Reflections on 'My Song is Love Unknown'- Stanza 3

We do not honor our love in Lent. Our love is fickle, it is wavering, it is unsteady. Our love is weak, even when turned toward those closest to us, but especially when it is turned toward God. Holy Week isn’t about the love of the people for Christ, because their love failed, and the crowds turned against our Lord. This dramatic shift, this failure of human love, is described in the third stanza of our hymn this week, “My Song is Love Unknown.”
“Sometimes they strew His way and His sweet praises sing; resounding all the day hosannas to their King. Then ‘Crucify!’ is all their breath, and for His death they thirst and cry.” Jerusalem rejoiced to receive her King on Palm Sunday. Jesus even said, “I tell you, if these [people] were silent, the very stones would cry out.” The cries of ‘Hosanna’ rose up to Jesus, cloaks and palm branches covered His path. The people showed Jesus glory, honor, and love. But by Friday that all had changed. The cry was no longer ‘Hosanna!’ but ‘Crucify!’ Man’s love had faltered and failed. The crowds who once had adored Him now cried out for His death. 

We do not honor our love in Lent, for we too are like the crowds of Jerusalem. Our love for Christ falters and fails. On some days we cry out ‘Hosanna!’ praising our King for all that He has done for us. On others, we are like the mob on Good Friday, rejecting Christ through our words and actions. Our love is completely corrupted by the sin that fills all of our members. Lent isn’t about our love for Christ, but His love for us. Even you and I, who have love that is so weak, so faltering, so unsteady, are shown love by Jesus, the love that led Him to the cross. His love is shown, as the first stanza declared, to the “loveless that they might lovely be.”

Reflections on 'My Song is Love Unknown'- Stanza 2

On Christmas we see God’s love. The Father shows His love in that He sends His Son into this world; the Son shows His love in that He willingly lays aside the glory that is rightfully His and is born in humility. Saint Paul ponders this mystery in the second chapter of Philippians: “[He] made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” The love of the Son points in two directions: Jesus shows love toward God in that He is born, lives, and dies in obedience to the Father’s will for our salvation; Jesus shows love toward you in that He is born, lives, and dies for your great need of deliverance from sin and death. He had all glory, but He laid it aside in love for His Father and for you.

“He came from His blest throne salvation to bestow; but men made strange, and none the longed-for Christ would know. But, oh, my friend, my friend indeed, who at my need His life did spend!” Because Jesus came in humility, He was rejected. He was long expected, but when He came, He didn’t fulfill expectations, and so men refused to know Him for who He was. He took the form of a servant, Isaiah’s suffering servant. Isaiah chapter fifty-three runs throughout this hymn. The prophet writes: “He had not form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men.” This Jesus, true God from eternity, is born in the likeness of man, born in humility, despised and rejected by all for you. Your need is salvation from sin and from death. It is a desperate need, for you can do nothing to deliver yourself. And as the hymn declares, at your need “His life did spend!"

Reflections on 'My Song is Love Unknown'- Stanza 1

God is love.  That fundamental character of our Creator is declared emphatically by Saint John in his first letter.  Love isn’t just a characteristic of God or something He does, it is His identity.  God is love.  In this world we have poor analogies to understand God’s love.  We love baseball, we love ice cream, we love television.  Our love for our family- our spouse, our parents, our children and grandchildren- comes close, but it remains imperfect, tainted by sin.  To understand how God is love, we cannot rely on human illustrations, but must turn somewhere else.  We must turn to the cross.

“My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love to me, love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.  Oh, who am I that for my sake my Lord should take frail flesh and die?” 

God is love, love unknown.  His love isn’t unknown in the sense that we cannot see it or hear of it.  It isn’t love that is hidden or secret.  His love is unknown because we cannot comprehend it, we cannot understand it.  We cannot imagine why Christ would die for someone like us.  We know our sin, our guilt, our shame better than anyone else.  We know that there is little in us that deserves salvation.  But God is love.  Saint Paul writes in Romans chapter five: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  This statement is the essence of what the Gospel is: love shown to the loveless that they might lovely be.  Our hymn immerses us in that mystery.  “Oh, who am I that for my sake my Lord should take frail flesh and die?”  This hymn isn’t about our love, which fails and falters, but about the Savior’s love for us, shown to us on Calvary’s cross.  This love is shown despite our sin, and it is shown to destroy our sin, so that we might be made lovely in the Father’s eyes forever.

