Sermons and More from Saint Peter's Lutheran Church in Door County

Title: The Blessing of the Nation
Liturgical Date: Pentecost 6 Proper 9 A
Calendar Date: July 5, 2026
Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County, 316 W. Main St., Forestville, WI 54213. 920-856-6420.
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County serves Baileys Harbor and other areas in Northeast Wisconsin.

TRANSCRIPT

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

Today, we celebrate with great thanksgiving the 250th anniversary of our great nation. We praise and thank the Lord for the blessings that He’s given to this great nation, the blessing that He has given us through this great nation.

To think that we stand as the most prosperous, most powerful nation that the world has ever seen. It truly is something from the hand of God, and something for which we ought to give Him thanks and praise. That’s the theme of our sermon today, the blessing of the nation. We’re going to be talking about how, first of all, it is God who caused our nation to arise. Second of all, we’re going to talk about the fact that the Lord blesses us through our nation. Third of all, we are going to talk about the fact that we are called to actively work for the wellbeing of our nation. Finally, we’re going to talk about how above all we belong to another nation, another kingdom, another city: the kingdom of heaven, which has been won for us through Christ Jesus, our Lord.

I’d like to start off today by reading from the Book of Acts, in chapter 17. There, St. Paul is addressing the Athenians in what we now call Greece. And he says this: God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward Him and find Him.

In this passage, St. Paul relates the fact of what we as Christians know, that it is only through the hand of God that any nation arises. It is only through the hand of God that any nation prospers. It is only by the hand of God that the borders of the various nations are set. 250 years ago, our nation came about through ink on paper, through the writing of Thomas Jefferson and the endorsement of all of those who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Our nation has been preserved ever since then, through its tender early years as a tiny upstart nation among these great superpowers France, England, Spain. As we continue to grow in power still we faced other kinds of obstacles and other kinds of threats. We had the Civil War, and God saw us through that. And then finally, the two great wars, World War I and World War II. Wars, in a sense, of existential import. And God saw us through these as well. Then finally, in the last 70, 80 years, the Lord has caused our great nation to grow into a hegemonic superpower. The most prosperous, the most powerful nation that the world has ever seen.

Now, to the unbeliever they look at this and what do they see? They see pens writing on paper and the Declaration of Independence. They see guns firing in the War of Independence. They see, once again, guns firing through the various other wars. And in our final period here, they see economic systems at work. Certainly all of that is the case. But as Christians, we understand the truth that behind all of these things, it is the hand of God who has been working. And because of this, we lift up our praise and thanks to Him on account of these great blessings.

Speaking of the praise and thanks to Him, this is a place where perhaps I feel a little despairing about our nation. Acts chapter 17, as we just read, why did God do this? God did this that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward Him and find Him. What ought to be the reaction of our people to these incredible blessings? We ought to be a people marked above all by greatness of faith. There should be more people in pews this Sunday morning than there were at fireworks displays last night. And yet the opposite is the case, is it not?

And here we come to a great trouble on account of our sinfulness. The Lord gives us blessings. He gives us great goods, and we are to receive those goods from the Lord as the blessings that they are. We ought to steward those blessings towards His purposes, and we ought to give thanks to the Lord for these blessings. And yet, on account of our sinfulness, we have this tendency to turn goods into gods, little “g” gods. And certainly this is the case with even the great good of a nation. Instead of receiving this gift from the hand of God and therefore causing their hearts to rise up to God in thanksgiving, instead people end up worshiping the gift rather than the giver. Let it not be for us, we Christians. But instead, let us recognize the blessing that our nation is from the hand of God and how God continues to bless us through our nation.

This comes to our second point today, that the Lord blesses us through our nation.

I’d like to read to you from Romans chapter 13. Another writing of St. Paul. And he starts off here in Romans talking to the Romans in a very similar way that he does to the Athenians. Talking about the fact that it’s the Lord who established civil power. He says this, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”

So we just heard that point from Acts when he was talking to the Athenians, that every authority in this world is established by God. He then goes on to say this, “Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good and you will receive his approval.” Now, I want you to listen to this, “For he is God’s servant for your good.” He’s God’s servant for your good. The Lord brings us great blessings by means of our nation.

And because the Lord brings us great blessings by means of our nation, therefore it is our duty to render obedience to the nation, to the state, insofar as it doesn’t ask us to do anything contrary to the Word of God. Now, I’m gonna take you back to catechism class. Many of you might remember the explanation to the fourth commandment as you studied the Small Catechism. The fourth commandment is about honoring father and mother, but it’s more than just honoring father and mother. It’s about honoring all authority that the Lord has given into our lives, whether that’s our employers, our teachers, our government, or our fathers and mothers.

It says this is the first commandment with a promise. The promise is this: That if we honor father and mother and every other authority, including our civil government, it will go well with you, God says. It will go well with you. In what way? The Lord grants us many blessings through our civil government.

One of the ways that the Lord blesses us is through a system of laws, for example, that allows us to conduct our affairs with each other in ways that are fair, in ways that are equitable, in ways in which we don’t have to have recourse to violence because the state will enforce these things for our sakes. Why are people not able to come and just take our home from us or to take this church property from us? Because the laws of our nation establish what it means to have title to a property. Why is it that businesses want to do business in the United States of America? A big reason for this is on account of our laws. That if you violate a contract, there will be recourse to the courts, and the courts will enforce the terms of your contract as long as the contract itself is lawful.

The government protects us as well from those who would do ill. If I drive recklessly in a way that endangers the community, there’s a good chance I’m gonna get pulled over, slapped with a fine, maybe even thrown in jail. This acts as a deterrent against those who would put us in harm’s way on account of their recklessness. The Lord grants us many great goods by means of our government, and therefore we are called to obedience to it.

But not only obedience, but also we are called to actively work for the wellbeing in turn of the nation. Even as the Lord grants us wellbeing through the nation, we are called to work for the wellbeing of the nation.

Last week’s sermon, we discussed Jeremiah and how he confronted a false prophet by the name of Hananiah. Hananiah was a priest, but was attempting to give prophecy and ended up giving false prophecy. Hananiah prophesied that even while God had allowed Babylon to exercise authority over Judah, and therefore take away a number of the precious implements and instruments of the temple worship, and as well take away Judah’s great leaders, their great people of commerce, their great generals and aristocrats, and as well even the king himself. Hananiah said within two years, everything’s gonna go back to the way it was. Those temple instruments are gonna come back. These people who are exiled are gonna come back.

Jeremiah had a much darker message. He said, “No, Hananiah, you’re wrong. In fact, actually, it’s gonna get worse than it currently is.” But still, Jeremiah had a word of encouragement to those who were caught up in the deepest, darkest aspect of all of this, those who had been ripped away from their homeland and exiled to Babylon itself. In Jeremiah chapter 29, Jeremiah pens a letter to these exiles. And it’s a fascinating thing ’cause here are people who are living in a state which is not their own state, and it’s an imperfect state at that. It’s a state given over to idolatry and immorality. And Jeremiah says this:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Now, isn’t that fascinating? People who found themselves foreigners and in a strange land, people who had been ripped away from their homes, and from their properties, and their families, people who had a very unstable prospect. But what does God say to them by means of the prophet Jeremiah? God says to them, “Work to the welfare of this nation in which you find yourself.” As imperfect as it is. Work for its welfare, pray for its welfare, for its well-being, and in turn you will do well as well.

Again, fourth commandment. It’s the first commandment with a promise.

And this call, if this applied to the people of Judah, how much more does it apply to us? We’re citizens of this great nation, not subjects. How much more are we as God’s people called to work for the welfare of our nation? There are many ways that we can work to the wellbeing of our nation. One way, for example, perhaps we would serve our nation through such things as military service or through working our local protection services like the rescue squad, firefighters, whatever it is. That’s one way. Certainly wisely exercising the right that we have, this precious right to vote, exercising that with wisdom and faithfulness is another way that we can work to the wellbeing of our nation. But the strongest way that we can work to the well-being of our nation is by minding our own domains, our own homes.

Did you notice what Jeremiah said? What did he connect to their well-being and the well-being of the nation? Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Increase, do not decrease. And finally, pray. If there is one thing that Christians can do for the sake of the nation, it is this: to establish stable, prayerful, fecund, and economically productive Christian households. We live in a time in which there are so many pressures against household life, against family life. The Lord calls us instead to insofar as we are able to establish Christian households.

This is going to look different for all of us. Maybe if we are a young person we would seek when the time is right to establish a household, to take a husband or a wife. That this household would as well, if the Lord blesses us in this way, to be blessed with children and to gladly welcome children into our households. Not all of us are called to a family life in this way. Not all of us are called to marriage. Not all of us are called to have children. But no matter what the situation of our household, it can always be a household of prayer, a household in which the Word of God is read, and that Word of God reflected back to Him with words of prayer.

And finally, no matter what the situation of our household, whether we are single or married or widowed, whether we have children or not, in all likelihood, most of us are called to have an economically productive household. As God said through Jeremiah, he said, “Plant gardens and eat their produce.” To give of our productivity for the wellbeing of all those around us. Yes, our families, but also our communities and our nation as well.

My brothers and sisters in Christ. The strength of our nations begins in the strength of our homes. Therefore, let our homes be stable and strong, built above all on that great foundation Christ the rock who stands against the quaking of the earth, who stands against wind and wave.

And therefore, brothers and sisters in Christ, let us Christians always make use of the gifts that He has given us, of Word and sacrament. And let this Word and sacrament work itself out in words of prayer. Prayer for our households, prayer for ourselves, prayers for our church, and as well, prayers for our nation. And we as Christians are empowered above all to serve the nation in this way because we belong to another nation, another city, the new Jerusalem.

Nations in this world, they rise and they fall. They wax and they wane in power. But there is one nation, one city, one kingdom which endures forever, and we as Christians belong to it. Hebrews 13:14, it says this: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.” And then he goes on to say, “Through him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God. That is the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

All of us who believe and are baptized belong to the New Jerusalem. We belong to that eternal kingdom. That status in the kingdom of God has been won not at the tip of a spear against our enemies, but rather through the spear that was thrust into the side of our Lord. It was won not through the shedding of blood of earthly soldiers, but rather through the shedding of the blood of our great champion, the Lord Jesus Christ. This is earned not by putting to death our enemies, but rather through the death of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. In that death, our sins are forgiven, and all of us who believe and are baptized stand as God’s people, forgiven, holy, and therefore belonging to the New Jerusalem, the eternal city, the kingdom of heaven.

Because of this, we have a power which surpasses any power here on Earth, and that is the power of the holiness and righteousness of God. Therefore, let his holiness and righteousness show forth in our lives. Holy and righteous as we seek to imitate Christ in lives of sacrifice in this world, lives in which we gladly sacrifice for the sake of our fellow countrymen, in the service of our nation. Lives which seek to help our earthly households to reflect our heavenly household. And lives above all in which we offer up prayers to the Lord God. Prayers of thanksgiving, above all for the heavenly blessings He has granted to us through Christ our King, but also prayers of thanksgiving for the blessings that He grants us through this nation, and prayers as well on behalf of the nation.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Title: Dying with Regard to the Law
Text: Matthew 10:34–42
Liturgical Date: Pentecost 5 Proper 8 A
Calendar Date: June 28, 2026
Location: St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County. 316 W. Main St., Forestville, WI 54213. 920-856-6420.
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church serves Ephraim and other areas within Door County.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christ our Lord said, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Today we’re going to be talking about death and the law in three different ways. First, we will talk about death through the law. Second, death to the law. And finally, death unto the law. We’ll tease out some of these fine distinctions.

Have you ever met or known someone who kind of lives in the past? A lot of times it’s a guy who hasn’t updated his wardrobe since high school. Maybe he lives on his high school athletic accomplishments. He hasn’t gotten the notice that times have changed—that the man he once was thirty years ago no longer exists. He’s failing to live in the now because he’s failed to die to the past.

We have something similar in our Old Testament lesson today. Jeremiah is confronting Hananiah, and Hananiah is a man who has failed to die to the past and is failing to live in the present situation. In what way? Hananiah has failed to die to the past because he does not recognize God’s judgment for what it is.

As we meet Hananiah and Jeremiah at this point in the Book of Jeremiah, Babylon has already come. This great empire, with its headquarters in what we would now call southern Iraq, has overwhelmed Judah. In the process, they have carried off some of Judah’s greatest treasures.

First, quite literally the treasures: you might remember the various items, implements, and vessels that God had instructed Israel to fashion for worship in the tabernacle and then eventually in the temple. Babylon had carried off a number of these. Not only that, but Babylon had also carried off many of the people—the highest among the people of Judah: their great merchants, their great generals, their nobles, and even the rightful Davidic king himself. They carted them off back to Babylon. In the king’s place, they installed their own puppet king, one the Judahites would have considered illegitimate.

