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Fresh Insight into the Ten Commandments

Fresh Insight into the Ten Commandments

by | Mar 8, 2023 | Featured, Headlines | 1 comment

Someone once said insight isn’t primarily about getting new information but about seeing old information in fresh ways. This happened to me recently with the Ten Commandments. Our tendency is to view the Ten Commandments as merely a set of prohibitions.

But a closer examination of them reveals three things that help us gain fresh insight.

 

The Ten Commandments remind us who God is


First, these commandments remind us who God is. He is the rescuer! This is vital! Notice how the Ten Commandments begin in Exodus chapter 20.

And God spoke all these words, saying,  “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Exodus 20:1–2 ESV

If we miss God’s identity as the rescuer, we will completely misunderstand the purpose and heart of the Ten Commandments. God did not give Israel these commandments while they were in Egypt and say, “Now if you keep these perfectly, I will rescue you from Pharaoh and bring you into the promised land.” No! In his grace and mercy, God has compassion on the plight of his people and he rescues them. It is only after they have been rescued that he gives them the gift of the commandments as part of his covenant agreement with them.

Even more than revealing that God is a rescuer, these commandments reveal the kind of God it is who rescues like this. Sandra Richter writes in her outstanding book, The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament:

In its place in redemptive history, the law served to sketch the profile of God to a fallen race who no longer had any idea who God was or what he defined as “good.”…This god [sic] was different, and what he expected of his people was different as well. This is what the Mosaic law brought into focus and Israel’s world. It was a very good thing.

 

The Ten Commandments remind us who we are


But that’s not all. The Ten Commandments also remind us who we are. We are no longer slaves! We are the rescued! That is our new identity; we are rescued people. The commandments then define our identity and way of life as people who have been rescued by grace. These words to live by are not a means of salvation or rescue, but obedience to them can shape the identity of those people who have been rescued.

The moment we start viewing the Ten Commandments as primarily about making God happy with us, we have missed the heart of God. It is true that we express our love to God through our obedience to him. But we do this because we are already secure in his love for us.

In the original moment of their giving, the Ten Commandments served to make God’s people distinct in the world. They served as an identity marker. This fact is the foundation for the third insight.

The Ten Commandments remind us how to act

Not only do they remind us who God is (the rescuer) and who we are (the rescued), the Ten Commandments also reveal how to act like rescued people.

In their fascinating and hopeful book, The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation, Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks explain that God has created our brains in such a way that we are constantly asking Who are my people? and How should I act right now to be like them? Here is how they unpack this:

Through infancy and childhood, the brain is designed to develop individual identity through attachment to the parents and other caregivers. Around age 12, the brain undergoes a structural change that balances individual identity with group identity. From this point on, our group identity is a key player in the formation of character. We are formed by our strongest attachments and the shared identity of our community. Our brains are wired this way.… 

Our brains were designed to respond to group identity in order to help us act like “our people.” … every one-sixth of a second our right brain tries to answer the question, “Who am I? How do my people act now?” If my control center is working smoothly, my circumstances are integrated with my group identity. I spontaneously act with joy and peace. If my control center desynchronizes, I forget who I am and how to connect with those around me. I stop acting like myself. Even though I am a Christian, I stop acting like one. My brain has cramped.

When we fail to build the character of Christ into the identity of our community, we easily forget who we are. We become salt that’s not salty, and our character lacks the savory flavor of transformation.

So, then, far from being a way to earn favor with God, the Ten Commandments are God’s gracious gift that reveals who he is and how to act like his people. 

So how is it to act like God’s rescued people? What are we to do? What are we to be like?