Lent 3 of Series B (John 2:13-22)

“Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this morning comes from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the second chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John. Dear friends in Christ: the third commandment is God’s gift to His people. Listen again to the words of our Old Testament lesson: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God... For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” God blessed the Sabbath day and gave it as a gift to His creation. Man was given the gift of rest, but not simply rest for the sake of rest. The Sabbath rest is the gift of worship. We are privileged to interact with our God, the One who created us and acted to redeem us. God bends over backward to give us His gifts. He condescends to come to us today in humble words, water, bread and wine. For God’s Old Testament people, He established an elaborate system of sacrifices, all designed to convey His grace to His people. He dwelt among them in the tabernacle, and later in the temple; He came to His people so that they could receive His great gifts and respond in prayer and praise. The Sabbath is truly a gift; the gift of a compassionate God to His beloved creation.
But humanity rejected this gift; we rebelled against the loving compassion of our Creator and Redeemer. In our text for today, Jesus goes to the temple, the place where God promised to meet with His people in mercy, the place that the Father had so graciously provided for His people to worship Him. On that day the Scripture is fulfilled, the word spoken by the prophet Malachi: “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple.” God in the flesh suddenly came into His temple, and He expected to find His people reveling in the gift of the Sabbath, receiving His great gifts and giving Him thanks and praise. Instead, He found quite the opposite. “In the temple He found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, with the money-changers sitting there.” The temple was supposed to be a place of prayer, a place of sacrifice, the place where God had promised to come to His people, but now it was a shopping mall. The religious leadership would rather reap the profits of turning the temple mount into a marketplace than encourage true piety and respect for the worship of God. The Sabbath was being desecrated in the courtyards that surrounded God’s most Holy Place; that is what the Lord found when He suddenly came into the temple.

What would Jesus find if He walked into our sanctuaries? What would He find if He walked into our lives? Would He find that we too have despised the Sabbath like His people of old? Martin Luther gives us the Christian application of the Sabbath command in his Small Catechism: “We should fear and love God so that we do not despise preaching and His Word, but hold it sacred and gladly hear and learn it.” The Sabbath isn’t about a specific day, it isn’t even about not doing work; it’s about the proper worship of God. This worship has two parts: we receive God’s gifts, and then we give Him thanks and praise. Do we hold God’s Word sacred, and gladly hear and learn it, or do we despise preaching and His Word by placing other things above it? Do we hear God’s Word and receive His great gifts with thanksgiving, or grudgingly, looking for an excuse to avoid them? What takes priority in your life over prayer, devotion, and worship of God? Is it work, school, sports, recreation, your social life? So many other activities are encroaching on the time set aside for worship, and Christians have often allowed the sports tournaments and social gatherings to replace weekly worship. But I’m not just talking about Sunday mornings. The Sabbath is not restricted to one day of the week. Luther calls on us to “gladly hear and learn” the Word throughout our lives. Do we spend time in prayer, studying and meditating on God’s Word during the week? Do we take advantage of opportunities to receive God’s Word in bible class or special services? Do our Lord’s gifts receive priority, or does everything else crowd them out?

Jesus responds to violations of the Third Commandment in a way that we wouldn’t have expected. “Making a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And He poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, ‘Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.’” The only thing to do when the things of this world encroach on the Sabbath is to drive them away. In holy anger, Jesus cast the merchants out, He drove away their animals, overturned their tables. They felt the bite of his whip, they cowered before the righteous wrath of almighty God. When the Sabbath is desecrated, it must be made clean again. This isn’t easy, it isn’t without pain; it is the work of God’s holy Law. Sin must be driven out. Our sins don’t want to leave, the Old Adam’s hold on us is tight; Satan knows that if He can keep us away from God’s gifts, we are well on our way to joining Him forever. The whip is necessary, no matter how painful it is. You and I must feel the bite of the Law, we need to have our sins attacked and driven away; the Old Adam must be put to death. This is the task of the Law: to expose sin and drive it away in repentance.

The disciples watched Jesus’s whip cleanse the temple, they observed the operation of the Law upon sin, and they remembered a phrase from Psalm 69: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” Jesus had zeal for His Father’s house that day; He wouldn’t let it be desecrated before His very eyes. His zeal, His passion led Him to use the whip of the Law to drive out sin, to declare God’s just judgment upon it. But if that was all that Jesus had come to do, we would still be lost. The Law exposes sin, it cannot destroy it or deliver you from its penalty. Jesus came to bring sin to light and destroy it. His zeal led to the proclamation of the Law, but more importantly, it led to the accomplishment of the Gospel. His zeal for His Father’s house would lead Him into conflict with the religious leaders, conflict that would begin here at the start of His ministry. This zeal would literally consume Him, it would lead to His death. He suffers because He loves His Father; He dies as a criminal because He is passionate for the holiness of the temple. “Zeal for your house will consume me.” His crime? Love for God and His house. Jesus has zeal for the things of His Father. That is why He suffers, that is why He dies.