Hananiah is saying, “In two years, it’s all going to go back to the way it was. In two years those vessels are going to come back, and the king will be restored to his rightful place on his throne in Jerusalem. We will, in essence, be reliving what they thought was their golden age.”

Jeremiah says, “Okay, that’d be great if that happens,” but actually (and this is beyond what we read today) he says it’s going to get worse than what we’re presently experiencing—and it’s going to get worse for you, Hananiah, because you are actually going to die within a year’s time. Both of those prophecies came true, by the way.

Hananiah ought to have died to the past. He ought to have recognized the Babylonian takeover of Judah for what it was: God’s judgment over the fact that they were already dead in the past. They were dead because they failed to keep God’s law. They failed to love the Lord their God with all their heart and soul and strength and mind. Instead, they allowed themselves to be led astray by idolatry. Not only that, but they had failed to show the brotherly love that the Lord had instructed them to show.

So much of the Old Testament law exists to establish and maintain a brotherhood among the children of Abraham, and they had rejected this purpose of the law. People misused each other, abused each other, and violated God’s commands with regard to one another. They were already dead, and they ought to have recognized that death and died to the past. But Hananiah failed in this regard.

At the center of our sermon today, we understand that under the law we stand dead, and that we therefore die to the law by faith in Christ. But on the other side of that, we are empowered to live unto God and to live unto His gracious will for us—to live unto the law.

St. Paul in our epistle lesson today has a really complicated argument. I’m probably going to oversimplify it, but I’ll simplify it for you to help us see two major themes. We’re actually going to take the second theme that he brings up first, which is that through the law we die.

We die through the law. In what sense? The law arouses disobedience to God on account of our sinful nature. St. Paul goes on at great length about this. He says, “Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I once was alive apart from the law, but then the commandment came. Sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.”

The law of God is certainly there for the sake of our life, for the sake of our wellbeing. If we obey the law of God, things would tend to go well for us and for our families. This is a big part of what God was indicating when He set the law before the Israelites and said, “Keep this and you’ll live, but depart from it and you’ll have curses.”

But here’s the thing: because we are sinful, we take that opportunity to live through the law and instead die through it. We take it as an opportunity toward disobedience. I know I reuse my examples, but I love this one. You’ve heard it multiple times, but I think it’s a good example, so I’m going to say it again.

When my little nephew Luke was two years old, I was watching him and told him, “Don’t touch the remote control.” I said that for his wellbeing, because if he touches that remote, it’s never going to work again and we’re never going to be able to get the cartoons up that he wants to watch. So, “Luke, don’t touch the remote control.” What did he do? He went and touched it with the tips of his fingers to show that he was touching it—not because he wanted to touch it, but because he wanted to rebel against me.

That’s our situation as sinners. We are all spiritual two-year-olds who take the commands that the Lord has given us—good and righteous commands that are there for our wellbeing—and we take them not as an opportunity of obedience to Him and an expression of love toward Him and toward our neighbor, but instead as an opportunity to rebel. “Okay, God, you told me not to do this, so therefore I’m going to do it. God, you told me to do this, so I’m not going to do it.”

That’s our situation under the law according to our sin, and therefore the law kills us. Under our sin it increases our sinfulness, and therefore we stand condemned and judged under God’s righteous rule.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the good thing for us is to recognize that—to not be like Hananiah and think things were fine before, so therefore God will return us back to that situation. No. Instead, what is good is for us to recognize the fact that we are dead, and therefore to die unto our sinful selves.

In the book of Romans, a few chapters before our reading today (chapter 3), we find these words: “Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”

We will not be justified in the sight of God according to the law, because through the law we become rebellious sinners according to our sinfulness, and therefore we understand our sinful nature. And we therefore do not even try to justify ourselves before God. That’s a good dying to the law.

St. Paul goes on: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

And so this is the second dying with regard to the law we’re talking about. Through the law we die, but through faith in Christ we die to the law. And that’s actually the first point that St. Paul is taking up today: that through faith in Christ we die to the law.

For by faith we are united to the work of Jesus Christ for us on the cross. As it says in Romans chapter 6, all of us who are baptized into the death of Jesus—so that even as Jesus Christ rose from the dead, so also through this washing of rebirth and regeneration we have the promise that we too will live. If by faith we die with Jesus—this death in which He died to take the consequences for our sins—therefore we die to the law as well. The law can no longer condemn us. The law can no longer stand in judgment over us, because in Christ we have already been judged. And through Christ we have also received His righteousness.

And therefore we die to the law. That is gone and passed. Just like that guy who is still reliving his high school days thirty years on ought to die to who he was, so also in Christ we die to who we were. Once we were sinners, once we were condemned, but now we are righteous, we are holy, and we stand as God’s children. Die to the law by this means.

And as we die to the law, we then live to God and live unto His will. And we live unto the law—not under the law, but rather fulfilling the law as God has always desired us to fulfill it. Not as external compulsion, but rather out of internal heartfelt desire. As it says, “I no longer live; I’ve died. Christ lives in me.” And as Christ lives in us, therefore we follow in His footsteps.

As Christ says, take up his cross and follow Him. Now, as we take up the cross of Christ and follow Him, this certainly means that the world will look at the way that we live and consider us foolish, and maybe even evil according to its standards.

I think that in a community like Forestville, Wisconsin, these words that Christ said can be very hard for us to hear. Family is everything, right? And so it’s hard for us to hear Christ say, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

We look at that and think, “Lord, what an awful thing for you to put in front of us.”

As we look at this, we need to keep in mind who Jesus was speaking this to. He does speak this to us, but He was speaking this originally to His apostles—whom He was getting ready to send out to spread the word of God. These are men, most of whom are in the working years of life, from their teens to their forties, maybe fifties. These are men who certainly maybe their fathers and mothers depended upon them. Men who had wives and children. Men who had careers. And yes, Jesus was asking them to sacrifice—not only asking them to sacrifice in worldly understandings, but also asking their families to sacrifice in a worldly sense.

And yet what an incredible act of love the apostles performed as they fulfilled this first mission, and then eventually the other mission by which the gospel has come to us. Through the work of the apostles, the message of Christ Jesus has gone out into all the world so that hearts would be transformed into hearts of faith in God and therefore as well love to the neighbor. This was a means by which the love of God has been spread throughout the world. Did it entail sacrifice, worldly sacrifice? It absolutely did.

And yet Christ gave them an even greater way to love. In this way they followed along in the footsteps of Christ. Yes, the apostles faced all kinds of persecution, and most of them—all but one—also faced death for the sake of the gospel. And yet Christ Jesus certainly warned them of such, that they were taking up their cross, which He did for our sakes.

When we think of love, what greater love is there than this? Than that a man might give up his life for his friends—which is what Christ Jesus has done for our sakes.

What I’m getting at, brothers and sisters in Christ, is that the gospel of Jesus Christ transforms our hearts so that we are able to love in ways in which the world is unable to. And therefore we are able to sacrifice in the ways that the world is not able to. Most of us are not called to leave house and home and family for the sake of obedience to God. Most of us are called to labor in our places and to serve the Lord in our workplaces, in our homes, in our communities. But you too have had the same transformation that the apostles did.

Your hope is not in this world, but rather in the world to come, and therefore you are empowered to sacrifice for the sake of others in ways that the worldly are not empowered to. And no sacrifice is a worthy sacrifice if it is done simply by external compulsion. But instead, your hearts have been transformed to render this service unto others by the gospel of Jesus Christ, so that you do so willingly as God’s children, gladly taking up your crosses and following in the way of Christ.

And by this means you fulfill the ultimate commands: to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself—not by your own power, but rather by the power of God in Christ Jesus.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us gladly hear the testimony of the law that we stand condemned under God’s righteous rule so that we might embrace the gospel and therefore die to the law. And let us gladly as well follow along in the footsteps of Christ so that we might live unto the law out of willful, glad obedience.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Title: Glad Confession

Text: Gospel: Matthew 10:5a, 21–33
Liturgical Date: Pentecost 4, Proper 7 A
Calendar Date: June 21, 2026
Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

St. Peter’s serves Sturgeon Bay and other areas in Northeast Wisconsin.

Transcript

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Christ our Lord said these words in our Gospel lesson for today: “Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies me before men, I will also deny before my Father who is in heaven.”

On the basis of this passage, we are going to be talking about making a glad confession of Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Today is Father’s Day, and when we observe Father’s Day, it is hard for me not to think of that old classic country song. I love classic country music. The song is “Daddy’s Hands.” “Daddy’s hands were soft and gentle, and Daddy’s hands were hard as steel,” and so on it goes.

Certainly, when we think of fathers, we might think of hands, right? The hands that provide, the hands that protect, the hands that guide, the hands that correct, and so on. There is a lot of truth to that.

But really, when it comes to fatherhood, there is another member of the body which is even more powerful than the hands. And what member of the body is that? The day is going to come — and it has already begun in my household — when these hands can’t do that guiding and correcting and protecting anymore in a physical way. The day is even going to come when these hands can’t even do any kind of providing whatsoever. In a sense, these hands will, in time, become weak. And instead, I will need protection and provision and even guidance. It is the way the world goes.

So what is going to help with that provision and protection and guidance when these hands are no longer able to? It is the tongue. When I think of fatherhood as a father, the tongue is probably the most important part of the body. I would not be a father were it not, for example, for the tongue. When, twenty-three years ago, I said, “I do,” that set me on the course of being a father. And as a father, even while these hands have been important, what has been even more important is the tongue — giving words of guidance, words of instruction, words that protect from even worse enemies than those who might assault the body: from those enemies which might assault the soul, the heart, and the mind.

Even when I am long dead and gone and in the grave, and perchance if the Lord has blessed me and prospered me, those words will continue to guide and provide and protect even while I am in the grave. Our tongue is a powerful force. It is a way of guiding our lives. It shows who we are. And on account of this, therefore, it is good for us to gladly make confession of the faith that dwells in our hearts — to gladly confess in word that Jesus Christ is Lord, the Savior from the sins that we have committed, and the one who has earned us eternal life. That is what our sermon is all about today.

Now, as we talk about this and about making a glad confession, that choice of words might be a little bit confusing to you. Confession? Isn’t that when you say that you did something wrong? Yes, that is one definition of confession, absolutely. But there are other ways that term is used, and we are using it in one of these other senses. Another sense of the word confession is simply giving voice to what you believe, and that is the sense in which we are using “confession” today.

It is a very important word for our congregation here at St. Peter’s. We are what is often called a confessional Lutheran church. What does that mean? It means that we have bound ourselves to certain statements regarding the Christian faith. They are enclosed in a book called the Book of Concord. You are most familiar with the Creeds, which are part of the Book of Concord, and also with the Small Catechism, which is also in the Book of Concord. The church as a whole has dedicated itself to that. That is a confession.

And also as individuals, we are called by Christ to make glad confession about what we believe regarding Him and the work that He has accomplished for our sakes.

One of the most important reasons why we ought to be glad to confess our faith is, first of all, that life is led by the tongue. There are many passages which indicate this. In Proverbs chapter 18, verses 20 and following, we find these words: “From the fruit of a man’s mouth his stomach is satisfied. He is satisfied by the yield of his lips. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.”

What Solomon is telling us in the Book of Proverbs is that the tongue has a way of shaping our life, and we will receive the fruits of what we speak. We have many other passages in Scripture which indicate this. We have, for example, James, which talks about the tongue being like a rudder which guides a ship.

Now, here is not what I am saying. There is a whole bunch of talk out there, especially on social media, about “manifesting,” for example. That is not what we are talking about. We are not talking about creating reality or manipulating God just simply by what we speak. But rather, what I am saying is this: what we speak certainly does yield in our lives certain ways of being and certain results.

So for example, back in 1993, I took my confirmation vows. That was a really special day in which I confessed that I have a desire to live as a Christian my entire life, to believe as a Christian my entire life, and that has guided the choices that I have made in life. That is one example of how what we speak shapes our lives.

Today in our Epistle lesson, St. Paul warned us and said, “Present your members in service to God,” because the way that you use your members will affect the way that your soul goes. And so it is with the tongue. If, for example, we in contradiction to this principle speak unwholesome speech — as it warns us against in the Book of Ephesians — if we speak unwholesome speech, it makes us more likely to engage in unwholesome behavior in other ways. All of a sudden now our hearts and our souls become a little bit more and more comfortable with sin. It is possible that all just rolls like a snowball to the point in which saving faith no longer abides in us.

