For you, O LORD, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy.  How great are your works, O LORD!”  The LORD himself did something for the Psalmist personally to make him glad, to give him joy.  The word the Psalmist uses here for works in Hebrew does not mean look at nature and see the hand of God at work.  Rather, he means works where God really acts in the immediacy of our personal lives in saving ways, doing works which wondrously show his loving kindness and faithfulness to us in ways personal to us each.  God gets personal with us in wonderfully kind ways in the darkest corners of our lives. 

There seems to be a prevailing opinion among Mainline Christians that as long as we are morally good and doing our part for the church that it is well between us and the LORD and that it is only the down and out destitute who need Jesus to show up with a work of deliverance provided they repent.  What we seem to lack in the Mainline is a sincere realization of our own need to know personally and experience the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives who brings us to Jesus and in him and with him we share his relationship with the Father – something which Paul calls new creation.

Jesus has risen from the dead and is here in our midst and it is possible in fact extremely likely that we let what we have come to call a worship service stand between ourselves and him.  It truly is good to worship the LORD, but that goodness arises not from our doing our duty on Sunday morning but as the only appropriate expression of his having made us to be new creation in himself by his wondrously kind and faithful works in our lives to deliver us from darkness and reconcile us to himself.  Amen.

Out of the Depths of Waiting

Text: Psalm 130

I occasionally go on a laundry folding spree which necessitates watching a little Stargate Atlantis.  It’s a SCiFi about a group of civilian and military personnel from earth who live in the lost ancient city of Atlantis which is located in another galaxy where there are also humans.  They are at war with an alien species known as the Wraith who live by sucking life out of humans.  In one particular episode called The Seer they’ve come across a man who has the ability of showing them brief glimpses of the future one of which shows the destruction of Atlantis.  In this episode they are secretively collaborating with a Wraith commander on a weapon that could destroy a common enemy.  The Atlantis team has the Wraith commander in custody on Atlantis so that his ship which is in orbit won’t destroy the city.  Then they discover betrayal number one: there is still needed information aboard the Wraith ship to insure that Atlantis won’t just blow it out of the sky.  To complicate things, no other Wraith are supposed to know this particular commander’s whereabouts or that Atlantis even exists.  Yet, Atlantis detects another Wraith ship approaching and the question arises: Has the Wraith commander betrayed them again and set in motion the Seer’s vision of the destruction of Atlantis.  What are the Atlantians to do?  They could believe the Wraith commander that the other ship does not know about Atlantis and take his advice to lower the shields and cloak the city until the other ship leaves.  Or, they could attack it which would certainly give away Atlantis’ location when the other ship called for help.  Add to that, the Wraith commander’s ship along with the information it contains would most likely be destroyed in the attack as well.  The super weapon that would help billions of people would be lost forever.  

 A key moment in the episode for the purpose of this sermon was a conversation that the Atlantis mission commander and the chief military commander had about the situation and the decision that needed to be made.  The military commander notes that there is too much information on the table.  You only need a few details to make a decision.  Any further details, like the visions that the Seer had shown them of the destruction of Atlantis, are really useless and only complicate the decision.  You decide your number one priority (the safety of Atlantis) and relying on your own judgment and training, you do what is best to accomplish that priority.  To the military commander blowing the two ships out of the air would be the best way to ensure the safety of Atlantis.  But, then they note that simply maintaining the safety of Atlantis would cost millions of lives throughout the galaxy.  So, they decide to risk trusting the Wraith and lower the shields to cloak the city leaving them vulnerable to attack and the fulfillment of the Seer’s vision.  

