Words of Encouragement for March 31, 2010

Meditations in the Parables of Jesus

THE RICH FOOL

Read Luke 12:13-21

“And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me. And he said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”

The Parable of the Rich Fool was told by our Lord Jesus as a warning against desiring the treasures of this world and neglecting the eternal treasures of God’s kingdom.

When Jesus was asked to speak to a man and urge him to divide an inheritance with his brother, Jesus would not. He had not come into this world to judge and resolve disputes over money and goods. He came to save sinners and to give unto them eternal life (1 Tim. 1:15; Matt. 20:28). After warning against covetousness and pointing out that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” Jesus told the Parable of the Rich Fool to illustrate His point.

Indeed, it is foolish to live for and depend upon the goods of this world. Look at the man in Jesus’ parable. He had been greatly blessed with the fruits of this world and planned to build greater barns to store and keep his goods. That he depended upon the goods of this world is shown us by his words: “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” His foolishness is seen in God’s words to him: “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” His earthly goods were left to others, but he had to face the judgment of God without the true spiritual riches necessary to enter into eternal life!

The closing words of Jesus’ parable drive home the point: “So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”

It is indeed foolish for us to live for and depend upon the goods of this world. When we die – and we know that could happen at any time – of what benefit are all our earthly treasures to us? They will be left behind for others to inherit.

It is as Jesus said, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). Rather than seeking after the goods of this world, our first concern should be to “seek … the kingdom of God; and all these things [the necessary goods of this world] shall be added unto you” (Luke 12:31).

When we seek after God’s eternal kingdom and His righteousness which is ours through faith in Jesus Christ, God will graciously grant us the eternal riches of forgiveness of sins and life everlasting with Him in heaven. These blessings will never be lost or taken from us.

And, as we seek first God’s kingdom through faith in our Savior, we will also do well to remember the Word of God recorded by St. Paul: “Having food and raiment let us be therewith content” (1 Tim. 6:8).

Jesus, Thou art mine forever, dearer far than earth to me; neither life nor death shall sever those sweet ties which bind to Thee. Jesus, Thou art mine forever; never suffer me to stray. Let me in my weakness never cast my priceless pearl away. Amen. (The Lutheran Hymnal, Hymn #357, Verses 1,5)

Pastor Randy Moll

Lenten Devotions from Isaiah 53

“Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief: when Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand. He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied: by His knowledge shall my righteous Servant justify many; for He shall bear their iniquities.” Isaiah 53:10-11

Have you considered that it was the will of God the Father to bruise His own Son – to have Christ Jesus take our place upon the cross and suffer and die for our sins? Jesus was offered up a perfect sacrifice to make full atonement for our sins and for the sins of the whole world.

And, yes, Isaiah the prophet also foretold the resurrection of Jesus some seven hundred years before Jesus died and rose again: “When Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand. He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied.”

Jesus not only died for our sins according to the Scriptures; He also rose again on the third day. Jesus saw the results of His atoning sacrifice. He saw His seed – those who would obtain the right and privilege to be called children of God through faith in Him and His atoning sacrifice. His days are indeed prolonged – He is risen and lives forever! And the will and pleasure of the LORD is prospering in His hand as He brings sinners to repent and trust in Him for full pardon and life everlasting. Jesus sees the labor of His soul and is satisfied. He has joy over every sinner who repents of His sinful ways and trusts in Him for forgiveness and a place with Him in paradise.

“By His knowledge shall my righteous Servant justify many; for He shall bear their iniquities.” Having taken our sins and iniquities upon Himself and having paid in full by His innocent sufferings and death, the risen Christ justifies many. Christ Jesus makes us sinners acceptable in God’s eyes through His shed blood so that God reaches out to us in mercy, offering us forgiveness and life through faith in Jesus’ name. And, even yet today, the Gospel message calls sinners to repentance, proclaiming forgiveness of sins and life everlasting through faith in the crucified and risen Savior (cf. Luke 24:46-47).