But what if we use our tongue in other ways? What if instead of using our tongue in unwholesome speech, it is salted with the Word of God? Not in a Bible-banger, holier-than-thou way, but rather in a way which seeks to encourage, to lift up, to give instruction and wisdom to those around us. This will be a blessing to those around us and a blessing to us as well. When we speak the Word of God, this helps to shape our hearts.

What if instead of allowing unwholesome speech and curses to come upon our tongue, prayers and praises to God come upon our tongue? That is a way that God shapes and forms us as well.

We learn this in the Small Catechism. There in the Lord’s Prayer, Luther constantly is making this point when he says that we pray, “Hallowed be Thy name.” It is not like God’s name isn’t holy if we don’t pray for it to be holy. It is already holy. Instead, what we are praying is that God’s name would be kept holy among us, that we would keep it holy. When we pray “Thy kingdom come,” it is not like God was not reigning on His throne before we prayed, and now He is reigning on His throne now that we prayed. That is not how it works. God already reigns. But instead, when we pray “Thy kingdom come” — which is itself a form of confession — the Lord uses this to shape us and form us so that His kingdom will be reflected in our lives as we lead lives of loving obedience to Him and lives of loving service to Him.

Prayer ultimately is saying to the Lord God, “Not my will, but Thy will be done.” This cannot help but shape and form us. And it helps as well to shape and form others around us.

We, and I call upon the fathers this day in this regard: I believe the Lord has called fathers especially to salt their words with the Word of God. To daily open the Scriptures and to read the Bible with the young ones the Lord has entrusted to you. It can be very simple. It does not have to be this hard, onerous thing. What I encourage you to do, maybe if you are not in the habit, today would be the day to get in the habit. Pick one book of the Bible. A good book of the Bible to pick might be the Gospel of John. Open it up and start on chapter one, and just read from heading to heading with the young ones at your table. Very simple. That will take all of two to three minutes. And then after you have read that, teach them how to pray. Maybe you do not feel comfortable saying prayers in your own words in your household. I think that is a good thing to get to, but a good start would be just to simply pray the Lord’s Prayer together.

I can guarantee you that as you read the Word of God as a family together — and I lay this at the feet of the fathers of the congregation to take leadership with this — and as you pray together, the Lord will shape you and form you and as well shape and form your household and the individuals within your household. It is a very powerful thing.

We make glad confession because it is a way that the Lord shapes and forms us. We also make glad confession because it is also a reflection. This is not a contradiction but rather this is the wonderful cycle that the Lord has given us. We confess that the Lord would shape our hearts, and then in turn, out of the heart, we confess. It is mutually reinforcing.

What we speak is a reflection of who we are. Christ our Lord said in Matthew chapter 12, verses 33 and following: “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you speak good when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”

What Christ Jesus is getting at is this: what we speak is a reflection of who we are. It is a reflection of our hearts. Therefore, as Christians, if Christ truly does dwell in our hearts, if we trust in Him unto the salvation which He did in fact win for us on the cross — the forgiveness of our sins — therefore we ought to let that faith be reflected in speech, in glad confession.

Now, there are all kinds of objections people might give to this. People might object: “What if individuals will pull me at arm’s distance if I make it known that I am a Christian, that my trust is in Christ? What if I might not get that job that I want, or that promotion that I want, or that scholarship I want, or that college admission that I want?” Christ today affirmed that we might face persecution on account of our confession. We can expect that. Christ warned His first disciples that they might actually face a persecution that leads to death if they do. Most of us are not going to face that. I doubt any of us are going to face that. And how much lighter are the persecutions that we might face? And yet we gladly let ourselves be known as Christians. We do not seek to cover that up. We do not seek to hide that.

Why? First of all, it is a fool’s errand. Christ said, “Nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be made known.” If we are a Christian, our lives will look different than the unbelievers around us. It is a fool’s errand to try to cover that up.

Back when I was in college, I had the opportunity to study abroad and I studied abroad in Greece for a semester. While I was in Greece, when I went to the city of Ephesus — you are familiar with Ephesus actually, because the Book of Ephesians was written to the Christian church in Ephesus. When I was in the tourist part of town, outside of the ancient city of Ephesus, you would walk down the streets and the shopkeepers there were so in tune with everybody walking by that they could identify exactly where you were from. As you walked down the street, they were calling out, “American! American!” Some of the ones who really knew their stuff could actually tell you exactly what state you were from. At that time I lived on the border of Oklahoma and Texas, and so they did not know Oklahoma so much, but they were pretty close. They were like, “Texan!” I do not know how they knew that, but they knew.

This is how it is if we are a Christian. The hope that we have will look different and lead to a different way of life, because our hope is not for this world; our hope is for the world to come. Because of this, therefore, the things of this world mean something very different to us than they do to those who are worldly. For those who are worldly, this is all they have. So therefore they cling to the things of this world. They cling to wealth. They cling to reputation. They cling to various pleasures. That is all they have.

But we have so much more as Christians. Those who are worldly cling to this world’s gold. For us, gold is so plentiful that the city that we await, they pave the streets with it. So if we have treasures in this world, if we have gold in this world, praise be to God for that. It is a blessing from God to us. Clearly receive it from the hand of God, but we receive it as a gift to use for the sake of others. If the Lord has granted us a good reputation in whatever way that might be — whether as a student or a worker or a community member — praise be to God for that. But we do not serve the reputation as a good in itself that makes it a god. Rather instead, we use the reputation that the Lord has given us in order to serve, and so on it goes.

Our life will look different. Even if we try to cover over the fact that we are a Christian, there is a day that is coming in which all will be revealed. It is to that day that we look, and for that day that we live.

And so therefore we gladly make confession of Christ. We name Him as Lord and Savior, so that on that great and glorious day, we in turn will be named. Christ our Lord said, “Everyone who acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven.”

This does not mean that we are saved by virtue of our confession itself. It is not just like saying with the lips, “I’m a Christian,” and now we are saved. Rather, the confession is a reflection of our hearts — hearts that trust this wonderful work that Christ has done for us in the shedding of His blood for our sakes.

Let us gladly confess that, so we might more strongly believe — so that it might be a reflection of the heart, and so we might receive that wonderful promise that awaits us in heaven.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Title: The Compassion of Christ
Text: Mattthew 9:35-10:8
Liturgical Date: Pentecost 3, Proper 6 A
Calendar Date: June 24, 2026
Location: St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County, 316 W. Main St., Forestville, WI 54213. 920-856-6420.
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

Saint Peter’s serves Ephraim and other areas in Northeast Wisconsin.

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Full text:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. You may be seated.

Today we heard from our gospel lesson these words: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.” Compassion—not self-righteousness, although he was indeed righteous. Not disgust, even though certainly on account of what he witnessed he could have felt that, but rather compassion.

And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today: the compassion of the Lord Jesus Christ. When we read this passage, I think our initial reaction is that Jesus has compassion upon them because these are sympathetic individuals, right? Some of the imagery that’s used there leads us to think, “Oh, they’re like these fluffy, cute, white sheep that maybe wandered away, but still they’re sympathetic.”

But actually, I think the imagery that St. Matthew is using here—and some of the other ways these crowds are described—paints a very different scenario than what is in our mind’s eye. We’re going to dig into that a little bit.

But by way of digging into it, I want to contrast the reaction of Jesus—this reaction of compassion—with a reaction that I had a few years ago when I witnessed various crowds.

A few years ago, Mary and I were celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary. I took the weekend off from church here. We still went to church down in Chicago where we were visiting, but we took the weekend off here. On Saturday, as we were walking around downtown Chicago, let’s just say we weren’t in Forestville anymore.

They had a big music festival going on downtown. If you’re not familiar with these, this is kind of the big thing with young people these days—massive music festivals with twenty thousand, thirty thousand, forty, fifty, sixty thousand people. I think there was a forty-thousand-person music festival downtown that day.

And that sounds wholesome, right? Young people going to listen to music. In a way, I guess that part of it is. But certainly a lot of the activity around it wasn’t, including a lot of the attire that people—especially young women—were wearing as they walked around downtown Chicago.

And that wasn’t even the worst of the attire that we witnessed that day. There was also a very niche lifestyle convention going on downtown. I won’t go any further than that, but let’s just say we went back and took refuge in our hotel room. I muttered to myself, “My goodness, the world is going to hell in a handbasket.”

I was filled with disgust at what I witnessed. I think a lot of us feel the same when we’re scrolling social media or watching TV—we might be filled with disgust at the things we see, or maybe self-righteousness. But when Jesus was witnessing these crowds, he was seeing something akin to that—probably even worse. Because Jesus, as the Son of God, can see the heart of man. Imagine all the iniquity he witnessed as he looked out on those crowds. Matthew describes them as crowds that were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Once again, to us that sounds somewhat sympathetic—these cute, fuzzy, woolly sheep being chased around, harassed, helpless. But when you really think about it, “sheep without a shepherd” is one of the strongest images Scripture gives for willful, active rebellion against God—going our own ways.

Isaiah chapter 53, one of the most poignant prophecies of the passion of Jesus Christ, uses the image of sheep: “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” Now I think you can probably fill in the blank here: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.”

And so on it goes. The strongest image—one of the strongest images—that the Scriptures have given us of active, willful disobedience against the Lord and rebellion against his righteous rule is the visual of a sheep that has gone astray. And that is why these individuals were like sheep without a shepherd.

It’s not that God had simply ignored them. No, the Lord God had gathered up this people out of Egypt and rescued them from the mouth of those who were trying to devour them. This flock the Lord had led out into the wilderness and shepherded them there. And then, as a good shepherd, he led them through that valley of the shadow of death into the green pastures and beside the still waters of this good and pleasant land of Canaan.

In reaction to this shepherding goodness and faithfulness of the Lord, the people had pledged in the time of Moses, “We will obey. We will do what you have commanded.” And that’s reasonable, because the commands of the Lord are light. His yoke is easy. His burdens are joyful to take upon us. His commands are good, and they were given to them for their wellbeing. They are given to us for our wellbeing as well.

In fact, the Lord promised, “If you do these commands that I set forth before you here at Sinai, you will do well. Things will go well for you.” And it makes sense. For example, according to the Fourth Commandment, if we honor father and mother—and therefore all the various authorities the Lord has put into our lives—things will tend to go well for us. God promises it, right? That’s the first commandment with a promise. The other commandments have promises as well.

What if, according to the Eighth Commandment, instead of exposing our neighbor or speaking ill of our neighbor, we are discreet with the trusts our neighbor gives us and we uplift our neighbor in word and reputation? Others will trust us. Things will tend to go well for us.

What if, according to the Sixth Commandment, we honor our marriages and the marriages of others? Once again, things will tend to go better for us and for our neighbor.

What if, according to the Seventh Commandment, instead of taking what doesn’t belong to us, we protect the possessions of those around us—not only protect their possessions but help them to improve them, and also help our neighbor to improve his means of acquiring income? Once again, things will tend to go better for us. We’ll have no lack of business and cooperation from our neighbors in our lives.

But those people had chosen to go their own way. And because of this, they were suffering the consequences in their lives on account of sin—both the sin that they had inherited from Adam and their own sin which they had committed.

Now here we’re going to be extending and probably challenging a way that we typically see things. We’re working backwards here. So we started at verse 36. We’re going to go back to verse 35: “Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction.”

Certainly some of these various diseases and infirmities… (There’s a reason I’m calling them infirmities versus afflictions. We’ll get to that in a second.) Some of these individuals would have suffered on account of the fall of humanity in general. We heard in the epistle of Paul to the Romans that through the sin of the one man, Adam, death has come into the world. And so therefore all the consequences of sin have come into this world through Adam—all the sickness, all the disease, all the pain, all the various kinds of oppression in the world, whether political or moral or physical—all of this on account of the sin of Adam.

Sometimes we suffer those things not on account of any sin of our own. For example, when it was asked of Jesus about the man born blind, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus said neither, but rather this has happened to him so that the glory of God could be displayed in him. Sometimes we suffer not through any active sin of our own, but rather on account of the fall of humanity and the fall of the world.

There are other kinds of afflictions and other kinds of consequences of sin that we absolutely do suffer on account of our moral ills. Boy, people don’t like to hear this these days. People want to cordon off the consequence of sin from the sin in our minds, and I think that the translators of the English Standard Version fell prey to this mindset, by the way. Now, don’t get me wrong—I like the ESV and generally I just believe that I’m dumb, and so I’m going to follow the translation that’s given to me because the people translating are way smarter than me. But here’s one circumstance where I think being dumb helped.

When I was looking at this particular passage, I noticed that the word they translated as “affliction” was a really curious word. Maybe “affliction” wasn’t the right translation there. The Greek word is malakia. You don’t have to know that, but here’s the interesting thing about malakia. Malakia is not a problem outside of me that comes and afflicts me. A malakia is a problem with me. It’s a problem I have. The most literal translation of malakia is “softness.”