Trust and take a risk that would help everybody or take control and do what’s best for yourself; that’s the rock and hard place that we usually find ourselves in when it comes to major decisions in life and it also holds true for when we are trying to discern the will of the LORD and find ourselves waiting on his move before we ourselves can move.  There is a broad school of thinking out there that thinks that God does not make his desire for what we should do with our lives known.  If God did, it would be like the visions of the future that the Seer gave—to much information that only complicates things as there is no way to know for sure what God wants.  Rather, they say decide your own number one priority and then relying on your moral judgment and training do what’s best to make the priority happen.  The assumption is that if your own priorities are moral and you don’t intentionally hurt others, then the LORD will see to it that his will gets done through your diligence.

I wish it were that easy.  Following Jesus is what we are called to do.  Our next move is determined not by our own priorities or life-goals, but by his next move.  Therefore, following/faithfulness involves a lot of waiting.  Waiting on the LORD is not easy.  It is painful.  People judge you.  You judge yourself.  Your resources run thin.  Your training only gets you so far.  If you pardon my pun, waiting on God is self destructive.  Waiting on God changes who you are.  It makes you doubt and second guess yourself.  It puts you in a dark place from which the LORD can only show the way out.  The Psalmist says: “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.”  Those words are often spoken to us as words of encouragement.  Yet, we have to remember that it is from out of the depths that the Psalmist is calling out.  It is by waiting that the LORD teaches us to rely on nothing but him and to hope in nothing but his word.

The number one priority of the spiritual life is Jesus teaching us who he is so that we may be like him.  A huge chunk of his efforts in this task not our own will be set on showing us who we are our in our very selves.  There will come a point where if we truly are serious about Jesus, he will show us who we are and, it doesn’t matter if you’re Mother Teresa, you’re not going to like what you see.  There will come a point where you will learn than sin has clouded everything about you.  You find that you can’t trust your own judgments, that your skill set that has got you thus far in life is no longer reliable, your character is flawed.  The Frank Sinatra mantra of “I did it my way” comes up way short when you find yourself face to face with Jesus; Jesus crucified.

Waiting on the LORD is a form of judgement.  The Bible teaches us that God’s judgment upon us ends well.  It’s transformative, healing.  The Psalmist writes:  “If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?  But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be revered.”  God is not out to “get us” for every little thing we’ve done wrong in life.  If God counts our sins, we’re all doomed to die.  We’re all going to do that anyway, thus God, on the other hand, is forgiving.  God seeks to give us reason to worship him.  God takes us, twisted as we are, and like a kinsman redeemer in the Old Testament buys us back from our wasted-ness with the currency of his own life, the gift of the Holy Spirit by whom we are raised to new life in Christ.

The way of new life in Christ is more of the same waiting.  Waiting doesn’t mean sitting back and doing nothing.  George Campbell Morgan who was a prominent British evangelist prior to World War II wrote: “Waiting for God is not laziness. Waiting for God is not going to sleep. Waiting for God is not the abandonment of effort. Waiting for God means, first, activity under command; second, readiness for any new command that may come; third, the ability to do nothing until the command is given.”  Also, “Waiting for God means power to do nothing save under command. This is not lack of power to do anything. Waiting for God needs strength rather than weakness. It is power to do nothing. It is the strength that holds strength in check. It is the strength that prevents the blundering activity which is entirely false and will make true activity impossible when the definite command comes.”  It takes great strength to fight the inner compulsion that we all have to take control of our lives and do with them what sees fit to us and our priorities especially when God is taking too long and staying too silent, when the voices that are the loudest are not the supportive voices, not the encouraging voices, not the voices that say “Hang in there, the LORD is still going to do great things through you.”

To close, Psalm 130 is a lament.  Jerome Creach, professor of Old Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary writes: “Lament is a form of speech that allows the worshipper to complain about injustice and to call on God to hear the cries of those who suffer; as did our biblical forbears…lament also is praise, and a very important expression of praise at that. It gives evidence of faith worked out in the midst of hardship, hurt, and loss. Perhaps this is the reason the editors of the Psalter labelled the book ‘praises’ even though it is dominated by the lament genre.”  When we read the Book of Psalms, lament is what we hear the most.  Therefore, that leads me to conclude that with respect to our relationship with God in Christ if we’re going about it the right way and letting him be in control, lament will dominate our side of the conversation; lament not just for ourselves, but also for one another, for the church, for the world.  After all, you’ve never really loved someone unless you’ve stood with them in their suffering and suffered with them and learned to hope.  Amen.