O dearest Jesus, thank you for bearing the guilt and punishment of my sins, upon the cross. As You have risen from the dead, so raise me up to faith in You and life everlasting. Amen.

Pastor Randy Moll

What’s Wrong with America?

What’s wrong with America? What changed the nation’s course and led us down a path which makes our nation – our society – almost unrecognizable to those who still remember another America?

People answer these questions a number of different ways. Many point to our nation’s ills – to things like abortion, euthanasia, sexual aberrations, lack of self esteem and respect for others and drug and alcohol abuse. But these are only the symptoms – the result – of a deeper cause. And so, we need to look deeper if we are to find and understand the reason for what’s wrong with America and what has changed the course of a nation and people.

If we look back on our nation and the principles upon which it was founded, we see a whole different way of thinking – a different world view. Our founding fathers, even though not all were Christian, held to a Christian (or Judeo-Christian) world view. They believed that the world and all mankind were the creation of an almighty God, to whom all are responsible and to whom all must one day give account. They also believed that people have certain rights given to them by their Creator – rights which men and governments ought not take away.

The Declaration of Independence sets forth this common belief in the well-known words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

How things have changed! Rather than believing in an almighty creator God who has given us life and all things, the view of modern society – the view taught in our public schools and espoused by our nation’s government and courts – is one of a chance existence: Life and the world as we know it are the result of “natural” laws relating to mass and energy in the universe, with man being the highest known form of evolving life.

Thus, instead of man being a creation of God – a person endowed with life, liberty and the freedom to own property and carry out godly pursuits before he stands before his Maker – man is now viewed as an insignificant speck on the face of the universe who is here today and gone tomorrow. His only significance and meaning in life is in the existential now, and his only moral guide is himself and the views of society’s influential and ruling elite.

Is it any wonder, then, that our nation’s highest court could legalize abortion in all 50 states with one ruling? Should we be surprised that euthanasia has been practiced and is now being legalized in a number of states? After all, modern laws are no longer based on the moral absolute of God’s Ten Commandments and the Bible; they are based on the opinions and desires of people and society. If society determines it is okay to murder unborn babies for the convenience of the mothers, it becomes the law of the land. If society thinks it is acceptable to terminate life when it becomes “unmeaningful” or “unuseful,” then it becomes the law of the land. If society determines that alternative lifestyles and same-sex marriages are acceptable, the law protects these aberrations. If society determines that it is okay to have sex outside of marriage, to produce and view pornography, to allow no-fault divorces, that lotteries and other forms of gambling are for the common good, they become legal and lawful. And the list goes on and on!

Of course, what has happened is not new. It has just taken another form. In the Garden of Eden, the devil’s temptation was to doubt God’s Word and to become like gods, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3). Instead of listening to God and His Word, Adam and Eve made their own moral judgment and did what seemed good for them at the moment: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (v. 6).

Adam and Eve erred in the Garden and we err today when we seek to be our own gods and put in place of God’s Word our own views of what is good and evil, right and wrong. When we determine our own moral values, our values are neither moral nor absolute. They change from situation to situation and become further and further removed from the foundation of God’s truth.

Sadly, we may not have seen the worst yet in America. If a ruling party determines it to be good to exterminate people of a certain race or religious or political view, it could become law – it did in Nazi Germany. If a ruling party determines that churches be closed, presses be shut down or censored and that dissenters be sent to mental wards or labor camps, it could become law – it did in the old Soviet Union. If a ruling party determines what our children are to be taught in schools, who will receive health care and how, what is socially and morally acceptable and what is not, which religious speech and displays are permissible and which are not, it will become the law of the land – it’s already happening in America.

This is the direction America is taking today: God and His Word are becoming outlawed; man and his opinions and views are becoming the law of the land. Our nation is becoming another fulfillment of Psalm 2: “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against His Anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.”