So therefore, sometimes that gets translated as “infirmity.” That’s a better translation, right? Because that’s a problem with me, not a problem outside of me that hurts me, but rather it’s my problem. And this word malakia can be used for all kinds of softness. For example, if I break my bone, now my bones aren’t hard anymore. That’s a malakia, right? If I am swelling, now I’ve got the softness of the swelling. That’s a malakia. But it’s also used for moral infirmities of all kinds. In fact, St. Paul uses it in Corinthians to talk about the moral infirmity of homosexuality (using a euphemism).

So if I give myself over to gluttony, that moral softness of gluttony—I might become physically soft, right? I might have all kinds of health issues. My blood pressure might go up. My cholesterol might go up. My blood sugar might go up. All kinds of health problems because of my moral inability to exercise self-control. And this goes with all kinds of ways in our life. Because of our inability to follow God’s law, we have all kinds of infirmities and difficulties around us.

So let’s talk about the negative examples. We talked about what if I keep the Eighth Commandment—people will tend to trust me better. But what if, on the other hand, I speak ill of those around me and I gossip and I slander? I’ll lose the trust of those around me. What if I take what doesn’t belong to me and I seek to undermine the careers of others around me? I will not be considered a good coworker. People won’t want to cooperate with me. People won’t want to do business with me. They’re going to try to stay away from me. And I will suffer that consequence. And yes, that will hurt. But that’s the due consequence for my sin.

Here’s what I’m getting at: When Jesus was looking out on these crowds, he was looking out at people who were actively rebelling against God. Straight from the fall. And because of rebellion against God, they were facing all kinds of consequences on account of this—both on account of the rebellion of Adam and their own rebellion as well.

If I were in that position—sinner that I am—looking out at the sins and the consequences of people for their sin, I would have reacted with self-righteousness or disgust. But Jesus, being God and a God of love—as we sing, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son the world to save”—Jesus instead reacts with compassion. Not to excuse sin or to gloss over it, but rather that he himself would suffer the consequence for sin, for our sins.

As we read from Isaiah 53: “He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” Healed of our disease and healed of our afflictions. We are healed in the transformation of our hearts. Because the Lord Jesus Christ, in his great love for us and having suffered for us, has thenceforth sent his Holy Spirit by means of that gospel message to transform our hearts.

So now our hearts are no longer in rebellion against the Lord, but rather are shaped and formed into hearts that trust in him and have hope in him. And in this hope we are healed. We have the healing of our hearts, and on account of this healing of our hearts, we have the great hope of total and complete healing when Christ returns in power and might and glory. On that day, this old sinful flesh will melt away in the purifying glory of God that we will behold. Our rebellion against God will be no more, and therefore we will no longer suffer the consequences of our rebellion on that great and glorious day of Christ’s return.

Christ Jesus sees all things. And he looked out not only upon these crowds, but he has looked upon us sinners that we are—those who have gone astray like sheep—and he has had compassion upon us. Praise be to God for this.

As you leave today, I want you to leave with two emotions.

First of all, resolve that you would be more Christ-like in showing compassion for the sinner. That when you behold sin, you would not be exalted in self-righteousness, but rather that you would be moved to compassion as Christ our Lord was filled with compassion. Not to excuse sin, not to overlook it, but rather that through this resolve you would, for example, pray for the soul of the sinner. That you would work for the sake of the soul of the sinner. Always being ready to give an account of the hope that you have in Christ Jesus. That you would support the work of St. Peter’s as here we proclaim this gospel message, this message of forgiveness in the blood of Christ, so that your fellow sinners here would have their hearts lifted up in faith towards God.

And so that we might continue with this clarion call to the community so that others would hear and know of their Savior, the Lord Christ Jesus. Pray for the work of missionaries around the world, and support missionaries as they proclaim this gospel message to all who will hear so that hearts may be gathered into the Lord’s flock.

Yes, I want you to leave here with resolve, but also I want you to leave here with gratitude. Lord Jesus, thank you that even though I, like an errant, straying sheep, have gone astray, instead you have shown compassion to me. Lord Jesus, thank you that you have suffered the consequences of my sin so that in eternity I might enjoy the consequences of your righteousness. Lord Jesus, thank you. All praise and honor and glory be to the Lord Jesus Christ, he who is full of compassion. Amen.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The post Sermon: The Compassion of Christ first appeared on Saint Peter's Lutheran Church.

Title: 3 Myths & Facts About the Holy Spirit
Text: Acts 2:1–21
Liturgical Date: Pentecost (A)
Calendar Date: May 24, 2026

Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County, 316 W. Main St., Forestville, WI 54213; 920-856-6420.

Preacher: Rev. Christopher Jackson

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church serves Luxemburg, Wisconsin, and other areas in Northeast Wisconsin.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

And on this great and holy day of Pentecost, we’re going to be taking up the theme of the gift of the Holy Spirit.

A choice of words is deliberate, the gift of the Holy Spirit. ‘Cause indeed the Holy Spirit is a wondrous gift that the Lord grants His people. By the Holy Spirit, He grants miracles, the greatest miracle being the miracle of the transformation of the heart. By the Holy Spirit, He opens our minds to hear the Word of God and to understand it as He’s given to us in the Holy Scriptures, and He continues to extend it to us as well in the Holy Sacraments, and that’s at the core of what our sermon is today.

We’re going to be talking about various myths about the Holy Spirit, three myths about the Holy Spirit, and three facts about the Holy Spirit in contradiction to these three myths.

Now, to help begin to illustrate this a little bit, I’d actually like for you to take a look at these two images right here.

So most Sundays we use the pre-printed bulletins that we get from our publishing house, and generally I like them, generally they’re great, but they’re almost universally terrible on Pentecost. Almost universally. I’ve seen multiple versions of… I’ve been doing this long enough, you see when they start to recycle them after a few years and there’s a few versions and they all kinda portray something like this.

On special feast days when we’re doing things like processions and chanting the psalm, we’ll put down the full bulletin and I’ll put another image on there. So there you go. That’s the image that Pastor Chris chose. That might look strange to you, but that’s actually an image from one of the very first editions of the Martin Luther Bible.

So one of the first Bibles printed in the vernacular language, the German language. So this was an early Lutheran image of Pentecost. Now let’s take a look at some of the differences here, ’cause it’s gonna help to illustrate some of the myths and the facts that we’re gonna be talking about with regards to the Holy Spirit.

So the biggest difference you might see is, one’s color, one’s black and white. That’s just the nature of the technology, the printing technology that was available in their times, but there’s other differences, right? Now take a look at first of all, where the fire is. Now the Greek is ambiguous about where the fire was upon their heads.

There is a Greek word for directly on top of. That’s not the word that was used. It’s an ambiguous term. Where upon the heads, it’s up for artistic interpretation. The ones who made the color one here, they interpreted on top of the heads. In our mind’s eye, that’s probably the way we usually see it, but it could have been upon their lips.

And why did the artist choose that? To indicate the truth, that the giving of the Holy Spirit was the gift to understand the scriptures, to understand what they had witnessed in Christ, and to therefore then preach it. So quite literally, they have tongues of fire. I love that, right?

What else do we see here? Okay. The disciples, the apostles that are receiving the tongues of fire upon their head they are amazed at this. They are having an ecstatic experience about this, and the people who are witnessing it are also having ecstatic experience and are filled with wonder over as well these tongues of fire coming on their heads.

None of that’s in the Bible. None of that is in the Bible, right? It doesn’t say the disciples were filled with awe and wonder over these tongues of fire that came upon them. It says after these tongues of fire came upon them, they preached. And the people were not filled with awe and wonder over these tongues of fire coming upon them, but instead they were filled with awe and wonder over their preaching, right?

Very big difference. And so I like how in this one, instead of this awe and wonder, instead they just have gratitude and reverence to God for this wonderful gift. And that’s my hope for you today. That’s the point of this sermon, is that you in turn would have gratitude towards God for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Because the plain fact of the matter is that in American religion, we have made the Holy Spirit into a club to beat people over the head with instead of a gift to be received with gratitude and a gift which empowers us to give as well towards others. That’s at the center of our sermon.

How does American religion turn the Holy Spirit into a club to beat others over the head with? The first is by claiming that the Holy Spirit and the gift of the Holy Spirit is primarily about miraculous signs and wonders. So signs and wonders that are visible, that are, that are– cause awe and so on and so forth. This is very often associated, for example, with the Pentecostal movement.

Now, we do have a few Pentecostal churches in the area here. Back when I served in the South and lived in Missouri, this was a much bigger phenomenon than it is here, but it– we can still find influence of this idea here. And the Pentecostal movement will often say that their– your salvation, if you are truly saved, that’s going to be accompanied by various signs and wonders.

So things like speaking in a tongue. Maybe it’s a tongue that doesn’t even exist on earth, but rather is a tongue– what they might call a tongue of angels some sort of mysterious spiritual tongue, or maybe doing a work of healing or predicting the future or something like this. They’ll say these are the kinds of miraculous signs and wonders that you will show if you are saved.

And people will say things like, “Oh, they don’t actually teach, they don’t actually preach that,” but I can tell you that they in fact do. I’ve used this story multiple times. You’ve heard it before about how when I was in high school, a friend of mine, I was driving down the road with her and she said, “Chris, I believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

I believe that He died for my sins. I believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but I’m not saved and don’t think I’m going to heaven.” And I asked her why is that?” She said I’ve been going to this church and they’ve been telling me if I’m truly saved, then I’m going to be able to do something like speak in a tongue or to do a miraculous act of healing or to prophesy about the future and so on.”

And I told her, “Look, the Bible doesn’t say that. The Bible clearly teaches that, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life,” right? If you believe that Jesus died for your sins, I believe you’re going to heaven.

You should have seen the weight fall off her shoulders. You should have seen the joy on her face. That’s just one way that people turn the Holy Spirit into a club, a demand rather than a gift.

And this turning the Holy Spirit into a demand rather than a gift, a lot of times this is out of an effort to build oneself up and one’s status at the expense of others. St. Paul addressed this in the book of Corinthians. There, there was a number of people in the Corinthian congregation who were claiming that they had a special miraculous spiritual gift like the ones that we’ve been just talking about. And St. Paul doesn’t deny that they might have this, but he points to even bigger gifts and better gifts that every Christian will have as a gift of the Holy Spirit.

“Concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. Therefore, I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says, ‘Jesus is accursed.'” Now, here’s a linchpin in his argument here.

“And no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except in the Holy Spirit.” Part of what St. Paul was saying here is, look, you may have some sort of miraculous gift, and if you do, praise the Lord for that, but each and every one of your brothers and sisters in Christ who have confessed Jesus as Lord is no less spiritual than you.

That is a gift of the Holy Spirit. And he goes on to talk about this. He goes on and addresses some of these various spiritual gifts, but at the end of chapter 12, he says this: “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret?” And then he says, listen to this, “But earnestly desire the higher gifts And I will show you a still more excellent way.”

And then he goes on to that classic wedding text that we read at weddings, 1 Corinthians chapter 13, right? And that’s a good text to read at weddings, but a lot of times we miss the context of this. Paul is not so much talking about romantic love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 as he is talking about the miracle of the transformation of our hearts to beat with love for God and to beat with love for the neighbor.

He goes, “If I speak in tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” Then he goes on, “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy or boast,” and so on.

And finally, he ends with these words, “So now faith, hope, and love abide these three. The greatest of these is love. Even while all these other miraculous signs and wonders are going to pass away, faith, hope, and love are the greatest gifts of the Holy Spirit. And it’s those gifts, and especially love, which will endure until the end.”

Now, I don’t want you to get me wrong about what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that I don’t believe in miracles. I do believe in miracles, and I’m not saying that the Holy Spirit doesn’t work miracles. I believe the Holy Spirit works miracles. What I am saying is this, is that too often we are blind to the greatest miracle that the Holy Spirit works, and that’s the miracle of the transformation of our hearts.

Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, we are spiritually dead and blind, unable to come to the Lord Jesus Christ, unable to trust in Him, but rather, according to the book of Romans, our sinful minds are enmity against God, which means that they are hostile to God. We don’t want anything to do with God. If we hear God walking in the garden, we, like Adam and Eve, we run away.

That’s the nature of our hearts according to the original sin that we have inherited. And the miracle of God is this, is that by the Holy Ghost the Holy Spirit transforms these cold, dead hearts into hearts that beat with love. Love of God. Love of the neighbor. And that is a miracle above all miracles. And a gift above gifts of the Holy Spirit. Praise be to God for this.

Don’t doubt. Rather trust that through the gospel, the Lord works this gift to you.