Rescued people don’t have any other gods. They don’t look to anyone or anything else for their rescue, hope, and satisfaction. The rescued bear God’s name and identity with wholeness. Rescued people receive God’s gift of rest as a reminder that they have been rescued. They aren’t slaves anymore. They can stop and rest. Rescued people treat their parents with honor, respect, and kindness. Rescued people don’t murder people with their hands or in their hearts. Rescued people joyfully receive and practice God’s design for sexuality even when it can seem counterintuitive and is countercultural. Rescued people respect the fruits of other people’s labor and refuse to steal in any way. Rescued people tell the truth even when it hurts, and they refuse to use the truth in ways that harm others, such as gossip. Rescued people are content with what God has given them. They don’t look down on others who have less or envy those who have more. 

That is how it is for us to act as God’s people who are salt and light, pointing others to the rescue we have found.

E90 Is Over… So What’s Next?

E90 Is Over… So What’s Next?

by | May 4, 2022 | Featured, Headlines | 0 comments

“I have loved watching my heart soften toward the individuals that I have been praying for, and how often I’ve been thinking of them and noticing things about them. Much more intentional interactions!” – Linda

 

Spending 90 days praying for others to come to know Jesus was an amazing time together as a church. Over the course of these 13 weeks, close to 400 different people across all five campuses texted me about their experiences witnessing and praying for others. I was blessed to hear so many people, just like Linda, share how praying each day for the same people shifted their perspective toward them. It is surprising (though it really shouldn’t be) how many opportunities for greater connection with others arise when you intentionally and regularly pray for them. I was even more deeply encouraged when I heard about perseverance through the challenges people faced in their witnessing.

 

A handful of people let me know that one of their nine made a decision to follow Jesus during these 90 days. Beyond these, so many more had their nine make significant movement toward God. Some of their nine reached out with spiritual questions for the first time. Others reached out while facing significant life difficulties and asked for prayer. Some of their nine decided to visit church with them. Others saw their relationship with their nine deepen in new ways. There are so many more powerful stories that you can read about on theformed.life/e90

 

But if you’re like me, as soon as these 90 days finished, you wondered what’s next.

 

Was this just a cool 90 day challenge? One more project to mark ‘done’ and move on? No, from the beginning of our team’s planning process, we hoped e90 would be a catalyst for continued growth in prayer and personal evangelism for our church. Though this initiative is done, we continue to be a caring family of multiplying disciples, influencing our community and world for Jesus Christ. Here are four ways you can continue to grow in this even after e90.

 

Keep Praying

 

Just because the 90 days are over does not mean you need to stop praying intentionally and specifically for others to come to know Jesus! This season hopefully started a habit that remains with you well after it officially finishes. Consider how you can keep praying regularly for others. Think about how much movement you’ve seen in yourself and in them over 90 days. How much more could happen through the rest of the year? Maybe your list of nine grew to fifteen. Keep praying for your fifteen! Perhaps there are just two people from your nine God has highlighted to you these past few months. Keep praying for those two!

 

Pray Together

One of the best parts of e90 was that this was something we did together as a whole church. It reminded me that I’m not alone in witnessing to others. This doesn’t have to end either! What if your community group decided to keep praying for others specifically to come to faith as a part of your regular prayer time? What if you and just one other person committed to praying together for your lists? You could do a short phone call once a week and pray together. Or you could exchange names and pray for their list in addition to yours. This would encourage you to stay consistent in praying for others.

 

Learn Together

 

Another awesome part of e90 was how praying and witnessing motivated greater learning about the gospel and how to practically share it with others. This doesn’t have to end either! What if your community group, or just you and one friend picked a book about evangelism to read together? In addition to discussing what you’re learning from reading, you can also debrief how you’re practicing those things as well. If you don’t know where to start, two of my favorite books on evangelism are The Sacrament of Evangelism by Jerry Root, and Questioning Evangelism by Randy Newman.

 

Keep Inviting

 

Lastly, we can continue to grow in personal evangelism beyond e90 by continuing to invite others. Continue to invite them to hang out with you in a relaxed setting with other believers, to read one of the gospels from the Bible together, to come to church with you, to hear your story of what God has done in your life, to consider what following Jesus might look like. Not every invitation will be responded to with an enthusiastic “Yes!” but that does not mean we’ve failed. Even small invitations and planting seeds over time can be used by God to draw others to Him.

