FOUNDATIONS FOR PEACE

Colossians 3:1-4
March 27-29, 2010
Pastor Don Sutton

Colossians 3:1-4
“ 1Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. 2Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

Introduction
Last weekend my wife and I visited our daughter and son-in-law in Wisconsin Rapids, WI. On Sunday morning we went to church there. Since we were going to late service, and since I had to be back in New Ulm for an evening class, and since the church was a few miles west of our daughter and son-in-laws. Joanne and I decided to drive separately. That way we could leave from church and head back to Minnesota. But not knowing exactly where the church was, I thought I better follow Naomi and Mike pretty closely. I wanted to keep an eye on them so that we wouldn’t get lost or end up randomly roaming around looking for the church. When you’re following someone, it’s good to keep an eye on them.

The same thing is true of Jesus and us. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life (Jn14). He’s the One who gives us eternal life and gets us into heaven. Therefore, it’s good that we keep an eye – a spiritual eye – on Jesus. That’s what God tells us through the apostle Paul in Colossians 3:1-4. “Keep and Eye on Jesus!” … in whom you have spiritual life … with whom you will share in eternal glory.

1. … in whom you have spiritual life
Put your hand on your naval. It doesn’t serve much of a purpose now, does it? But have you stopped to think how important it was to you when you were in your mother’s womb? That was how you got good stuff from your mother needed for your life and got rid of bad stuff that would have threatened your life. At that time we needed our umbilical cord to be connected to our moms to have life.

Likewise, we need to be connected with Jesus to have spiritual life. By ourselves we can’t believe in and be alive to God. We are spiritually dead in our trespasses as Paul wrote elsewhere. We are by nature objects of wrath – God’s anger (Eph2). If left to ourselves, we would still be spiritually dead and eternally lost

But when we were baptized we were joined to Christ. Mysteriously we shared in his death. Miraculously we shared in his resurrection. We died to living to sin and came alive to live for God. Paul wrote to the Romans, “Don’t you know that all of us baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life (6:3,4).”

Through this connection to Christ we received not only spiritual life, we also received his righteousness, forgiveness, adoption into God’s family, eternal life, peace, joy, hope and love. Our faith in Jesus is our umbilical cord connecting us to Christ through which we receive life and blessings for life.

Paul says, “Your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” It’s hidden because it’s spiritual and you can’t see it. But our life is hidden with Christ in God for security and preservation purposes. Let me explain. If you had $1,000 in cash you wouldn’t leave it on the dashboard of the car or where someone could easily take it. You would likely hide it for safe keeping. Likewise, our spiritual life and all the blessings that come with it are hidden and safe with Jesus who sits at the right hand of God the Father. There, as Jesus taught, moths and rust do not destroy and thieves do not break in and steal (Matt6).

So, in Christ we receive life and abundant blessings. Therefore, we want to keep a spiritual eye on Jesus. But Paul also emphasizes that with Jesus, we will share in eternal glory.

2… with whom you will share in eternal glory.
Paul wrote, “When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” When will this happen? Jesus told his disciples, “You do not know on what day your Lord will come (Matt24).” Jesus said that before his return there would be wars, famines, earthquakes, hatred, persecution, false Christs and false teaching. He said that the gospel would be proclaimed throughout the world. Then Jesus said that just before he comes, “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its life; the stars will fall from the sky and the heavenly bodies will be shaken (Matt 24).” There would also be the roaring and tossing of the sea (Lk21). Jesus added, “At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory (Lk21).”

As Jesus comes he will bring the souls of those who have died in the Lord and went to heaven. He will also summon the souls in hell. The bodies of the dead will come to life and be reunited with their souls. Those who rejected Jesus, their bodies and souls will be forever separated from God and suffer eternal punishment along with those still alive on earth who do not trust in Jesus as their Savior. But those who believe in Jesus, whether raised to life or still alive, will be glorified. As Paul wrote to the Philippians, “Our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body (Phil3).” John wrote in 1 John 3, “…we will be like him.”

We will be glorified. Do you remember how Jesus looked on the Mountain of Transfiguration? Matthew wrote, “His face shone like the sun and his clothes became as white as the light.” If we are like Jesus, we will glow. We won’t grow old. We won’t get sick. We won’t have pain, or problems or pressure.