And so, what is my point? It is just this: It will do little good to complain about the symptoms if we don’t address the root problem. We must do more than oppose abortion, euthanasia, sexual immorality and other symptoms of a humanistic, man-centered nation and society. We need to focus on restoring a world view based on the God of the Bible and His absolute and unerring Word.

That cannot be done through war or bloodshed. It cannot be accomplished through political might or gaining the upper hand at election time. It won’t be accomplished through marches on the nation’s capitol. Church programs and membership drives will prove futile. And though I often write columns political in nature, they will be of little effect.

There is only one way to change America’s world view, and that is by preaching and teaching the Word of God – the Bible – with a goal of reaching one person at a time. Only when people again read and hear God’s absolute truth will they be reminded that they are not gods. There is only one true God and He sits in the heavens and laughs at our foolishness in thinking that we can cast off all ties with Him and with His Anointed – the Lord Jesus Christ.

Only when we, by the working of God’s Holy Spirit through the Word, individually acknowledge that God is God and humble ourselves before Him, trusting the promises of His Word which assure us that He will be merciful to us, forgive us and accept us for the sake of the eternal Son of God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, will our way of thinking change. And if, by the grace of God, enough people hear the Word of God and believe its message, America, as a nation, may also change its world view and let God be God again, before it is too late.

Pastor Randy Moll

The Brief Statement

of the

Doctrinal Position of the Missouri Synod as adopted in 1932

(Editor’s Note: This remains the official position of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod yet today, though in practice, many have departed from it.)

Of Conversion

10. We teach that conversion consists in this, that a man, having learned from the Law of God that he is a lost and condemned sinner, is brought to faith in the Gospel, which offers him forgiveness of sins and eternal salvation for the sake of Christ’s vicarious satisfaction, Acts 11: 21; Luke 24: 46,47; Acts 26:18.

11. All men, since the Fall, are dead in sins, Eph. 2:1-3, and inclined only to evil, Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Rom. 8:7. For this reason, and particularly because men regard the Gospel of Christ, crucified for the sins of the world, as foolishness, I Cor. 2:14, faith in the Gospel, or conversion to God, is neither wholly nor in the least part the work of man, but the work of God’s grace and almighty power alone, Phil. 1:29; Eph. 2:8; 1:19;-Jer. 31:18. Hence Scripture calls the faith of man, or his conversion, a raising from the dead, Eph. 1:20; Col. 2:12, a being born of God, John 1: 12, 13, a new birth by the Gospel, 1 Pet. 1: 23-25, a work of God like the creation of light at the creation of the world, 2 Cor. 4:6.

12. On the basis of these clear statements of the Holy Scriptures we reject every kind of synergism, that is, the doctrine that conversion is wrought not by the grace and power of God alone, but in part also by the co-operation of man himself, by man’s right conduct, his right attitude, his right self-determination, his lesser guilt or less evil conduct as compared with others, his refraining from willful resistance, or anything else whereby man’s conversion and salvation is taken out of the gracious hands of God and made to depend on what man does or leaves undone. For this refraining from willful resistance or from any kind of resistance is also solely a work of grace, which “changes unwilling into willing men,” Ezek- 36:26; Phil. 2:13. We reject also the doctrine that man is able to decide for conversion through “powers imparted by grace,” since this doctrine presupposes that before conversion man still possesses spiritual powers by which he can make the right use of such “powers imparted by grace.”

13. On the other hand, we reject also the Calvinistic perversion of the doctrine of conversion, that is, the doctrine that God does not desire to convert and save all hearers of the Word, but only a portion of them. Many hearers of the Word indeed remain unconverted and are not saved, not because God does not earnestly desire their conversion and salvation, but solely because they stubbornly resist the gracious operation of the Holy Ghost, as Scripture teaches, Acts 7:51; Matt 23:37; Acts 13:46.