 

I encourage you to keep praying, keep learning, keep inviting, and do all these together with other believers. And I hope I continue hearing how God is working through it all to reach others with His love for His glory.

 

What Harvard Discovered About Kids and Church

What Harvard Discovered About Kids and Church

by | Mar 16, 2022 | Featured, Headlines | 2 comments

Getting kids to church can be a challenge — at any age. When they are infants it’s because it just takes so much work to pack them up. Kids at that age require so much gear! Later as toddlers, separation anxiety can make dropping them off at the Children’s Ministries area challenging to say the least. With elementary-age kids, sports and other activities can easily compete with and crowd out opportunities for kids to participate in church events. Then as pre-teens and teens, a normal and healthy burgeoning sense of autonomy can be challenging to parental suggestions or expectations for church involvement. 

So as a parent — at any stage — the question on any given weekend can understandably be Is it worth the effort and energy to help get my kids to church this week? 

Now I am a pastor so I know you’re probably not going to be shocked if I say, Yes! It’s worth it. (It feels a little like asking a personal trainer if working out is worth it. Of course they are going to say yes.) So I’m going to let someone else answer the question. 

Recently, Christianity Today magazine published a summary of findings about children’s health from researchers at Harvard’s (yes, that Harvard) T. H. Chan School of Public Health (i.e. not pastors). 

The researchers led by Tyler VanderWeele “…examined a large swath of data, collected over more than a decade, which tracked the development of 12,000 nurses’ children into their young adulthood. The longitudinal study surveyed social, physical, and mental health trends across the group—like substance abuse, anxiety/depression, community engagement, and sexual activity.”

The team was curious about how schooling choices and religious service attendance correlated to health outcomes. Here’s what they found:

In comparing key health indicators, the researchers found little difference between the long-term well-being of adolescents who attended public school and those who went to private school. (All of the kids who participated were between the ages of 9-14 when the study began.)  

So parents you can breathe a little sigh of relief there. But what about religious service attendance? How much does that matter? 

“What we found was that religious service attendance makes a bigger difference than religious schooling,” [VanderWeele] said. “Religious service attendance has beneficial effects across the different school types and has stronger effects than religious schooling.”

 

In other words, the kids who grew up attending church regularly rated far higher in overall well-being as young adults than those who went to a religious school but did not go to religious services during their formative years.

Did you catch that? If you take two kids — one who attends church once a week regularly and another who goes to a religious school five days a week but attends church only sporadically — it is the regular church attendee who fares better. The researchers concluded that “…religious service attendance in youth was clearly the more dominant force in shaping health and well-being, at least as this pertains to the data and experiences 20 years ago.” 

Here’s the bottom line from the Christianity Today summary: 

Furthermore, “regular service attendance helps shield children from the ‘big three’ dangers of adolescence: depression, substance abuse, and premature sexual activity,” VanderWeele writes in his latest article for Christianity Today. “People who attended church as children are also more likely to grow up happy, to be forgiving, to have a sense of mission and purpose, and to volunteer.”

 

“So regardless of school type,” VanderWeele says, “it’s beneficial to go to religious services, both as an adolescent and as an adult.”

These findings highlight the beauty and wisdom of God’s design for the local church. When parents dedicate their children at Christ Community, one of the questions they are asked is: Do you promise, before God and this congregation, that you will be faithful in worship, both in the home and in the church?

Those two spaces —the home and church — are vital to human health and flourishing. This is why Christ Community’s Children’s Ministries and Student Ministries staff and volunteers put so much effort into equipping parents. Parents play an outsized role in their children’s faith development. However, what the Harvard analysis shows  is clear. It isn’t enough to simply be faithful in worship at home if we want our children to truly flourish. It also requires being faithful in a worshiping community; a local church.