Not only will we be glorified but we will live in eternal glory with Jesus. Peter wrote that we will live in the new heaven and new earth, the home of righteousness (2Pe3). John described this as the Holy City, the New Jerusalem where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. He said that the dwelling of God would then be with men. Imagine that, being in the very presence of God in all his / their glory and splendor?

This is why Jesus came to this world to live in perfect love and in such love to pay for our sins with his death on the cross. This glory is what you can look forward to connected to Christ your Savior.

Keep an Eye on Jesus!
With a relationship with Jesus being so important and with so much at stake, this is why God in love through Paul emphasizes, “Set your hearts on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.2Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” This is what God says. But is this what we do?

Don’t we at times find ourselves so focused earthly things that we take the eyes of our souls off of Jesus? Don’t we at times suffer from a spiritual attention deficit disorder distracting us from Jesus? It may be buying land and building a home, planting fields and harvesting crops, catching fish or killing deer, a relationship with someone special, raising our children, keeping up with the chores of everyday life, dealing with the death of a loved one or trying to regain one’s health, making money and investing it wisely. You see, none of these things in and of themselves is bad. They are things we do in life. But when they cause us to take our spiritual eye off Jesus, we lose sight of the way and can end up randomly roaming around through the chaos and darkness of life. And if we don’t catch sight of Jesus and reconnect to him, we can end up roaming eternally through the chaos and darkness of hell.

Do the things you need to do in your station in life. Enjoy the blessings God gives to you. But keep things in balance. Every day remember your Savior. Remember how he lived for you in perfect love that God now counts as your perfect love. Remember how he died for you in perfect love that you might have peace in this life and perfection in the next. Recall the spiritual life he has given you through his Spirit by which you enjoy forgiveness, righteousness, peace, joy, hope and love. Look forward to the glory he has awaiting you.

Stay close to Jesus through his word, through worship and through the sacrament. Keep an eye on him everyday. Should he come during your lifetime, you’ll be ready for his return. Amen.

LUKE 20:9-16
March 20th—22nd, 2010
Pastor Tim Smith

Salvation is our precious treasure; the treasure of which we must never let go, and the treasure which we must keep on giving away.

It was Tuesday of Holy Week. Jesus had just been confronted by the chief priests and the teachers of the law—the leaders of the Jews. They questioned his authority to teach and preach and perform miracles, and so Jesus presented a parable to show all of these things from the other point of view; from God’s point of view. In fact, this short parable from our Lord shows the entire history of the world, including the career, death and resurrection of Jesus, from God’s point of view.

9 He went on to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. 10 At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 11 He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and sent away empty-handed. 12 He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out. 13 “Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.’ 14 “But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. ‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ 15 So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. “What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? 16 He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” (NIV)

Have you ever thought how thrilling it would have been, to have been there when Jesus was in Jerusalem, preaching and teaching and performing miracles? Even King Herod thought so; during the trial of Jesus Herod’s greatest wish was that Jesus might perform some wonder and entertain him. But not everything Jesus did was miraculous; not everything Jesus proclaimed was the gospel. Some of the things Jesus said were strong declarations of the law.

That’s what was happening here as Jesus was confronted by the leaders of the Jews on this busy Tuesday. When confronted about his authority, Jesus the Son of God laid out the entire history of mankind from his perspective; that of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.

The ‘man’ in the parable is God himself, and the vineyard is not the earth producing its fruit, but rather the people of the earth who produce the fruit of faith. That’s more clear in the other records of this parable in which the vineyard itself receives some of God’s judgment for not bearing fruit, and from a passage in Isaiah from which Jesus is drawing some of his imagery.

The tenants, the farmers who are renting the property, are here the leaders of the Jews. During this Holy Week and especially on this Tuesday of Holy Week, Jesus condemned the leaders of the Jews very severely because they were missing the point of Israel itself.

God had set the nation of Israel apart to be separate from the rest of the world, to be faithful to God and to be the nation from which the Messiah would come. They were to be that vineyard of God until the coming of the Son of God. But they had not been faithful.