But while Jesus suffers innocently, He doesn’t suffer unwillingly. His zeal for His Father’s will consumes Him. The Father wills that Jesus offer up His life as the sacrifice for your sin, in answer to the Law’s sting. Jesus has zeal for the things of His Father, and so He goes boldly to the cross. His Father’s will is His desire, and that desire, that passion, that zeal, will consume Him. He will be devoured upon that cross, consumed by the righteous wrath of God over our sin. He will feel the bite of the whip, the Law’s just judgment. Jesus endures that suffering and humiliation not only because of His zeal for His Father’s house and His Father’s will; He endures the cross because of His zeal for you. His zeal for your salvation will consume Him. He will not let you die in your sin, He will not see you dwell in hell forever, and so He gave up His life in your place. His love for you was so strong that He was willing to endure hell itself for you.

This zeal leads Jesus to challenge His opponents in the temple that day. “So the Jews said to Him, ‘What sign do you show us for doing these things?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’” He commands His enemies to put Him to death, with the promise that He will rise again on the third day. They are tearing down the temple, the location of God’s gracious presence, by turning it into a marketplace; now Jesus dares them to tear down the true temple, the new location of God’s gracious presence: His very own body. He will show His authority as the Son of God and His identity as the new temple by raising up His body on the third day, never to be torn down again. For Jesus has come to fulfill the temple and all of its sacrifices with His own death and resurrection. In our text, He drives out all the animals for sacrifice, and the temple courtyard is left empty- except for Jesus Himself, Jesus only. Jesus alone is the sacrifice for our sin, the answer to the Law’s bite. That building He so vehemently defended will become obsolete on Good Friday with His own sacrifice. The dwelling place of God with men is now Jesus Himself, the sacrifice for our sin.

Having accomplished salvation, Christ’s zeal is turned toward distributing the fruits of salvation. His passion and desire is to bring forgiveness to you and to me. Yes, we need to feel the bite of the whip, the sting of the Law. Our sin needs to be attacked and driven away, but then we need the healing balm of the Gospel. The Third Commandment now describes the gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation. The Sabbath is now the opportunity to receive Christ Himself as He comes to us in Word, water, Body and Blood. We take time out of our lives and gather in this place because here Christ fulfills our greatest needs, the only needs that truly matter for eternity. Here Jesus gives us rest, not just the opportunity to take a break from this world, but eternal rest. Through the shed blood of Christ, we have eternal rest, the Sabbath rest of heaven. There all the distractions and other priorities will be no more; there will simply be Christ, the temple, the location of God’s presence with His people forever. We read in Revelation chapter twenty-one, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God.” In the Name of the new temple, the one whose zeal for His Father and for us led Him to the cross, Amen.

Star Wars and the simul

It is easy to identify good and evil in Star Wars: A New Hope. On one side is the good guys: the idealistic farm boy Luke Skywalker, the beautiful princess Leia. They are appropriately dressed in white, providing a sharp contrast with their antagonist Darth Vader. He is clad in black, more machine than man, in the words of Ben Kanobi, “twisted and evil.” But at the end, Luke triumphs, Vader is defeated, and Leia is there in beautiful white to hand out the medals. It’s easy to see the contrast between good and evil as the Star Wars saga begins.

But the picture quickly becomes complicated. Good doesn’t triumph in The Empire Strikes Back. It is battered and bloodied. Against the white background of Hoth, Vader smashes the Rebellion’s hidden base; he relentlessly pursues our heroes to the Cloud City. C-3PO is blown to pieces, Han is frozen in carbonite and handed over to the bounty hunter, Luke is drawn into a trap. There good and evil square off—and evil wins. Luke loses his hand in the stuggle; good is vanquished.
Luke loses more than his hand; he loses the illusion that he is somehow disconnected from evil. Vader is his father, and so like Frodo Baggins carrying the ring, or Harry Potter’s link to Voldemort, Luke has an intimate connection with evil. Good and evil was once black and white; simple and easy. But now good and evil both co-exist within him. Luke looks at himself differently, especially when he is fitted with a mechanical hand to match his father. He cannot imagine that he is clean and pure; the white garments he once wore were an illusion, now, in The Return of the Jedi, he is dressed in black. Even Leia is tainted; she too is a child of Vader. But this knowledge causes him to see his father differently, too. Luke claims that there is good left in Vader, that there is a conflict within him. He knows this because he has the same conflict within himself.