A Skeptic Goes to Church

A Skeptic Goes to Church

by | Jan 26, 2022 | Featured, Headlines | 2 comments

By Colman Murphey


I wasn’t raised in a church, but I decided to attend a year ago, and here I am a year later, still attending. I’ll try to sum up the reasons for that decision as concisely as I can, because I really could write a thousand-plus words about it.

Back in my college days, I listened to a lot of Jordan Peterson’s podcasts (I can maybe feel some eyes roll at this statement). He cracked the defenses I’d built up in my ignorant youth against all that is traditional. Suddenly, I became aware that the stories in the Bible contained powerful truths that pertain to the lives of all people, religious or secular. 

My memory isn’t perfect (probably due to the undergraduate alcohol culture) but I think it was after hearing many things that Jordan Peterson had to say that I started to notice a light emanating from the people of faith I encountered in random places. By light, I mean that their behavior resonated positively with me in some way. I did not literally see light around them.

I remember I felt particularly good when a stranger at the financial aid office said “God bless you” as thanks when I directed him to some other administrative office he was trying to find. I remember Anna and Nick, who were fellow counselors at the summer camp where I worked. They did not keep their faith a secret, and it seemed they were working with children for all the right reasons. I remember George, a history major studying at CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan whose coptic faith seemed to animate his passion for history. I felt these people were particularly admirable and I would remember them years later. 

During the pandemic, I moved to Kansas City and I had to start rebuilding my social life. I made a few friends through work, but I was also ready to try new things. Over the years, I had consumed a great deal of media produced by public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and Glenn Loury. I found myself not as comfortable sharing my thoughts or being myself around the people I usually associated with through school and work. I hate confrontation, and I can be very timid when it comes to sharing contrarian views, so politics and religion were off the table most of the time, even though I was deeply interested in those topics. 

At the time, I was doing an online church with some friends back home, and I remember how those sermons empowered me to face the challenges of my job when other activities didn’t. They also provided me with validation for certain beliefs. The thought crossed my mind that maybe going to church in person would be a good idea.

Weirdly enough, I found a link to the Gospel Coalition’s website through a math pedagogy page I was exploring for work. 

I typed in my zip code and Christ Community’s Downtown Campus was the closest church to pop up. I emailed one of the pastors, who suggested we get coffee. When we met, I was relieved by his understanding demeanor. It made me feel relaxed, and I felt comfortable talking openly around him. He invited me to church on Sunday. 

Upon arrival at my first Sunday service, I was warmly greeted by a stranger my age who introduced me to his friends who were similarly welcoming. This receptive environment and the relationships I began to form kept me coming back. I eventually joined the men’s group where I got to meet and converse with guys from all walks of life about topics of masculinity and faith. This environment of a unified group which also contained so many diverse opinions was such a welcome change from others I inhabited in university and at work. Many of the people I met at church were admirable like those other Christians I’d encountered, which didn’t feel like a coincidence. Church has felt like an answer for a deep yearning for community and meaning that I sometimes forgot I had. 

While I’ve found community at church, I wouldn’t consider myself Christian in the colloquial sense. I’m not yet willing to concede that the miracles in the New Testament are historical or more than symbolic. After watching many hours of debates about the resurrection of Jesus on YouTube, I came to the conclusion that if I were to someday believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead, my belief wouldn’t come from rational arguments. Maybe rational arguments would play some role, but the belief would mostly come from something more akin to a feeling powerful enough to fend off the disbelief. 

That isn’t to say that scholarship on the historicity of the gospels hasn’t altered my views. It was interesting to learn from the Wikipedia page on the historicity of the gospels that John’s baptism of Jesus, and Jesus’ crucifixion at Calvary, are held to be historical facts. John’s baptism is supported by something called the criterion of embarrassment which essentially just says early Christians wouldn’t have made up that story since it might have been used to argue that John was in authority above Jesus. The writings of first century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus make reference to Jesus’s crucifixion at Calvary and therefore serve as strong evidence for the historicity of that event. Now that I’ve seen how some aspects of the gospels stand on historically solid ground, I am more open to the possibility that the gospels as a whole may be historically true. 

