Acts 1:8 - But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

When Peter Pan tells the Darling children they can go with him to Neverland, they ask how to get there. He tells them that they'll fly. When they try and fail, Peter is puzzled. "This won't do," Peter murmurs. "What's the matter with you? All it takes is faith and trust." I could almost hear the frustrated preacher behind those words. "What's the matter with you, congregation of mine? Why aren't you doing good Christian thing A or good Christian thing B? All it takes is faith and trust!"

Most pastors, and for that matter, Christians in general, have too high a view of Human ability. We are left wondering what's wrong when we try to do something and fail. We wonder why our minds drift to the same selfish or impure places day after day, despite our efforts to control them. We wonder why our relationships seem to falter when we've tried so hard to make them work.

But Peter Pan is forgetting something: "Oh! And something I forgot ... dust! A little bit of pixie dust." And so, with the magic ingredient introduced into the situation, flight is possible. Sure it helps to set your mind on "the happiest things," but the pixie dust is the key. It's the fuel that makes the flight go.

In the same way, it is the Holy Spirit that makes our Christian lives possible. But unlike Tinkerbells's dust, we can't grab the Holy Spirit and shake a little out. No, it's better than that. The Holy Spirit is promised as power to us, but He is not fairy dust or a magic potion. He is God! He is the third person of the all-powerful triune God indwelling us, instructing us, and empowering us.

It's the Spirit that allows for flight, not the quality of our "faith and trust." Someone once said that as our opinion of human ability goes up, our reliance on Jesus goes down. Let's always remember that. A high view of ourselves gives us a low view of Jesus. But it's a low view of ourselves and what we can actually do that promotes a high view of Jesus and what He has done for us. Only the eye-opening power of the Holy Spirit can grant us this kind of gospel sanity and cause us to fly into the freedom that Jesus paid so dearly to secure for wingless people like us.
Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,
 

2 Peter 3:18 - But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.

Are you doing well as a Christian? It seems that often Christians are less concerned with the fact that they're a Christian than their proficiency at being one. Because of this, we envision our Christian lives as being like a ladder we have to climb. Sure, we think, Christ's great sacrifice for us was enough to get us on the ladder, but now it's up to us to move higher. We imagine the pope and Mother Teresa as being very high on the ladder and those people who don't read their Bibles every day as being very low. This concept makes sense to us, and it allows us to do one of our favorite things in the world - compare ourselves and our progress to that of others.

So what, then, are we to make of the Great Christian Tumble? You know what I mean: when someone considered "a great Christian" is revealed to have been engaging in reprehensible behavior. It's confusing. We don't know how to classify the event. Was this person not as high on the ladder as had imagined? Perhaps they'd never really gotten on the ladder at all. The truth, though, is more profound: there is no ladder.

Each of us, as Martin Luther said, at the same time justified and sinner, or in other words, we are both right before God and wrong in ourselves. We live our lives in the glory of the Holy Spirit even while we are getting in accidents, getting called names, and getting abandoned by our loved ones. Even while we are still dealing with sin. Our desperate need never goes away.

In ourselves, we are left in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the Christian ladder. In Christ, we are carried directly to heaven, no work necessary on our part.

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Mark 9:7

Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets, are shown in the story of the transfiguration to be less than equal to Jesus. The law and the prophets are overshadowed by the gospel. All three of them are standing there and the cloud comes, and the voice says, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" (Mark 9:7). And in case the disciples were confused about which man they were supposed to be listening to, when they looked around the other two were gone. Only Jesus remained. Peter's mistake is that he fails to distinguish the law from the gospel. He thinks that Moses and Jesus will make good equal teammates.

If we fail to understand how the law and the gospel work together, our struggle to obey the law will make us forget about the gospel completely. If you start to worry about how well you're doing in God's eyes, you will forget that He saved you as a sinner. Remember what Paul said: "Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death" (Romans 7:9-10). The commandment that we think will bring us life, like "be a good Christian," will actually bring us death. The way in which it brings us death is by making us forget the truth, blinding us to the good news that we once knew, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Peter, by suggesting that Moses and Elijah be on equal footing with Jesus, is actually eclipsing the radical goodness of the good news that Jesus embodies. Both God's law and God's gospel are good. But only one of them is eternal. There will not be any sin to restrain in heaven, giving the law an expiration date. But the gospel's life is eternal, which is why Paul says in 2 Corinthians that the gospel's glory is far greater than the law's.

The cloud comes and the voice from heaven singles out Jesus. The gospel always has the last word. For the pardoned children of God, forgiveness always trumps condemnation.

Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Romans 2:4 - Or do you show contempt for the riches of his 

kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?

The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn't make people work harder, it makes them give up. So we make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to licentiousness. In fact, the law tends to stir up lawlessness. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law.

To be sure, the Spirit does use the whole Word in our sanctification - the law as well as the gospel. But the law and the gospel do very different things. The law reveals sin but is powerless to remove sin. It shows us what godliness is, but it cannot make us godly. As Martin Luther said, "Sin is not concealed by lawful living, for no person is able to live up to the Law. Nothing can take away sin except the grace of God."