Which brings us to our next point, that the Holy Spirit is primarily concerned about ecstatic experience. And in contrast to this, we’re going to talk about how the Holy Spirit is about the proclamation of the Word of God.

If there is an overriding and overarching viewpoint about the work of the Holy Spirit in American Christianity, it’s this: that the Holy Spirit is found, experienced in ecstatic experience. This is the overarching principle, by the way, which drives so many viewpoints about what proper worship of God is. It’s about trying to, to elicit this sort of ecstatic experience.

And as I was thinking about this sermon, I was a little bit confused. I was sitting there thinking, “Where in the world this– did this idea come from?” That the Holy Spirit and the experience of the Holy Spirit is through ecstatic experience, because I can understand where the Pentecostals are coming from. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with it, I can understand where they’re coming from because, it has this scriptural basis. But there is literally nowhere in the Bible which attaches an ecstatic experience with the presence of the Holy Spirit.

You can’t find it anywhere. It’s nowhere. Why is it that, that this came to be? As I started to think about this, I realized, you know what? This is just the outgrowth of the viewpoint, the cultural air of the 1960s and ’70s and how that kinda changed American culture and the way that we understand things and so on and so forth.

And I think this is, I think this is actually very a firm attachment here. In fact, I would go even further, and if you look into some of the commitments of the 1960s and ’70s which led to this idea, you really don’t get very far until you start running into Eastern religions. I’m not joking. Think about John Lennon, for example, right?

The man at the forefront of the cultural transformation of the ’60s and ’70s and influenced by Eastern religions. The Jesus people movement of the ’60s and ’70s as well. Many of those people came out of Hare Krishna. I think this is on firm ground. So I’m not gonna say you have to believe that. I’m not saying that’s the word of God. This is my theory because I can’t figure out where this idea came from otherwise.

And once again, this is a club that is used upon the people of God. And it’s a much more sly club. It’s a little bit more subtle. The idea is this if you don’t have this sort of ecstatic experience, then maybe you are not a child of God.

You might say, “Pastor Chris, you’re exaggerating.” No. This is my– I’ve experienced this. I know this. I’ve experienced this in my own personal experience. I’ve experienced this with couples that I’ve counseled where, a couple they have engaged in this sort of worship mentality and one will say, I’m embarrassed of my fiancé because he doesn’t have that kind of experience, and I’m not sure if he’s really a Christian.”

I’ve had people say this to me.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the Holy Spirit is not about ecstatic experience. It is about the Word of God. What happened when the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit? They preached the Word of God. By that preaching of the Word of God, people believed the Word of God and believed in the Word of God, who is Christ Jesus.

This brings us to our final point, the final myth. The Holy Spirit is about direct access to the mind of God apart from the Word of God.

Going back about, I don’t know, 15, 16 years ago or so, I was sitting listening to a sermon and the preacher said, “I know the Bible says this and this thing. I know the Bible says that, but I say this, and I can say this because I have the Holy Spirit.”

And I’ve heard variations of this all over. You, if you really start listening, you’ll hear people saying things like this, “Yeah, the Bible says that, but the Holy Spirit now is saying this, for I have the Holy Spirit, and so therefore I am saying this.”

I want you to listen. John 14:26. There, Christ Jesus says this: These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

Christ Jesus was saying that the work of the Holy Spirit is not to reveal anything beyond what was already revealed in Him, who is the very Word of God, the very picture of God Himself. There is nothing more to be revealed than has been revealed in Christ Jesus and the scriptures which testify to it. It’s the fullness of God’s revelation.

And the work of the Holy Spirit is to help us to better understand and to better take to heart the teaching of the Word of God. Above all this, that through Christ Jesus, all our sins are atoned for and all unrighteousness fulfilled, so that for us is not judgment, but rather justification. For us it is not condemnation, but rather glorification. For us it’s not eternal death, but rather for us is eternal life.

That is the gospel message that the Holy Spirit uses to transform our hearts and the Holy Spirit in turn helps us to believe that message and causes us to believe that message.

And once again, people use the Holy Spirit. If they say that the Holy Spirit is about them having direct access to the mind of God, this is something that they use for external force and compulsion. They want to put themselves in authority over you. Rather than acknowledging the authority of the Word of God.

And through this message, my hope for you is this, that as Christ said that through the Holy Spirit, we would have peace, and that we would have freedom from fear, that our hearts instead of being troubled instead would be glad and full of faith and full of love.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, all praise be to God for the gift of the Holy Spirit. You can be confident that wherever the Word of God is rightly preached, wherever the sacraments are given in accordance with the institution of Christ, the Holy Spirit is there doing His work to transform our hearts into hearts that beat with faith, hope, and love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The post Sermon: 3 Myths & 3 Biblical Facts about the Holy Spirit first appeared on Saint Peter's Lutheran Church.

Text: Matthew 28:1–10
Liturgical Date: Easter A
Calendar Date: April 5, 2026
Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County, 316 W. Main St., Forestville, WI 54213. 920-856-6420.
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County serves Luxemburg and other locations around Northeast Wisconsin.

TRANSCRIPT

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Alleluia. Christ has risen. He has risen indeed. Hallelujah. Christ is risen, and our good shepherd has crossed through the valley of the shadow of death and he has emerged unto the green pastures and the still waters of eternal life.

And we, his sheep, his flock, follow him. Christ has risen, and he, the second and greater Moses, has led us through the waters as on dry ground. And our enemies—not the enemy of Pharaoh and his soldiers, but rather the enemies of sin, death, and the devil—lay at the bottom of the abyss. Christ has risen, and the lying tongue of the devil, this lying tongue which would seek to corrupt our minds with his falsehoods, his lying tongue that would seek to corrupt our wills unto that which is evil, and his lying tongue which would seek to bring our emotions down into darkness, has been utterly cut off. But instead we hear the message of the tongue of the angels.

“He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell the disciples that he has risen from the dead and do not fear.”

With these words, the angel informs our minds of the resurrection. He gives us the resolution of the will to live as Christians who know that truth. And he as well preaches not just to our minds, not just to our hearts, but he also preaches to our guts: to have joy.

Our guts? Pastor Chris, what in the world are you talking about? In the ancient world—and I don’t think this is a mistake that the angel addresses all three aspects of this—the inner life could be divided between the life of the head, the life of the heart, and the life of the guts.

Well, the life of the head. This makes sense to us, right? This is where rationality is; this is the seat of knowledge. And the angel proclaims to us that the tomb is empty and Christ has risen. And my prayer is that we would be confirmed in this knowledge. But the angel preaches to the women and also thereby to us that this ought to lead to a particular way of life for the women. They were to go and tell the disciples about what they knew, and that the disciples, in the knowledge of this, should also act in accordance and go and return to Galilee where they knew they could find him.

And so also the angel preaches to us. And in the ancient world, the things that have to do with resolution, with loyalty, the principles that you live your life by—well, that was a matter of the heart.

Today we are filled with Easter joy. It is a joy to see all of you gathered here today. I’m sure that as you came and you saw your fellow Christians gathered here, you were filled with joy as well. It is a joy to hear that Easter proclamation, that Christ is risen. It is a joy to sing that wonderful tune, “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today,” and the joy will continue throughout the day in whatever way that is—eating candy, participating in egg hunts, getting together for a family meal. What a blessing to have this Easter joy.

And yet our feelings can be so flighty. So now we have joy, but even within this same day, when the family has gone off on their ways and all of the detritus of our celebrations is lying around and it’s late and you’re tired and there’s a sink full of dishes and there’s a mess in the living room, maybe your joy isn’t gonna be quite so pronounced. And maybe you might even speak a cross word to a loved one. It happens. I know it happens. And we are filled with joy today, but maybe tomorrow when we have to go back to work and the day-by-day continues, well, maybe at that point the Easter joy starts to wear off.

And now we come to the will. As we said, the will in the ancient world had to do with the heart, with the principles, the loyalties, the way that we lead our life. And today, on Easter Day, we can feel as if we intend to lead our lives according to the truths of the gospel, and we resolve to do so. “Lord, I’m going to try to—it was so wonderful to be in your house, to receive the gospel of the Lord, to worship with my fellow Christians, and Lord, I intend to be better about getting back into church more often.” But then the next week comes and the next week maybe our will isn’t as strong as we thought.

Maybe our will shows weakness in other ways. You know the will is a little bit more steady than the emotions. Our hearts beat steadily day to day, but even our hearts can start to get a little out of rhythm. Maybe even our hearts can start to beat in the wrong way. And man, I’m gonna talk to men specifically here. I think this is a particularly male problem in which at certain points in our lives our wills can become weak and we can have a great change.

We see this in the gospels, by the way. We see this in the passion narrative. Judas Iscariot, who ought to have been bound in bonds of loyalty—that ought to have been a matter of the will—instead showed a weak will and a desire for the worthless drops of silver over the precious gospel and the precious gold of Jesus Christ. We see this not only in Judas Iscariot, but we also see this in Pontius Pilate. He knew what was right, but he didn’t have the will to act in accordance with what was right and therefore he gave over an innocent man to die. Or we might think of Peter who, in a moment of resolution, said, “Lord, I will never deny you,” but instead out of weakness of will did so over the curious inquiries of a servant girl.

You know that stereotypical male midlife crisis? You get down to it, that’s a crisis of the will.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, my prayer for you is that your Easter joy would carry over beyond today. My prayer for you is that your Easter resolution to live as a Christian would be something that carries you through year to year.

But how? On the same way that the angel and Christ Jesus sought to transform the will and the heart of the women here at the tomb—and that’s through the knowledge that he has risen from the dead. The angel demonstrates to the women the resurrection. He rolls back the stone from the tomb. And this gets to something that just utterly drives me nuts. Every once in a while you’ll see a picture of the resurrection and it’s got a picture of the stone rolled away from the tomb and Jesus like walking around the corner. That’s not how it was. If you read this closely, that’s not how it worked. I’ve seen stained glass of this, sadly, in churches. No. Jesus rose from the dead. Do you think stone could hold him back? No. The angel didn’t roll away the stone so Jesus could get out. The angel rolled away the stone so the women—and so that we—can look in and know that he had risen from the dead already.

Now, the women showed good resolve. They showed a good will in that they did what the angel told them, but yet still the emotions were a little bit flighty. They did depart with joy and also with fear. How did Jesus address that? Once again, through knowledge. He showed himself to them in another demonstration of his resurrection so that their fear—and he says to them once again, “Do not be afraid”—so that fear would give way to joy.

My prayer for you, brothers and sisters in Christ, is that through the knowledge of the resurrection every day would become a little bit more like Easter in your resolve and in your emotions.

But here we come to a problem, Pastor Chris. Well, how can I know that Jesus rose from the dead? How can I know that? I was not there. Brothers and sisters in Christ, it is completely and utterly reasonable to believe the truth that Jesus rose from the dead. There is an empty grave in Jerusalem, and the witnesses of this fact were willing to go to their deaths proclaiming that truth. Now you can get people to lie, you can do that, but when they lie, it is hard for them to link up their stories. This is why when detectives seek to get to the truth of the matter, they separate the witnesses so they can get each individual’s own stories. We have the stories, the accounts of the apostles, and they’re all unified on this fact. Not only this, but all but John went to their graves proclaiming this. They lost their lives in bloody witness to this fact. Now you can get people to lie and you can get people to together agree to a lie. But you cannot get a group of people to together die for a lie. They might die for a just cause. They might die for the truth, but you’ll not get them to die for a lie. No, my brothers and sisters in Christ, we can be sure and confident of the truth that the grave is empty and that Christ is risen.

Here’s the one thing that I’m going to put a little bit of an extra burden on you for this day that I would like for you to do. Maybe you’ve got a copy of the Apostles’ Creed in your small catechism. Take a picture of that in your phone. You look at your phone every day. Or maybe if you’re not a big phone person, instead of taking a picture of the Apostles’ Creed, you can cut out the Creed from the bulletin today. Maybe you take that to your desk, you tape that to your mirror, or you tape that to your dashboard somewhere. You see it each day, and when you see it, recite it.

Recite these wondrous facts so that your mind would be conformed to them. Recite the truth that out of its infinite and eternal love, God created you and all things. Recite the fact that out of this eternal will, this heart which unlike ours is undeterred in its purposes, that out of his loving faithfulness to you—even though you were faithless in your sins—yet God remained resolute in his faithfulness to you. And in that resoluteness, the eternal Son of God took on human flesh to live a perfect life for your sake, fulfilling your righteousness, and to die an atoning death unto the forgiveness of your sins, that on the third day he rose again from the dead and thereby opened the doors of eternal life to you. Recite the third article, the article on the Holy Spirit, which conveys that the Lord has continued in his resolute love for you to extend this gospel, this forgiveness, through word and sacrament to you so that you might know and believe that Jesus is Lord, your sins are forgiven, and your eternal life is for you.