I also have yet to satisfy many questions before I’m willing to take next steps with Christ. There are other spiritual practices outside of Christianity that seem to produce positive changes in people. How is Christianity reconciled with cognitive behavioral therapy, Buddhist meditations, or reports of positive changes in behavior from therapy involving psychedelic drugs? What about the positive effects that MDMA therapy has reportedly had on people experiencing PTSD? How is Christianity reconciled with the findings of research where cancer patients had their death anxiety alleviated by doses of psilocybin? I want to understand how Christianity can incorporate these findings, and I feel confident there’s a way. I still have a lot of exploring to do, and, in the meantime, I’ll keep attending church.

New Creation Now

New Creation Now

by | Oct 13, 2021 | Featured, Headlines | 0 comments

Desiring New Creation

We all long for things to be complete, to be whole (James 1:4). We long for our marriages to be whole. We ache for our family relationships to be safe, close, and deep and we want the same for our friendships. We feel the groaning of churches full of broken, still-in-process people, and the difficulty of life within a broken, still-in-process world. We long for wholeness in our communities, cities, and nations. Ultimately, all this longing points to a desire for new creation.

God desires the same thing. In fact, He desires it more deeply, more excruciatingly than we ever could, with a vision for newness that far exceeds anything we could dream up or hope to imagine. His heart’s desire is for the integral restoration–reconciliation–of the whole creation (Colossians 1:20). We, all people and creatures, exist in an interdependent community, which author Wendell Berry likes to call a “membership.” We are members one of another. We belong to one another and to the land.

Genesis 1-2 sets the stage for this membership of God’s creatures. In Genesis 1:24-31, humans and land animals are created on the same day. Humans are unique in bearing God’s image, but not so unique as to warrant our own creation day. We belong to the same land, knit together in mutual dependence on God and all that He had created thus far—sunlight, soil, water, vegetation. God takes up the role of a gardener, calling us into life from the earth like a seed sprouting into a fruiting tree: “Let the earth bring forth living creatures…” (Genesis 1:24). We are earthlings bonded to the earth and to one another—for good or for ill.

Humans are then called to be fruitful and rule, reproducing the goodness God had made (Genesis 1:27-31, 2:15). We were made to work for the flourishing of this community. But, tragically, we were-—we are—broken.

The curse earned by human rebellion against God’s goodness produces estrangement precisely in the interconnections we were created for. The labor of childbearing and the labor of cultivation are intermixed with pain and toil (Genesis 3:16-19). We and creation have never known a day without groaning since that rebellion (Romans 8:22-23). Infertility. miscarriages, droughts, hurricanes, war, and injustice; all of this brings us back to desire. Our groanings point to a deep desire for something more. We know, our very bodies—and we who are Christ’s Body—know, with every ache and disease and division, that we need to be changed, or perish.

Beholding New Creation

Graciously, this is exactly what God desires: to shape us into something new, to restore us to the wholeness we were made for. The prophet Isaiah looks forward, as through a fog, and voices God’s desire, “Behold, I am doing a new thing.” (Isaiah 43:19). In the last book of the Bible, John records the same desire as he hears Jesus proclaim in that vision of the new creation, “Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5).

Then, the angel shows John the vision: a city called the New Jerusalem, with twelve foundations and twelve open gates symbolizing God’s story of redemption revealed through Israel and the apostles. (Revelation 21:9-21).

Jesus, the Lamb, illuminates the city from its center, and all the peoples of the earth bring their glory into it—the beauty of each and every redeemed human culture (Revelation 21:22-26). Other creatures live there, too, worshiping God with His restored people (Revelation 5:13, 7:9-12). This is the new creation reality: every culture and every creature living together in the light of the Lamb. This is the integral wholeness for which we were created. Even in the present darkness, we behold the light of new creation shining back at us.

But can we be new now? Is this vision for us who groan in the midst of “this present evil age” (Galatians 1:4)? In our time, now, can our desires come to fruition, can they bear fruit and birth a new kind of life? Or are our desires to be cursed with toil and pain, barren and dormant until Jesus comes again?