In the parable, Jesus presents three cases of servants being sent to collect the rent; to gather the fruit of the people’s faith. But the leaders, the tenants, rejected those servants. One they beat up and sent away empty-handed. Another they beat up, treated shamefully, and sent away empty-handed. The third they wounded and threw out.

Jesus doesn’t spend time explaining who these servants were, but you don’t have to dig very deeply to find examples of each one. Some of the leaders of Israel, members of the priestly Levitical family, opposed Moses—including his own brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, and their cousins such as Korah and Dathan. Moses brought something like two million Israelites out of Egypt, and of all the adults, only two entered the Promised Land—at the end of his ministry, Moses could be said to have been virtually empty-handed.

Prophets in the early days of the kings didn’t fare much better. Samuel, Elijah and Elisha were all criticized for the words they brought from the Lord to the people. In Elijah’s time, Obadiah had to hide a hundred prophets in caves to keep them from being killed by Jezebel, Queen of Israel; certainly an example of being treated shamefully—and of being sent away empty-handed.

Finally, Jewish tradition tells us that at least two of the greatest prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, were murdered by the people of Israel. The story of Jeremiah being stoned to death in Egypt is perhaps less well-known than the story of Isaiah’s death. But tradition aside, Jesus himself tells us that the prophet Zechariah, author of the second-to-last book of the Old Testament, was put not only put to death by the leaders of Israel, but it was done in the temple itself, between the altar in the courtyard and the entrance to the Holy Place.

In any parable, we need to see the comparison between the parable and our lives, and even though we are the people who are the “others” to whom God gave away the vineyard, we must acknowledge what a treasure we have been given, and what a responsibility we have been given.

The treasure of our salvation is the treasure we must never let go. And yet, at the same time, it’s the treasure we must keep on giving away.

Must never let go – law and gospel.

How do you bring a parable and a warning such as this one into your heart? Does knowing that Jesus was talking to the Jewish leadership of his day make you think, “That’s not me; I would never deny my Savior”? But hearing that out loud, do hear as I do the words of the Apostle Peter, “I will never deny you, Lord,” and are you listening, as I am, for a rooster to crow?

It is easier than we think to set ourselves into the shoes of the wicked tenants in this parable. The kinds of sins we walk in that reject God’s will and God’s word get buried like a month-old post-it note beneath a messy desktop.

The parable is about the sins of spiritual leaders; what about the way that we too often handle our obedience to secular leaders? How easy is it for us to become like the Sanhedrin of Jesus’ day, manipulating and pulling the strings of Pontius Pilate because he was afraid of the populace? How many sins against the Fourth Commandment and the Eighth Commandment do we commit, invent, and even perfect in our disgruntled grumbling? What a parade of bandwagons of reputation-bashing are we willing to jump onto was we dare to say, “They don’t deserve our respect,” or “They’ve given up the right to be honored by us.” We need to be careful that we do not stand where sinners stand or sit in their seats or walk in their counsel.

But right within our parable, in the middle of one of the strongest warnings and condemnations our Savior ever made, there is the Son of Man, sent by his Father, entering the vineyard and being put to death for our sins. Even in a parable, the gospel is clear and unmistakable. We must never let go of this treasure of salvation. We can’t treat it as something we could have stopped. We have agonized over our sins, but we can rejoice over the work of our Savior. The Lamb of God came into the world to rescue us from our sinfulness; even our pettiest crimes and our bad behavior; all are atoned for in the blood of the Lamb.

Must keep on giving away – application.

And now this treasure we cling to so firmly, which we never let go of, is the very same treasure we must take out into the world and start to give away. The more we give it away, the more we make it our own, as we share it with loved one close to home, share it with strangers we hardly know, share it with what we say, and share it with what we do and the way we behave, because we tend the vineyard of the Lord, too. But even though he has lovingly given it to us to look after, that doesn’t mean that he will never took for fruit.

The yield of this vineyard is the fruit of the gospel; and although we treasure it and never let it go, we must also keep on giving it away, to bring in more and souls who need to hear the word of the Lord, the word that has brought us the peace of God that transcends our understanding and that guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, Amen.