Faith and Signs

Text:  Gospel of John 3:1-17

This past week a 13 year old Kansas boy and his grandmother were hitting the garage sales when he came across an old Polaroid camera which he picked up for a dollar.  Later that evening he opened the camera and found a picture of a man and woman.  eHe showed it to his grandmother.  She stared at it for a moment in disbelief and then told him the man in the picture was his uncle who died in a car crash 23 years ago.  They checked back with the seller who said he knew neither the people in the photo nor where he got the camera.  The boy’s father, the brother of the deceased was a bit taken aback from the whole thing noting the astronomical odds of this happening.  You can’t explain what brought his son to this camera and its photo.  Nevertheless, he found comfort in the fateful find.  He said.  “When you have faith, you believe they’re always with you and when you see signs like this, it kind of reaffirms that.”

I got to admit that this incident is more than a bit freaky.  If it happened to any of us we would be thinking that it meant something; but what?  The boy’s father goes that way saying that faith and signs are involved; faith here meaning believing in a spiritual realm that we can’t see but which does manifest itself by signs and when a sign occurs it is a communication carrying some sort of esoteric message.  For this man it was confirmation that his deceased brother was nearby in the spiritual realm.  No one can say for sure whether this incident was anything more than an astronomically rare coincidence, but I should point out that we need to be a bit careful about holding out faith and signs as mere belief in and evidence of a spiritual realm.  In the Bible faith pertains to a relationship with the Trinity – a relationship with the Father through Jesus Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit; and signs are strictly meant to point us in that direction.

If you want to spend some time mulling over faith and signs, John's Gospel is a good place to go.  Faith and signs are a frequent topic there as is the case in our passage today concerning Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus.  At the very beginning of the conversation Nicodemus came to Jesus and noted that the Jerusalem authorities had surmised that Jesus had a God-sanctioned ministry because of the evidence of the signs he was doing, but they don't yet have belief in him.  In John’s Gospel for belief to happen God would have to open their eyes to see Jesus for who he is and enable them to receive him, entrust themselves to him, and worship him.  Faith or belief is a gift to us initiated by God’s revealing his self to us.

So, there with Nicodemus in the dark Jesus rather bluntly lets him know that he/they are not going to believe who Jesus is or understand what he has come to do and be a part of it until he/they see the sign that reveals how God loves the world; the sign of Jesus the Son of Man/the only-begotten Son of God, the Word of God become human and dwelling among us, the light of the world, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world hanging on a cross like the bronze serpent of Moses’ day; Jesus lifted up (glorified, exalted) to the effect that every believer in and in association with him has eternal life.

It is safe to assume that Nicodemus came to Jesus with the agenda of trying to sort out for himself whether or not Jesus is the Messiah who has come to establish the Kingdom of God.  So, in a bit of a humorous exchange, Jesus tells him that no one can see or enter the Kingdom of God without first having been "sired from above" or rather "conceived anew" by means of the regenerating indwelling of the Holy Spirit and Baptism.  This means that unless God has opened our eyes by revealing his very self to us (the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), we are simply unable to see God's reign in this world through Jesus.  Moreover, without that eye opening plus committed participation in the Spirit-filled communion of Jesus' disciples, no one can enter into the New Creation reign of God that is breaking in on us from the future right now, even as we are gathered here in Jesus name.