Embodying New Creation

God would not have revealed our eternal tomorrow if He did not mean for it to change our today. To change us. Today.

When we see God, we’re changed (2 Corinthians 3:18, 1 John 3:2-3). Paul’s only use of the phrase “new creation” is when he is talking about the present people of God. Paul declares that the thing that matters most as a result of Christ’s work on the cross is this: new creation-that is, the newly created people of God from all possible strata of society (Galatians 3:28, 6:15). Then, in the context of describing the reconciled community, Paul says that anyone who is in Christ is “a new creation; the old has passed away; behold the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

There is a sense, then, in which the great change of new creation has already come. Not fully—Paul begins 2 Corinthians 5 describing his longing to put off the earthly body and dwell in the heavenly one—but somehow, truly and substantially, the new creation reality is already embodied by God’s people. This is the hope we live in, today, even as we wait for its consummation (Romans 8:24). This is the at-hand Kingdom of which we are ambassadors (Mark 1:15, 2 Corinthians 5:20). This is the truth to which we are called to bear witness (John 15:26-27).

The new creation reality exists in Christ Himself, and in any and all who have been reconciled to Him, to one another, and to the earth (Ephesians 1:10, 2:16).

He taught us to pray for His kingdom to come… later? Somewhere else? No. Here. Now. “On earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10).

If He wants us to pray for it, He wants us to labor for it.

Like a master sculptor bringing stone to life, He is already making us new (Ephesians 2:10). If you follow Jesus, you are His apprentice. Join with Him in the work of new creation. Let us labor for all the earth’s peoples to belong, by the blood of His cross, as we worship the Lamb together in one voice with all the earth’s creatures (Colossians 1:20, Revelation 5:13, 7:10).

Jesus has called us into the world, into all its groanings, so that we, the membership of all God’s creatures, might experience a foretaste of the fulfillment of our deepest desires to become something beautifully new.

 

Demystifying the Holy Spirit

Demystifying the Holy Spirit

by | Sep 29, 2021 | Featured, Headlines | 1 comment

In a Bible study discussing our sermon series on the Holy Spirit, the facilitator asked the group if anyone had ever experienced the Spirit. After a long silence, a few people confessed that they never had any “crazy” encounters with the Spirit. This was met with murmurs of agreement from the rest of the group. This struck me because many of these people faithfully follow Jesus and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. As a result, they are experiencing Him daily, whether they can identify it or not.

I don’t blame them for having nothing to say, because so often in Christian culture we assume encountering the Spirit must look a certain way. We intuitively think it must be dramatic and extreme, like tongues of fire, miraculous healings, or the audible voice of God.

Many followers of Jesus, myself included, know that the Holy Spirit lives within us and yet struggle to concretely identify what that looks like and miss out on the formation that occurs when we cooperate with Him. There is a need for Christians to demystify the Holy Spirit.

You may recoil at that statement. Shouldn’t we recognize God as mysterious and admit we will never fully understand him? Yes, of course. And yet, ironically, the impulse to view the Spirit’s work as ethereal and mysterious leads us to put His work in a box, missing out on what He is doing in our lives on a regular basis. We become like Elijah on Mount Horeb, expecting God’s presence to be something sensational, like a great wind, earthquake, or fire, when it is really a gentle voice (1 Kings 19:11-13). This is what I appreciated about our sermon series. It is important to expand our categories for what the Spirit does in our lives, and give concrete examples of them, so we can recognize what He is doing in us.

Whenever I find myself stuck in an implicit view of God, I find it helpful to listen to believers from a different time and place to see what my cultural blinders are concealing from me. The great reformer Martin Luther, though best known for expounding justification by grace alone, had a robust theology of the Spirit with applications that are surprisingly concrete for contemporary Christians.

Two helpful contributions Luther makes are designating the Spirit a special role in sanctification (the process of becoming holy) and illuminating how this primarily happens through Christian community.