Saint Paul knew all about this conflict. He wrote in chapter seven of Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” (Romans 7:15-23)

Theologians call this the simul justus et pecattor: we are simultaneously saint and sinner. Good and evil dwell within all of us, and they wage against each other. We have been made holy, saints through the working of God in Holy Baptism, but yet, we can’t escape our sin, we still have the conflict within. How can I be a Christian and still sin? How can I continue to struggle against temptation when I go to church every Sunday? Am I still one of God’s redeemed children? Saint Paul was at the point of despair, despair that every Christian since has felt. Sin is warring against me. “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” You and I are like St. Paul, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, or even Darth Vader: divided between saint and sinner. What hope is there for us?

What saved both Vader and Luke was the love of a son for his father. That love led Vader to cast the Emperor, the source of evil, down into the pit. What saves us is the love of a Son for His Father. St. Paul writes, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Jesus loved His Father and obeyed His good and gracious will, which demanded that He go to the cross and die for your sin. That is the only deliverance that we have from the tragic reality of the simul; when we fall into sin, we have forgiveness through His shed blood.

Paul concluded: “So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” (Romans 7:24-25) Martin Luther put it this way in the Small Catechism: “[Baptism] indicates that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die along with all sin and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and holiness forever.” The old Adam is cast into the pit each and every day by returning to the font, by clinging to Christ’s redemption, and there the new man arises, which will stand before God forever in the new heavens and the new earth. There the conflict will cease, there we will be at peace.

Issues etc. blog of the week

Thank you to Issues Etc. for the honor of selecting this blog as one of their 'blogs of the week.'  I am a daily listener to the program, and I consider it part of my 'continuing education' here in the parish.  Todd, Jeff, and Craig do great work putting on a top-notch program, and I encourage everyone to listen.  You will be challenged, informed, and strengthened by this solid, confessionally Lutheran radio program.  Thank you to Issues Etc. for all that you do to proclaim the Gospel in the wilderness of American Christianity!

Lent 2 of Series B (Mark 8:27-38)

“Whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this morning comes from the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the eighth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark. Dear friends in Christ, our Lord took His disciples up to Caesarea Philippi, the farthest away from Jerusalem that they would ever be during His ministry. There, at the foot of Mount Hermon, He had a question for them: “Who do people say that I am?” Far from the crowds of Galilee or His dangerous opponents in Jerusalem, Jesus wanted an impartial evaluation of what people thought of Him. They answered, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” But Jesus wasn’t really all that interested in what other people had to say about Him. He wanted to know about what His closest companions, His friends, His disciples thought of Him. “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answers boldly on behalf of them all: “You are the Christ.” Their great teacher is much more than a mere man: He is the Messiah, the anointed One! The disciples, especially Peter, were excited, they were enthusiastic, they had visions of glory running through their heads. This was Israel’s triumphant Savior, come to establish God’s kingdom on earth!

But then Jesus tells them what it means that He is the Christ. “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, but the Christ will not receive glory before suffering. He is the suffering Messiah, who will give up His life into the hands of the religious leaders, the enemies of the Gospel. His destiny is rejection and death. And the disciples can’t believe it. “Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him.” Peter may be bolder than the other eleven disciples, he may speak his mind more freely than you or I, but he is simply saying what we are all thinking: Jesus is a suffering Messiah? We are often ashamed of the sufferings of Jesus. We are embarrassed by a God who acts in weakness. Sure, we love the baby Jesus, the great teacher Jesus, even the exalted Jesus, but we turn quickly away from the suffering Jesus. That is why so many churches have empty crosses, or no crosses at all. That is why you find it so difficult to speak about Jesus to your friends and family. That is why Lent is such a difficult time of the year. Why? Why are we ashamed of Christ’s sufferings? First of all, our world hates weakness. The weak get crushed and despised, not admired and worshiped. But the attitude of our world is only part of the answer. Deep down, we are ashamed of Christ’s sufferings because we know that His sufferings will lead to our own.

We hear the words of Jesus in our text for today, and we know that He is calling on us to follow Him on the path of sacrifice, humiliation, and suffering. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” There are only two paths: the way of the world and the way of Christ. The way of Christ is a way of self-denial. Jesus calls on us to cease our self-promotion and pride and instead deny ourselves. We are to refuse to acknowledge ourselves; we are to place all people, especially Christ Himself, above us. When we do this, we will face ridicule, we will be trampled upon. We will suffer as Christ did. We will truly sacrifice, we will give up our own lives for others and for Christ. Our lives will be completely focused on following Christ, in everything we say and do, from Sunday morning in church to the rest of the week in our vocations at work and at home. It goes without saying that we don’t do this; we follow the way of this world. We don’t deny ourselves; we worship ourselves. We seek our own interests above all else. We desire the good life this world offers, the material things that will make us feel better and make our lives more convenient. We seek the approval of the world, and the world approves those who help themselves, those who keep their religion private. We are ashamed of the suffering and sacrifice that Jesus calls for, and so while we live for Christ on Sunday, the rest of the week we live for ourselves.