I cannot emphasize enough here that the ability to see and enter the reign of God in Jesus comes by the means of the personal working of the Holy Spirit at the Trinity's initiative and doing and not of our own.  Jesus makes this very clear with the born again-anew-from above teaching.  The word we translate as born is better taken as referring to the moment of conception rather than the moment of breaking forth from the womb.  Just as we were conceived and birthed into this fallen creation as sinners, so must we be conceived anew from above by the Holy Spirit to live in an embryonic state of New Creation now as faithful disciples of Jesus and as his co-heirs sharing his relationship with God the Father in the Holy Spirit until we are birthed into the New Creation at the Resurrection.

With that in mind let's take a poke at John 3:16 and what it is to be a believer in Jesus, the Son of Man lifted up since salvation seems to hinge on that.  Jesus is working with the analogy of Moses lifting up the bronze serpent in the wilderness so that the Israelites could look at it and be healed rather than die due to bites from poisonous snakes that the LORD plagued them with for wanting to return to Egypt and Egypt's gods.  A very literal translation of John 3:16 would read: Indeed, in this manner God loved the world; he gave his only begotten Son with the effect that every believer in and in association with him absolutely does not perish but certainly does have eternal life.

John 3:16 is not a conditional statement saying we must believe in Jesus so that we may have eternal life.  It is a statement concerning the way things are for those who find themselves presently believing in and in association with Jesus.  These believers absolutely are not perishing in this world even though the situations of their lives may beg to differ.  Rather, they are certainly having eternal life.  Umm, eternal life?  In John's Gospel eternal life means the same as what salvation means in the rest of the New Testament; that Jesus has brought us into the Kingdom of God which at its heart is a living, personal and communal relationship with God the Father through Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit.  In John 17:3 Jesus says this fairly clearly: "And this is eternal life, that they (his disciples) know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."  Eternal life is knowing the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.  Eternal life is being in relationship with the Trinity, the relationship in which God conceives us anew and enables us to live for the New Creation now.  This relationship, eternal life, is a certainty for all believers in and in association with Jesus.

So then, what is it to believe?   Well, believing begins with knowing and acknowledging that Jesus is the One whom God has sent in his own name to save the world, the Son of Man the prophets foretold come from heaven to defeat and destroy everything that stands between God and his creation, that he is the very Word of God by which God created everything come into the world to create it anew, that he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  As I have been saying, the ability to know and acknowledge who Jesus is comes to us by the eye-opening work of the Holy Spirit.  Due to our utter blindness because of sin we are unable to perceive who Jesus is. 

Knowing and acknowledging who Jesus is must progress to receiving him, to showing him hospitality in our lives through prayer and Bible Study and Christian fellowship and just plain trying to walk the walk, just simply letting the Holy Spirit do his healing and transforming work on us.  It is sitting at the table with and in the communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit enjoying eternal life in the midst of this world's death.  This is the personal devotion side of believing.   

Next, knowing and acknowledging and receiving Jesus for who he is must then become entrusting our lives to him and obeying him, living according to his way, truth, and life in this world, taking up our crosses and following him, and laying down our lives for one another rather than living in accordance with the fallen powers, standards, and values of this world.  Faith necessitates faithfulness.

Finally, believing in and in association with Jesus culminates in worship.  In Chapter 9 of John's Gospel Jesus heals a man born blind who consequently gets thrown out of the synagogue because of it.  Jesus afterwards comes to him and asks him if he believes in the Son of Man.  The man responds, “Show me who he is that I might believe.”  Jesus says “I am he.”  The man explodes forth, “Lord, I believe” and worships him.  The way God has loved this world, giving his only-begotten Son for us making us to believe and have fellowship with the Trinity in his very self inexplicably fills us with awe and adoration and drops us to our knees screaming “Yes!  Amen!” from the deepest part of ourselves.  It is one thing to consider the astronomical odds of a fateful find at a garage sale as a sign from God and evidence of something unseen.  But, it is entirely another for Jesus and the Holy Spirit to break forth on us with the love of the Father causing us to be lost in wonder, love, and praise.  It is my prayer that the Trinity awakens belief in all of you.  Amen.