First, Luther’s shorthand for explaining the Holy Spirit is “the spirit who makes us holy.” The Spirit takes the objective work of salvation that Christ accomplished for us on the cross in dying for our sins, and makes it a subjectively real experience for us. He does this by killing the flesh over time, that is, our corrupt human nature, and instilling a proper love for God in us. Luther says the flesh wants what benefits itself and avoids what is harmful. It enjoys and uses other people, things, and even God for its own benefit and the Spirit wants God for His own sake, which is the proper response. Luther adds that the Spirit works to reassure us we belong to God because of His grace, not our performance, so that we are not striving toward holiness out of fear. Any desire you have to do what is right, live the way God designed you to live, work for the best of another person without thinking about what you will get in return, is evidence of the Spirit working inside you, since these are not natural responses of human nature.

Second, for Luther this sanctification of the Spirit occurs in a caring community; the local church. So often contemporary Christians instinctually view their sanctification as a primarily personal journey. However, God does not make us holy in isolation but rather uses other Spirit-filled believers to produce Christlikeness in us. As someone who grew up in church, I have often heard Christian leaders quip, “it’s the Spirit’s job to convict, not mine,” while referencing John 16:8. However, Luther sees this verse referring not only to an internal guilt conscience, but also to Christians who, by the power of the Spirit, help other believers recognize where they might be going astray. Of course this must be done in a posture of grace and gentleness, with love and tact.

The internal holiness and the virtues the Spirit produces in us have a multiplying effect on other believers. For Luther, the fruits of the Spirit are not only vertical, but also horizontal by spurring other believers to do the same. Just like fruit contains seeds to produce other fruit-bearing trees, Luther views the Spirit’s work of renewing one believer as a tool used to develop holiness in another. Encountering Spirit-inspired gentleness in another person can lead us to grow similarly.

Luther picks up on how, in the structure of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the doctrines of the Church directly follow the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, meaning they are closely related. For Luther, the Church is the place and means of a believer’s sanctification because of the activity of the Spirit. He bemoans the enthusiasts of his day who became fanatical about the Spirit but left the church. They cut themselves off from the “bridge, the path, the way, the ladder” and all the other normal means He uses to affect the inner renewal of a believer. In looking for the spectacular and transcendent, many ignore the routine activities of the Spirit. Over time, these seemingly mundane practices of worship, preaching, prayers, communion, and Christian fellowship become supernatural catalysts for growth in holiness through the Spirit’s working.

If you are a follower of Jesus, you have this Spirit living inside you. Each day, whether you explicitly identify it or not, you are experiencing His work of making you holy. Each time you desire to act out of genuine love for another, this is God’s Spirit working inside you. Every time a still, small voice reminds you of God’s love for you when you might feel like a failure, you are hearing the Spirit’s voice. Whenever another believer encourages you to display Jesus better, you are experiencing the Spirit indwelling them. Every Sunday when you are comforted and challenged by God’s Word preached, it is the Spirit enabling that to occur for you. Even as we leave this sermon series behind, let us look for the concrete ways the Spirit shows up in our lives and cooperate with how He is working.

 

Additional Reading:

Luther, Martin. A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians : Based on Lectures Delivered at the University of Wittenberg, in the Year 1531. Translated by Philip Watson. Westwood, NJ: F.H. Revell, 1953.

Lectures on Romans. Translated by Wilhelm Pauck. The Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961.

“On the Councils and the Church.” In The Annotated Luther: Church and Sacrament, edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand, Kirsi I. Stjerna, and Timothy J. Wengert, translated by Paul W. Robinson, Vol. 3. Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 2015.

“The Larger Catechism of Dr. Martin Luther.” In The Annotated Luther: Word and Faith, edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand, Kirsi I. Stjerna, and Timothy J. Wengert, Vol. 2. Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 2015.

Malcolm, Lois. “The Holy Spirit.” In Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther, edited by Derek R. Nelson and Paul R. Hinlicky, Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.