And my prayer for you is that that knowledge as you recite it day by day and week by week, that it would start to drip down out of your minds and into your hearts so that you have the courage and the resolve to live as Christians, to continue in the way of love that the Lord has given you.

And maybe then once the gospel has trickled down from your minds and trickled down into your hearts, it will also trickle down into your guts. And maybe instead of bitterness at the end of a long day, you’ll feel joy: “Lord, what a wonderful blessing to have served you by serving others.” Maybe as life’s day comes to an end and you’re on your deathbed, instead of feeling fear, you will feel confidence and joy and express that to your loved ones gathered around. Because you know that as you close your eyes in this world, they will only open in the world to come. Because you know that as you are laid in the grave, it’s not a final resting place. It’s a resting place, but you know that you will rise because you know that on the other side of the return of Christ is an eternity of bliss and joy with God forever.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, my prayer for you is that day by day Easter joy is more and more a part of your life, that day by day Easter resolution is more a part of your life, and that all this comes through Easter knowledge. Hallelujah! Christ has risen. He has risen indeed. Hallelujah.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The post Sermon: The Resurrection Transforms Our Minds, Wills, and Emotions [Easter 2026] first appeared on Saint Peter's Lutheran Church.

Text: Isaiah 53:4-5
Date: March 5, 2026
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson
Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County, 316 W. Main St., Forestville, WI 54213, 920-856-6420

This sermon was preached as part of our Lent Midweek service.

Today we are continuing our series on the Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah—one of the most beautiful and clearest prophecies regarding our Messiah, the Savior Jesus Christ, and his passion and death for our sakes. Today we are taking up the theme that he, as the Suffering Servant, is the one who has borne our griefs.

The book of Job, in the fourteenth chapter, tells us, “Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble.” Notice what Job said. He made this very universal statement: no matter who we are, we will have troubles, we will have griefs, we will have sorrows. It’s not a question of whether we will have them or not.

We will have them—whether we are non-Christian or Christian, unbeliever or believer. We will have griefs. We will have sorrows. The question becomes: what kind of griefs, what kind of sorrows? Because we’re going to look at this in just a few minutes.

The Apostle Paul tells us that there are two kinds of grief and sorrow: the kind that leads to repentance and therefore to hope of eternal life, and on the other hand, the kind that leads to death.

Even though it should be obvious to us that we can’t escape grief and sorrow in this world, it doesn’t keep people from trying. And there are all kinds of ways that people try to escape grief and sorrow in this world, and they establish patterns. The Bible is clear: you can’t do it. We have examples of this—we just read from Job.

Some of the best examples come from the life of Solomon. We’re going to be talking about a number of these in the wisdom literature. Solomon was a man who accomplished many things. One of the things he accomplished was the accumulation of great wealth and riches. He was Solomon the man who owned gold mines. After all, he could literally pull money from the ground. That’s who Solomon was.

And with this wealth and riches he built palaces, maintained huge retinues of people to serve his every need.

And yet in the book of Ecclesiastes, when Solomon—I think roughly in midlife, having his midlife crisis—looks back on all this accumulation of goods and accumulation of money, he says, maybe it wasn’t all that I thought it was.

It says in Ecclesiastes chapter 5, “The sleep of a laboring man is sweet.” He goes day to day exerting himself out in the fields or on building projects or whatever it is that he puts his hand to. The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eats little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not let him sleep.

Solomon is taking stock of his wealth and his riches and he realizes, you know what? This is filling me with anxiety. People think they can escape grief and sorrow on account of accumulating riches. It brings all kinds of other sorrows as well—anxiety: Am I going to get sued? Are people going to come after me for the wealth that I have accumulated? Are the friends around me really my friends, or are they here just for what I have?

Paul says in 1 Timothy, those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare which drowns men in destruction and perdition.

Others seek relief from pain and misery and sorrow and grief through pleasure: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” The old saying, right? And so they pursue worldly pleasures. They pursue perhaps fast and loose living. They seek to drown their sorrows—drown their griefs—in alcohol or perhaps drugs. And it’s a very common thing. We talk about how a lot of drug abuse is on account of trying to avoid one’s demons and to find release from pain and grief.

And Solomon too, it seems, was one who pursued pleasure in various forms. But in the book of Proverbs he says this, in the fourteenth chapter: “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.”

I’m sure a lot of us can relate—laughing on the outside and feeling grief on the inside, or pursuing a few moments of forgetfulness in alcohol, but after that mirth comes the heaviness of regret. No, you can’t escape grief and sorrow with pleasure.

Others seek to escape grief and sorrow by means of accomplishment. And certainly Solomon was a man who sought to escape grief and sorrow by means of accomplishment—various accomplishments: a man of great building projects, a man who had some measure of military success, a man who was able to do so much that his kingdom was the awe and envy of other kingdoms all around him.

And yet Solomon looks around at these things and says, in Ecclesiastes 2, “Then I looked at all the works that my hands had wrought and on the labor that I had labored to do, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind.”

Solomon realized that ultimately these things had a great deal of trouble entailed in them, and even the greatest projects in time will crumble.

Still others look to escape grief and sorrow through knowledge. They think, if only I can dial in through knowledge and through the discipline of applying that knowledge a particular way of life, or if only I can apply certain principles to my life, then I’ll be able to avoid grief and I’ll be able to avoid sorrow and I’ll be happy and joyful.

Solomon was a man of great wisdom—in fact, the Scriptures say the wisest man to live. And let’s not make any mistake about it: wisdom is a good gift of God. We ought to pursue wisdom. God commended Solomon for seeking wisdom when God appeared to him and Solomon asked for wisdom so that he could rule over the kingdom well. And God commended him and said, yes, I’ll give you wisdom, and I’ll also give you other things that you haven’t asked for—many things that we’ve talked about, such as fame and riches and so on. Accomplishment. Wisdom’s a good thing.

But an escape or a release from sorrow? Oh, Solomon says, “For in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

We keep trying to avoid sorrow. We keep trying to avoid grief. We think that we can outrun it. We think that we can outmaneuver it. But we ought to know that it’s unavoidable. We ought to know that it is a fact of life. We ought to know this from our own experience, looking around the world, and we ought to know this as well from the Holy Scriptures.

And the Holy Scriptures are clear about this: you cannot avoid it. But there are two kinds of grief and sorrow.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 7, “Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”

So the question isn’t “Will I have grief and sorrow or not?” The question is, “What kind of grief and sorrow will I have? Will I have the kind of grief and sorrow that leads to repentance and salvation and a clear conscience, or will I have the kind that leads to despair and doubt and lack of faith?”

That’s the question. And notice how Paul describes the good kind of grief. It is godly grief. Do you know what that means? That means that this is a grief that we can’t get for ourselves. It is a grief that is a gift when God transforms it. And that’s why people keep running out of their own will and out of their own abilities trying to outrun grief and trying to outrun sorrow.

But the answer is that we can’t do it.

But we need God to transform it for us. And that’s precisely what Jesus did—the man of sorrows, the man acquainted with grief. That is precisely what Jesus did for us, because he took upon himself that second kind of grief. He took upon himself that grief that produces death, because he took upon himself the grief that is entailed with regret and shame, the grief that comes from sin and doubt and faithlessness.

Now he had no sin and he had no doubt and he was certainly faithful, but he took all of that upon himself on the cross. And by this means—this is what Jesus did—by this means Jesus closed the gate of death to us when he died for our sakes.

But in turn, through this work, he opened the gates of heaven and eternal life to all of us who trust him—that trust itself a gift of God by the power of the Holy Spirit and through the word of God. Through that gift—not anything that we could do, but only something that God can do—the Lord has transformed our hearts so that, freed from the regret and grief of sin, therefore the sorrows and griefs of this world are transformed.

Because these lead to repentance—yes, sorrow for the sins that we have committed, but above all, trust in Christ. And where we have that trust, we know that while grief and sorrow is there with us today, we know that it is limited and we know that it has its end, and we know that in the world to come we will have unending bliss and unending joy, and therefore we have hope.

And that’s how Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows, the man acquainted with grief, transforms our grief into something which is not always looking back at what has gone wrong in the past and not looking down in sorrow, but rather looking forward to the release, the relief, and the joy and the dignity and the holiness and the glories of eternal life.

And all praise and honor and glory be to Jesus, the man of sorrows.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The post Sermon: Jesus, the Man of Sorrows first appeared on Saint Peter's Lutheran Church.

Text: 1 Corinthians 1:18–31
Liturgical Date: Epiphany 4A
Calendar Date: February 1, 2026
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson
Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County
316 W. Main St.
Forestville, WI 54213
920-856-6420

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church serves Sturgeon Bay and other communities in Northeast Wisconsin.

Transcript

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So I’m going to have to apologize to you all today. I know that you enjoy Pastor Chris’s 25- or 27-minute sermons, but today’s not going to be one of those days. I’m sorry. You’re just going to have to go back and listen to some sermon archives or something like that to get your fill. We’ve got those on our website and so on.

We’re going to be keeping it a little bit short today because my voice is rather weak. I was up singing in the choir last night and had some speaking parts as well with that. And then this morning I had to yell at my dog. And in addition, coming off a little bit of sickness, so my voice is a little weak.

Well, that’s a good illustration of the principle at play here that we’re going to be talking about. We heard today from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians:

“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human might boast in the presence of God.”

And every time I hear that passage, my mind goes back about 25 years ago. I was a college student at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana. And I typically went to one of the town churches there Sunday to Sunday. I was at the town church there, and a lay reader got up—someone who is not good at reading, as Mary is, rather someone who evidently had a great deal of eye problems. He was a gentleman as well that a lot of people probably would look down on. He was a person who had rather shabby and aged clothes, and really just was struggling with the reading.

Yeah, what a great illustration of the principle here, because here he is—a man barely able to read these words on the page to the congregation—and yet communicating timeless truths and communicating that one truth which is more powerful than any other truth in the world: This truth before God, we have nothing to boast of. Even those who are mighty and powerful and strong in this world—for God, we have nothing to boast of. But God has done something for us and something the world would consider weak and foolish, which is the death of His Son. And by this He accomplished what nothing else could do: hearts turn to Him in faith, by this receiving eternal life.

Paul talks about how the Greeks demanded wisdom and the Jews demanded signs. What exactly is he talking about there?

Greeks demand wisdom. Christianity ran counter to the prevailing philosophical views of the day in the Greco-Roman world. A few hundred years before the time of St. Paul, there was a philosopher by the name of Heraclitus. I’ve talked about him before. Heraclitus, as he was sitting by a creek in Greece, was looking at those waters flowing by. And this creek, this river, was never the same moment to moment. It was changing every single moment—ripple here, a glimmer there, a swell here, a trough there—always changing. Even the riverbed itself was changing. You could see how the pebbles and the sand were getting carried along in that stream. And he realized that the entire world, the entire physical world, is like this. He said, panta rhei—“all things flow.”

Yes, it’s most evident in something like a stream, but in the stream of time, everything flows, everything changes. Nothing stays the same. Well, this led to the question: How can you lay hold of the eternal, the timeless—that which doesn’t change, but rather always remains the same? Because only that can be real.

You know, this whole idea flipped on its head the prevailing philosophy of the day. (Our day, we’ll get to that in a second.) But in the Greek mind, this wasn’t really real—because how can you say this is real if it changes and if it comes to naught? What’s real is that which is eternal and timeless and unchangeable.

And by the time of St. Paul, the idea is that you get access to the eternal, the unchangeable, by means of the mind—through the mind, come to the knowledge of eternal principles which remain the same all the time. That’s what was going on in the Greek mind.

And here we can see how the cross of Christ, the message of the gospel, was foolishness to the Greeks. Because the message of the gospel is this: that the eternal, unchangeable God—the source of all wisdom—actually became a part of this changeable world; that He, by taking on human flesh, became a part of all this; and that we apprehend the eternal, the unchangeable, by faith in God. And that faith comes to the suffering Christ. And this whole idea—the idea that through literally a man’s blood flowing out of him (remember when I said that philosopher, panta rhei—this blood flowing out), that by means of that blood we would have access to the eternal—foolishness.

lNow, the prevailing philosophy of our day, if you can call it that, is very much different. The prevailing philosophy today is that the only thing real is the touchable, the tangible, the things of this world. Once again, the world considers us Christians foolish. Why? Well, because we believe in things that cannot be seen: God in heaven, His eternal law, the righteousness that has been won for us by Christ and the cross. These are things which are apprehended by faith, not by sight. And so for different reasons, the world and its philosophy still considers us foolish.