Jesus has stern words for us this morning: “For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.” There are only two paths: By following Christ, you may give up all earthly possessions, you will be ridiculed and persecuted, and may even give up your life, but you will receive eternal life. On the other hand, by following the world, you will keep all your possessions, you will praised by others and preserve your life, but you will receive eternal death. “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?” Nothing in this life can pay the ransom for your soul. All the wealth, all the popularity in the world counts for nothing in eternity. You cannot exchange the things of this world for the eternal salvation of your soul.

Only one price could be exchanged for your soul: the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. St. Paul writes in our Epistle lesson, “God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The world has deceived you; nothing it offers can defeat death. All of its praise and wealth cannot travel with you beyond the grave. Suffering is the only path that brings salvation, the only way to eternal life. Jesus gave Himself in exchange for your soul, He walked the path of suffering, the path that Peter didn’t want Him to walk, for you and for me. We have a suffering Savior because that was the only way that He could deliver you and me from death. Mark tells us: “He began to teach them that the son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.” This is the divine ‘must,’ the ‘must’ of salvation. Jesus must go to the cross because it was the only way to save you from sin, death, and the power of the devil. No other way would suffice, no other path would lead to salvation, all that the world claimed to offer was a lie. The world offered salvation, but Jesus knew that the path of the world lead only to death. “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” Every rich person dies, every poor person dies. Every Christian dies, and every non-Christian dies. Jesus went to the cross so that those who believed in Him, no matter how much they had to suffer and sacrifice in this life, would not die eternally, but instead receive eternal life.

Jesus wasn’t ashamed of His suffering; He walked willingly, boldly to Jerusalem, where He knew that humiliation and death awaited Him. Mark tells us in our text that Jesus spoke the prediction of His suffering and death “plainly.” The Greek word Mark uses is even stronger; Jesus spoke ‘boldly.’ Jesus boldly declared His suffering, humiliation, and death. He boldly proclaimed His cross, because He knew that this was the only path to deliver you from sin and death. He wasn’t ashamed of the cross, but He boldly proclaimed it and He boldly walked that path for you. The Gradual for Lent calls on us to look to Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Jesus despised the shame of the cross, enduring it for you and for your salvation. His love for you would not let Him avoid paying the price for your redemption; He knew the cost, but He boldly declared that He would pay it, saying in John’s Gospel, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down on my own accord.”

He was not ashamed of you; He was not ashamed to bear your sin. The author to the Hebrews writes: “For He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why He is not ashamed to call them brothers.” Jesus was not ashamed to take flesh and become your brother; He was not ashamed of your sin, and so He bore it to the cross. He was not ashamed of the cost of your salvation, and so He paid it. You and I are covered with sin; we fall into pride and fail to deny ourselves, in our sin we are even ashamed of His humiliation. There is plenty for Jesus to be ashamed of. But He doesn’t reject us; He calls us to repentance, and then in love, mercy, and compassion He forgives our sins, cleansing and purifying us to live before Him forever. To follow Christ, we will face the loss of status in the eyes of others, ridicule, and persecution. We may perhaps be called upon to give up our possessions or even our lives for the sake of Christ. But this text gives us the assurance that despite all that we lose in this life for the sake of Christ, our Lord has a heavenly inheritance for us, won by His shed blood. Even though we die, yet through Christ, we will live. As we sang last week in the hymn A Mighty Fortress is our God, “And take they our life, goods, fame, child, and wife, though these all be gone, our victory has been won; the Kingdom ours remaineth.”

For us as well as Jesus, suffering comes before glory. Good Friday comes before Easter, and for us, a life in a world opposed to Christ comes before an eternity spent with Him. We travel with Jesus to the cross this Lenten season, for there the price has been paid, there the gates of heaven have been opened wide to us. Through His sacrifice on Good Friday, all the glory that belongs to Jesus is given to us. Like Jesus, we travel the road of the cross, we walk through suffering and sorrow, all the while knowing that our Easter is coming. For the God who vindicated Jesus by raising Him from the dead will surely raise those who belong to Jesus on the Last Day, bringing you to the glories of heaven, where we will no longer suffer, but instead will praise the Lamb who suffered for us. In His holy and precious Name, Amen.