The law apart from the gospel can only crush; it can't cure. Scottish churchman Ralph Erskine wrote:

     The law could promise life to me,

          If my obedience perfect be;

      But grace does promise life upon

          My Lord's obedience alone.

       The law says, Do, and life you'll win;

           But grace says, Live, for all is done;

       The former cannot ease my grief,

          The latter yields me full relief.

So the law serves us by showing us how to love God and others. But we fail to do this every day. And when we fail, it is the gospel that brings comfort by reminding us that God's infinite approval of us doesn't depend on our keeping the law but on Christ's keeping of the law for us. And guess what? This makes us want to obey Him more, not less!

Indeed, it is the kindness of the Lord that leads to repentance.

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Romans 10:13 - for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

The greatest single question of the religious life is, "If I call out to God, will anyone answer?" In the gangster-slash-vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn, Harvey Keitel plays a pastor who has lost his faith. At one point, his daughter says to him, "Daddy, don't you believe in God anymore?" and part of his answer is, "Every person who chooses the service of God as his life's work has something in common. I don't care if you're a preacher, a priest, a nun, a rabbi, or a Buddist monk. Many, many times during your life you will look at your reflection in a mirror and ask yourself: Am I a fool?"

I submit to you that this is shared by the people in those congregations as well as those in front of them. Am I a fool> Am I calling out into the void? If I call out for help, will anyone answer me?

When Paul wrote that "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved," he did it in the context of law and gospel: he was breaking down distinctions. When he said that there's no difference between Jews and Greeks, he was saying something incredible: there's no difference between law keepers and law breakers!

The prophets of the Old Testament railed at Israel because they weren't living up to the law the Lord had laid our for them: "You're just like the Gentiles," they'd say. "There's no distinction between you! You're not separating yourselves." So even when there was supposed to be a distinction between them, there was no distinction between Jews and the Greeks. The Jews were just as sinful as the Greeks! Now, because of Christ, there is again no distinction. All are made righteous. Their shared sin becomes shared righteousness, the precious gift of the crucified Jesus. It is because of this gift, this gift of a holy and righteous law-keeping life, that when we cry out into the void, "Lord, Lord, help me!" the Lord is generous to all who call on Him and that "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

1 John 4:18-19 - There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us.

Have you ever done something that won almost unanimous praise? Did the experience teach you what it taught me? That almost unanimous isn't worth much? As a pastor, I get a lot of feedback on things our church does, whether it's my sermons or the music or some other choices I've made. I've been blessed to have had many people compliment me on the way things are done at our church. Occasionally, though, someone will have a criticism. And you know what? The criticisms are far more memorable than the compliments.

I think this is probably true for most people. It seems like 99 compliments can be swallowed up by one bit of criticism. It just goes to show you: for love to be love, it must be perfect. To feel loved, I can brook no criticism at all. In other words, it is only perfect love that can cast out fear.

So why are we still afraid of God?

To borrow the language of John's first letter, we fear because we "have not been perfected in love." Our love is still addicted to the reactions we get. I love the positive comments, but that love dies under the poison of criticism. In other words, our love is reactive. We love the things that appear to be loving us, and hate the things that we think hate us. We assume that because this is the way we relate to the rest of the world - and the way the world relates to us - this must be the way of God, too.

But God loves differently than we do; we love, in fact, "because he first loved us." That God loved us first means He loved us before our performance. When someone walks up to me, I reserve my love until I hear what they have to say. God lavishes His love on us whether we're good or bad, to Him or to one another. We are only capable of love because of this radical, one-way love of God, a love that doesn't depend on anything I might give or withhold.

Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Acts 13:39 Through him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses.

Andrea Bargnani, the number-one overall pick in the 2006 NBA Draft, was having a terrible season. So terrible, in fact, that he was being loudly booed by his home fans. Bargnani's case is certainly not unique. Underperforming players are often booed at home. But we have to ask: Does this strategy work?

In theory, home fans boo their own players to shame them into working harder. Some, of course, might be expressing simple hatred, but most fans would prefer that their players actually play well. So let's take a quick look at Bargnani's stats: he's shooting 47% from the field on the road and an absolutely horrific 30% at home.

The Apostle Paul said that "the law was brought in so that the trespass might increase" (Romans 5:20). This is evidenced by Andrea Bargbnani's stats at home. When subjected to the law (the chorus of boos that tells him he's not good enough), Barnani's performance is significantly worse. The law comes in, the respass increases. The more Bargnani is reminded of how terrible he is, the more terrible he becomes. The same is true of every one of us.

Christians have an outlet that Bargnani lacks: when we hit bottom, we have a Savior there to pick up the pieces, a Christ who substitutes His perfection for our failure. The more shots Bargnani misses, the more likely he is to be out of a job. The more we fail, the more likely we are to call for that Savior.

So what are we left with? Does the strategy work? Well, yes and no. The application of the law only works to weaken. Those who are oppressed perform significantly worse than they do otherwise. The law, remember, was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But for the Christian? The law works, absolutely. Paul again: "Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God's sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin" (Romans 3:20).

Thank God Christ has come for failures.

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,