And the Jews—this, I think, is a word against modern-day religious people. The Jews demanded signs. St. Paul says, what kind of signs were they seeking? They were seeking the favor of God and the apprehension of God’s plans and purposes in what we might call great end-time signs—huge movements, not miracles per se. They weren’t miracle chasers. But the Jews, in order to believe that a man was a true prophet, wanted something like what Moses accomplished—you know, bringing the people of God out of their Egyptian slavery, something of that magnitude—or maybe something of what happened at a later date, when the Assyrians surrounded Jerusalem and this huge mighty world superpower force, which literally had toppled every other kingdom in front of them like dominoes, was stopped at Jerusalem and inexplicably just packs up and leaves. And the knowledge that this could only be by the power of God. That’s the sort of thing the Jews were looking for—the knowledge of God and your status with God by virtue of these huge signs.

And so maybe they were looking for something like the restoration of Israel back to independence or something of that nature, which obviously Christ hadn’t accomplished, hadn’t even set out to accomplish.

And so for the Jews as well, Christ was a stumbling block. You know, I believe Christ remains a stumbling block for many of those who are religious, including those who consider themselves Christians, because many Christians still look for signs all around them to understand God’s will, to understand who God is.

There are those who have, I believe, erred views of Revelation, by the way. But those who, on the basis of Revelation, will open up the newspaper and look for fulfillment of what they consider to be various prophecies in the book of Revelation—and usually their predictions on the basis of this all, actually all the time, they’re always wrong, by the way. Or maybe it’s not through that, or they want to see or experience or know God through something tangible like an emotional experience. A lot of people don’t believe God is there and doing His work unless there’s a big crowd and it’s whipped up to a certain kind of frenzy, and they say, “Look, God’s not present and God’s not doing His thing unless we can see some sign like that.”

And for them, once again, Christ crucified is a stumbling block, because Christ crucified—that message of the gospel—it’s a message which is offensive to many people, even those who consider themselves Christian. And if you preach the forgiveness of sins won for us by the blood of Christ Jesus, many people are turned off by this message.

But brothers and sisters in Christ, even while the message of the cross is a stumbling block to many, and even while the message of the cross is foolishness to many others, yet here at St. Peter’s we join with St. Paul in this commitment: that we preach Christ crucified. Because it is that message of Christ crucified which can do something that nothing else can do—turn hearts to trust in God and receive eternal life.

The philosophy of the age considers trust in God to be just simply a non-issue, and so you discard it altogether. Philosophical or scientific pursuit, as good as it can be—and it can be very good, mind you—ultimately cannot turn hearts to God. Seeking for God in various tangible signs like numbers, emotional states, what’s happening in the news—this too is a dead end.

Through the prophet Micah, God chided His people and said, “Look, what more could I have done for you, Israel? I literally brought you out of Egypt—one of the greatest signs the world has ever seen—and yet you do not believe, and yet you do not repent. How much more could I have done for you?”

There’s one more thing yet—not this great sign of a geopolitical event or a mass movement of emotion, but rather a far greater sign: the sign of Jonah, the sign of a man bleeding upon the cross and who would rise three days later.

And it is that message, my brothers and sisters in Christ—it is only that message—which will turn hearts to God and could do this thing which otherwise is impossible.

And so my prayer for St. Peter’s Lutheran Church is that this congregation, we would always remain committed, from generation to generation, to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. My prayer for you as individuals is that day by day you would lay hold of this gospel message—day by day reflecting upon the law of God, confessing your sins, and remembering with great thanksgiving what God has accomplished for you in Christ Jesus, in His death and His resurrection.

For you it is foolishness to the minds of the age, a stumbling block to the prevailing religious views, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and salvation and eternal life. To Jesus Christ be all honor and praise and glory. Amen.

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Text: Matthew 4:12-15 | Liturgical date: Epiphany 3 A | Calendar Date: January 25, 2026 | Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County serves Sturgeon Bay and other areas in Northeast Wisconsin.

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County
316 W. Main St.
Forestville, WI 54213
920-856-6420

Text: Matthew 4:12-15 | Liturgical date: Epiphany 3 A | Calendar Date: January 25, 2026 | Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we’re taking up this passage spoken by the prophet Isaiah in our Old Testament lesson today, and recorded as well in the Gospel of Matthew: “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them the light has dawned.” And on the basis of these words, we’re going to be talking about spiritual renewal.

One of the most important experiences of my life happened in third grade. I actually think that it was a turning point in my life, and had it not happened, there’s a good chance I might not even be your pastor today. What was that turning point? Already in third grade, I got glasses. Yeah, that was significant. I couldn’t see the chalkboard at school. That’s how bad my vision was.

So yeah, maybe my grades wouldn’t have been very good. I wouldn’t have learned. Maybe I wouldn’t have been qualified to go to seminary. So there you go—third grade, transformative event. A big renewal in my life. And just to give you a sense of what kind of renewal this was, it really opened up the world to me.

Oh, I fought against getting glasses. I didn’t want them at all. But after I got them on, the drive home—it was like the whole world had opened up to me. Did you know trees have leaves? Of course you all have. I didn’t know that until I got glasses. To me, trees were just these big, blobby things.

I knew they had leaves when I got close up to ’em, but I couldn’t see them unless I was standing right up next to the tree. I couldn’t see my pastor’s face. I couldn’t see what was being written on the chalkboard. Huge renewal in my life. A major transformation. And it happened through three things.

First of all, it happened in community. I needed people to rally around me. I needed my parents and my teachers and others to say, “I’m not sure you can see that well, Chris.” I needed people to rally around me for that, and I needed people to give me the formal diagnosis. I needed people to manufacture those glasses, and I needed the nice lady to fit them to my face, right?

I needed people. I needed a hard diagnosis. Oh, I fought against that diagnosis. I tried to trick the eye doctor into thinking that I actually could see when I couldn’t. I fought against that, but I still got that hard diagnosis, which I didn’t want, but I got it anyway. And finally came the gift—a blessing, hard-won, not by me, but by my parents and by all these others: the gift of the glasses.

And as I said, major transformation, major renewal.

There come times in all of our lives where it seems that our eyes are not dim, but rather our faith, our hearts. Perhaps we have doubts. Perhaps we’re not making progress like we would like against some besetting sin. Maybe our confidence is wearing a little thin. The need for spiritual renewal can take many and various forms, but I think it comes for all of us.

And in these lessons that we just read, we see the formula for spiritual renewal, which is God blessing us through community, through the church; through the hard diagnosis of the law; through the blessings of the gospel. And that’s the formula. That’s the route for spiritual renewal, which we’ll be taking up today.

This prophecy of Isaiah, reiterated by Matthew and fulfilled by Christ—it’s all about spiritual renewal, by the way. What does it mean that the land of Zebulun and Naphtali was dwelling in darkness? What does that mean?

Zebulun and Naphtali were the very periphery of the people of God, of Israel, in multiple senses. They were on the periphery of the people of God geographically to begin with. Why? In what sense? The heart of their life—politically, culturally, especially religiously—was Jerusalem. Jerusalem was pretty far south in Israel. Zebulun and Naphtali, however, were the tribes which settled at the very northern edges of the domain, all the way up at the border of Syria. So they were at the very periphery of the life of the people of God physically, and that led to them being on the periphery spiritually as well.

That’s probably the more important thing here, because they were up in this region bordering on these Gentile nations’ areas, which eventually came to be called by the name Syria. Because they were up in this area, they had a great deal of influence—a lot of cultural and religious pressure—on them by these nations. In fact, the border sometimes seemed to be a little bit porous, and these nations would set up little communities, sometimes sanctioned by their imperial powers over them, sometimes just happening by themselves. And with them came their religious beliefs and their religious customs: belief in the foreign false gods and goddesses, and religious customs to go along with them—idolatry, worship of these false gods and goddesses.

This led to something, first of all: weakening identity among those peoples as being God’s people, as being Israel. And even among those who still did identify as being Israelites, false belief, false practice, false trust crept in among them. They were beset by spiritual darkness, by being led astray by falsehood.

And Isaiah here is saying something downright shocking, utterly baffling. Isaiah is saying, this region—marked by idolatry, marked by casual adherence to the law of God and belief, marked by not the most identification with us—that’s where renewal is going to begin. That’s where spiritual renewal for the people of God is going to kick off. Big surprise. You might expect it to happen in Jerusalem. You might expect it to happen in Judea, the area around Jerusalem. But no. Isaiah says it’s going to happen in these hinterlands, in these borderlands, in this place beset by spiritual darkness.

And that’s why Jesus withdraws to Galilee there, by the way—to fulfill that prophecy, to begin his ministry there, to begin the renewal of God’s people in the place least expected, as prophesied by Isaiah. And something interesting happens, by the way: this renewal begins to creep out from there. As Isaiah foresaw, people begin to follow Jesus, not only from Galilee, but also from Judea, from Jerusalem, from across the Jordan—another place where idolatry was known to be practiced—and even, get this, Syria.

This land of Gentiles, which had been this negative pressure, this negative religious pressure on Israel—it starts to go the other direction. Now true faith is seeping out from Galilee into these Gentile lands. Syria—Gentiles who adhere to false religions, the Decapolis, this region of people of Greek culture who worship these false foreign gods—believers are being recruited from there.

How did this happen? First of all, this spiritual renewal—it wasn’t individual. Now, individuals did have a greater sense of the knowledge of God, a greater faith. That much is clear. But it didn’t happen alone, and it never happens alone, by the way. It was communal. What happened in community? In what way? We can see this in several ways.

First of all, we see that the prophecy itself is communal. What does Isaiah say? “For those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them has light dawned.” And what does Jesus do in order to, you might say, increase the reach of his movement? He recruits a community around him. He recruits the disciples to join him in this joyful work.

We read about how he commissioned here Simon, Andrew, James, John—and that’s just the beginning. He recruits them to be his disciples and his eventual apostles so that they might join him in being fishers of men. This is a work which is accomplished amongst the community, and it is a work which is accomplished through community, and it is the absolute same today.

Many people, when they want to give a formula for spiritual renewal, they say you have to draw into yourself. You have to do this, do that. And it’s all individualistic. It’s really just, in a sense, they put the Lord—this idea: it’s just you and God. But that’s not how God works. It’s not how Jesus works.

God desires to do his work for us through the Christian Church. And we here at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church are an outpost of this movement, which already began in Galilee. Jesus is using St. Peter’s Lutheran Church to build one another up in faith and to call those who have no faith to the faith through the message of law and gospel, which we’re going to get to here in a moment.

And this should cause us to realize two things. First of all, I want this to cause us to make use of, thank the Lord for, be grateful for the blessings that the Lord offers here at St. Peter’s. Jesus does his work here. We don’t need to wonder how the Lord intends to grow our faith, to make us trust more in Him, and to reflect his love.

All the more, if we want to receive these gifts, you know where to find them: from the people of God. And the people of God are here, receiving God’s gifts and blessing each other with God’s gifts.

This brings us to our second point: that the Lord calls us to lift each other up in mutual faith and mutual encouragement. We see this all over the scriptures, by the way. St. Paul, for example, says to build each other up through—what example does he give?—singing the scriptures to each other in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Just one of the many examples, by the way. When you come and you worship here and you sing the word of God in the hymns, and you speak the word of God in the psalms and the creed, you are blessing one another. You’re blessing one another as well—and the support of my ministry so that I can preach the gospel to your neighbor.

This, brothers and sisters in Christ, should encourage us to come to worship. If you’ll come to worship, not for yourself—come to worship for the sake of your neighbor. If you’re so strong that you don’t need worship (but you aren’t), but even if you were, come so that you might bless others.

And along the same line, the Lord has blessed us all, each uniquely, individually. We’re all different. We all have different gifts, different abilities. And as we are getting ready for our annual meeting, in which there are elections, by the way, to our various boards and offices, I encourage you to think about how you can serve—how you can participate in this movement of renewal, which Christ kicked off in Galilee.

So there’s the who of it. Now, what’s the how of it? How does Christ bring about renewal? God does it. Christ does it in community. And he does it through law and gospel.

The law’s the diagnosis. It can be hard to hear. We need it, and Jesus does it.

What was Jesus’ message that we heard—the very first word? “Repent.” What does this entail? That we need to repent, and that entails that we are sinners. That can be hard to hear. It can be hard to hear that we have failed to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind. That can be hard to hear.

We have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves—just as it was hard for me to hear back when I was eight years old: “You really don’t see very well, Chris.” That’s the first step: the diagnosis. It comes through the law. When as we hear the Ten Commandments, the righteous expectations that God has for us, we understand that we have failed. We failed to live up to God’s righteous expectations. It’s through this that we are brought to repentance.

But Jesus doesn’t end there. He continues. He says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And Matthew reiterates this about that part of the message. In verse 23, Matthew says that Jesus went around Galilee proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, even as we hear that hard diagnosis, Jesus, the great physician, also gives us the cure in the gospel: the message that heaven is ours, not by our work, rather by his gracious work. I did not do the work to receive those glasses. They were given to me as a gift. My father earned the money for them through his job. My mother took me to the doctor. The doctor diagnosed me. Someone manufactured them for me and fitted them to my face. It was all 100% gift.

And so also spiritual renewal is ultimately the gift of God in Christ. Jesus comes to us as we understand that we are God’s holy and precious people—not by anything that we have done, but rather by what Christ has done for us: fulfilling our righteousness in our stead, taking the punishment for our sins that we have deserved for us upon himself from the cross. And understanding that through the word proclaimed, through the sacraments given to us, that grace, that mercy earned for us on the cross comes to us individually now.

And as we receive that grace and mercy, the Holy Spirit uses that gospel proclamation, that gospel message, to turn our hearts to God—so that where once we had hearts that were cold and dim, now they burn with heartfelt love for God and they reflect his love for the sake of the neighbor.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, my prayer for you this day is that if you desire spiritual renewal, that you not seek all the various dead ends that people put in front of you, but rather that you find it where God offers it: by means of his people, through the hard word of the law proclaimed to us, and above all, the message of the forgiveness of sins, the work of Christ.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Title: Holding It Together When Everything is Falling Apart | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson | Text: 2 Thessalonians 2:1–8, 13–17 | Liturgical Date: Pentecost 22, Proper 27 C | Calendar Date: November 9, 2025 | Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County serves Fish Creek and other areas in Northeast Wisconsin.

The following transcript was produced with the assistance of AI.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. This Veteran’s Day weekend, of course, we are very thankful for the service of our veterans and our armed forces, and above all, we thank the Lord for the freedom of religion that is secured by their work as Christians. That is the greatest freedom that we enjoy.

We praise and thank the Lord for this freedom of religion here at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church and the way that has been secured by armed forces. Now, I myself am also a veteran and I enjoyed my time in the service. Something I really enjoyed about my time in the service was singing cadences.

You know, those songs that soldiers or marines or airmen or sailors will sing when they’re marching or when they’re running. Those are cadences. Now, I’m not gonna sing any for you today. I like singing and that’s probably why I like cadences. But most of these are not pulpit appropriate. But let me tell you about a couple themes that, or one very big theme that came up.

In those cadences, and that’s all the terrible things that you could expect in the military. There was one person that you’d end up hearing about quite a bit, a person named Jodi. Oh, we couldn’t stand Jodi. You know who Jodi is? Jodi is the guy back home who steals your girl when you’re away training in the military.

Oh, we couldn’t stand Jodi. We’d sing about Jodi. We’d sing about other terrible things. We’d sing about the terrible food, the terrible living conditions, the terrible leadership we had. We’d even sing about dying and bullets whizzing by your head, and that was a deliberate thing, by the way. That was a deliberate part of the training.

You see what that was teaching you? Is that even when these things happen, even when Jodi is stealing your girl back home, even when the food is terrible and the living conditions are rough, and when bullets are whizzing by your head, and even if you face the threat of death, you keep on marching, you keep on working to fulfill your mission. And St.

Paul was indicating the same thing to the Thessalonians today in our epistle lesson, and that’s our theme for today: holding it together when everything is falling apart. And the falling apart that St. Paul is referring to in our lesson today is the ultimate and final falling apart. When the whole world seems to be falling apart and the Thessalonians, it appears, seemed to think that the return of Christ was right around the corner and they could see things falling apart around them.

And it seemed as if this was causing no small number of their congregation distress, and maybe some of them were falling away from the faith and losing heart and confidence. And Paul helps to build ’em up in the faith, but he does so through, in the first instance, something that might seem counterintuitive.

He tells the Thessalonians, well, expect the worst. Yeah, things might be bad and they are probably gonna get worse. He tells the Thessalonians, you might think to yourself, my goodness, why would he be telling the Thessalonians to expect the worst? Well, first of all, let’s take a look at how he tells the Thessalonians that they can expect the worst.

He says, look, before the coming of the Lord, let no one deceive you for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called God or object of worship, so he takes a seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

What is Paul talking about there? He’s talking about two themes that we see consistently in prophecies of the end times, whether these are prophecies that Christ himself uttered or what he himself is here discussing or what we might find in the Book of Revelation. And the two themes are this: apostasy and the arising of the antichrist.

Now apostasy, that’s what he calls rebellion here in a somewhat different term. What is apostasy or the rebellion that he is talking about here? Apostasy is when those who claim to be Christian turn their backs on the Christian faith and fall away from the faith and oppose the faith even. And Paul is saying, look.

You might think that it’s bad now, but guess what? The time is coming when huge numbers of those who you considered your Christian brothers and sisters will turn away from the faith.

And not only this, but many of them, he says, will be led astray by this figure. This man he calls a man of lawlessness, but in other places is called the antichrist. And who is the antichrist? It’s a religious figure who exalts himself and puts himself into the place of God and leads many astray. And so Paul is saying, look, many are gonna turn away and this false religious figure is going to rise up and he’s gonna turn the hearts of many and he’s going to speak lies and many people are going to be led astray by his lies.

Paul is saying it might be bad, but guess what? Things are going to get worse. Paul is telling the Thessalonians to expect the worst, and that’s good advice for us as well in whatever circumstance we might face. Now, we may not ourselves see the end of the world. We don’t know when Christ is gonna return.

It could be tomorrow. It could be in a thousand years. We don’t know. But here’s what we do know. Even though we may not see the end of the world, all of us will see the end of our days in this world. And what then? And when that day of death comes, how will we stand firm in the faith? And maybe that day is far off for us.

Maybe the end of our days in this world are 20, 30, 40, 80 years ahead of us. For some of the young ones, at times it may seem as if the world is still collapsing around us. Maybe our household is not a place of peace and harmony, but rather is a place of division and distrust. Maybe things are not going well for us at work and we’re worried that a layoff or maybe even a firing is around the corner for us.

And how are we going to supply the needs of our household? And well, we could go on and on and on about all the ways it might seem that everything is falling apart. Well, just taking stock of the fact that yes, indeed, in this world things can go from bad to worse. And taking stock of the fact of the bad things that could happen.

Helps us to reckon with them. Let me give you some real world examples about this. This is a bit of a trite example, but it’s an example nonetheless. Whenever I am working with a couple getting ready to get married, and we’re going through our preparations for the service, I always tell them, expect something to go visibly, noticeably wrong in the service.

Now, why do I tell them that? Well, when it happens, and it happens in probably two thirds of the services, when that thing happens, they, you know, they don’t get bent out of shape, but instead they can say, well, yep, pastor told me that was gonna happen. There it was. Let’s keep on trucking with our mission here to get married.

Right? Want me to tell you an example in my own life? I came up in ministry, the first years of my ministry in a time that, uh, maybe it’s not the great rebellion or the great apostasy that was talked about here, but it was a time of apostasy nonetheless. So those who might remember back, like in the eighties and before, churches were full, right?

I mean, on special services you had to put up chairs in the aisle and back in the narthex, and ushers had a hard job ’cause they actually had to find spots to put people because there were so many people filling the pews. In the early, mid nineties, churches started emptying out and a lot of churches lost their nerve and they went far off mission.

How far off mission? There was a great deal of pressure among Christian churches, even in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, I am sad to say, to give up the gospel itself. You know, there were prominent leaders in that era among people who call themselves Christians who said, you know, you probably shouldn’t even talk about the name of Jesus that much in your services.

Why? Because the name of Jesus is divisive.

People lost their mettle. When they should have known from St. Paul that yes, there will be times when people turn away and going back to the soldier example, if you are singing about bad leadership, well guess what? When you don’t agree with your sergeant, when the times get tough, you can stay on mission.

You knew that was coming. When the bullets start whizzing past your head, you sing about that and so you can keep on rolling. And it’s the same with us brothers and sisters in Christ. We know the scriptures are clear that before the return of Christ, things will go from bad to worse. Now, this is not a reason to lose heart, but rather instead, we keep the faith because we cling to the truth and the knowledge of what awaits us.

And that’s the second thing that St. Paul tells to the Thessalonians to encourage them to hold it together when everything is falling apart. He goes on to say this: But we are always to give thanks to God for you brothers, beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits to be saved through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.

To this He called you through our gospel so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter. St. Paul encourages the Thessalonians by telling them to cling to the truth of the gospel, which they had been taught.

Why? Because by trusting in this gospel, the gates of heaven, eternal life, the glory of God, were open to them. Paul says, look, we know that in this world, things will go from bad to worse, but your lot is not this world. Your lot is the world to come, and you are worthy to dwell in that kingdom. Not by our works, not by our words, not by anything in you, but rather by the gospel of Jesus Christ, you are worthy because through Christ and His death for you on the cross,

your sins have been forgiven, your righteousness fulfilled, and therefore, heaven is your heritage. And even as this would give encouragement to the Thessalonians, this gives encouragement to us as well. It gives us encouragement to keep the faith, even though it seems that the world is falling down all around us and encourages us to keep the faith when our life in this world comes to its close.

When this day in this world has its evening, we can know and be certain that the day of eternity is dawning for us and when things otherwise seem to be falling apart around us, this can strengthen us when things are going difficultly at work. We can have the knowledge that God has given us all things in our heavenly home, God has provided for us lavishly, He has provided for us lavishly.

He will not fail to provide for us in this world as well. All things equal beyond this, it can empower us in this world when things are going poorly to reflect the glory of God in this world. And this brings us to our final point. Paul tells the Thessalonians, expect the worst, cling to the truth of the gospel,

and finally, to do your best. It says, now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and listen to this, establish them in every good work and word. As we take stock of this world and the situations that we find ourselves in, we may be tempted to go the way of the world.

So we look at the world and we see that things are going from bad to worse, and we may be tempted to ourselves accommodate, and ourselves go from bad to worse. We may see immorality arising, and we may say, well, maybe I will act immorally, or perhaps things are not going well for us at work, and we think well.

Then I’m not going to do my best at my job. Or maybe our home is marked by conflict. And so we think we just have to give into the way things are and be a participant in this. But brothers and sisters in Christ, our lot is not this world. Our lot is the world to come. We have a share in the glory of Christ, and therefore we seek to reflect that glory in this world.

And so even as we have peace with God in heaven, through the work of Jesus Christ, we seek to be a peace agent here in this world, offering forgiveness and mercy in our relationships, seeking to make amends where we have done wrong. We seek to do this good work. And even when others give themselves over to immoral ways of life, and it seems like we are the odd man out for the way we live.

We seek to not be conformed to this world, but rather to the world to come. We seek to be that light on the hill. We seek to be the salt of the earth, knowing that yes, we’ll look different. But that’s because we do not belong to this world, but rather to the world to come. And when we lead our lives in such a way that it is obvious that we have a hope and a peace that this world does not give,

and people notice. We are glad to give testimony to the reason for the hope that lies within us. And we reflect God’s glory not only in our work, but also in our word as we testify to the gospel of Jesus Christ and our hope for heaven, which animates and motivates us in this world. We seek to do our best in work and word, not in order to attain eternal life.

Not in order to attain salvation, but rather because through Christ we have been given eternal life and through Christ we have salvation and brothers and sisters in Christ. Therefore, we are well to listen to the encouragement of St. Paul. Expect the worst, but cling to the truth and do our best in the knowledge of what Christ has earned for us.

And yes, singing a cadence here and there about this can certainly help us. At the beginning of the sermon, I talked about how in the military we sang these cadences talking about all this terrible stuff that can happen to us, and that was part of the design to give us courage in the face of these things.

Did you know that you did this today already? We are the church militant. We are God’s foot soldiers here on Earth. Open up once again to hymn 713. I put Grace, uh, on the spot at our last service at Rankin here, so she knows to expect this now. Poor Grace, she handled it well, but uh, on verse six, you notice what we sang about? Yet, even though I suffer the world’s unpleasantness and though the days grow rougher and bring me great distress, that day of bliss divine.

The day of Christ’s return, which knows no earthly measure, and Christ is my pleasure. Forever shall be mine. With these words, we took stock of the darkness of this world, and yet we clung to the truth of the gospel to empower us in this day. And so let us conclude by saying that stanza of this hymn once again.

Yet even though I suffer the world’s unpleasantness and though the days grow rougher and bring me great distress, that day of bliss divine, the day of Christ’s return, which knows no earthly measure, and Christ is my pleasure. Forever shall be mine.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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