14. As to the question why not all men are converted and saved, seeing that God’s grace is universal and all men are equally and utterly corrupt, we confess that we cannot answer it. From Scripture we know only this: A man owes his conversion and salvation, not to any lesser guilt or better conduct on his part, but solely to the grace of God. But any man’s non-conversion is due to himself alone: it is the result of his obstinate resistance against the converting operation of the Holy Ghost, Hos. 13:9.

15. Our refusal to go beyond what is revealed in these two Scriptural truths is not ‘masked Calvinism” (“Cryptocalvinism”) but precisely the Scriptural teaching of the Lutheran Church as it is presented in detail in the Formula of Concord (Triglot, P. 1081, @57-59, 60 b, 62, 63; M., P. 716 f.): “That one is hardened, blinded, given over to a reprobate mind, while another, who is indeed in the same guilt, is converted again, etc. – in these and similar questions Paul fixes a certain limit to us how far we should go, namely, that in the one part we should recognize God’s judgment. For they are well-deserved penalties of sins when God so punished a land or nation for despising His Word that the punishment extends also to their posterity, as is to be seen in the Jews. And thereby God in some lands and persons exhibits His severity to those that are His in order to indicate what we all would have well deserved and would be worthy and worth, since we act wickedly in opposition to God’s Word and often grieve the Holy Ghost sorely; in order that we may live in the fear of God and acknowledge and praise God’s goodness, to the exclusion of, and contrary to, our merit in and with us, to whom He gives His Word and with whom He leaves it and whom He does not harden and reject…. And this His righteous, well-deserved judgment He displays in some countries, nations, and persons in order that, when we are placed alongside of them and compared with them (quam simillimi illis deprehensi, i. e., and found to be most similar to them), we may learn the more diligently to recognize and praise God’s pure, unmerited grace in the vessels of mercy. . . . When we proceed thus far in this article, we remain on the right way, as it is written, Hos. 13:9: ‘O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in Me is thy help.’ However, as regards these things in this disputation which would soar too high and beyond these limits, we should with Paul place the finger upon our lips and remember and say, Rom. 9:20: ‘O man, who art thou that repliest against God?”‘ The Formula of Concord describes the mystery which confronts us here not as a mystery in man’s heart (a “psychological” mystery), but teaches that, when we try to understand why “one is hardened, blinded, given over to a reprobate mind, while another, who is indeed in the same guilt, is converted again,” we enter the domain of the unsearchable judgments of God and ways past finding out, which are not revealed to us in His Word, but which we shall know in eternal life. 1 Cor. 13:12.

16. Calvinists solve this mystery, which God has not revealed in His Word, by denying the universality of grace; synergists, by denying that salvation is by grace alone. Both solutions are utterly vicious, since they contradict Scripture and since every poor sinner stands in need of, and must cling to, both the unrestricted universal grace and the unrestricted “by grace alone,” lest he despair and perish.

Bible Study in Preparation for Sunday

The Adult Bible Class will take up the resurrection accounts in the four Gospels and in 1 Corinthians 15:1ff. To prepare, read the resurrection accounts and consider the chronology and the significance of what took place. What does Jesus’ resurrection prove? What assurances can you draw from the fact that Jesus did rise on the third day?

The Catechism Class continues studying the Lord’s Prayer and the Sacraments and learning of Jesus and what He has done to redeem all mankind.

The Sunday Readings will be Psalm 16; 1 Corinthians 15:1-23; and Luke 24:1-12. Please take the time to read them in their context in preparation for Sunday. Psalm 16 – What does the psalm say of Jesus’ resurrection? What comfort can we draw from the promises of this psalm? 1 Corinthians 15 – What does Paul say is the message of the Gospel which he preached? To whom did Jesus appear after His resurrection on the third day? To whom could Paul’s readers go if they wanted proof of the resurrection of Jesus? What were some apparently preaching in Corinth? Do people still teach this today? What would be the result if Jesus did not rise from the dead? What comfort can we draw from the fact that Jesus truly did rise from the dead? Luke 24 – What happened early on the first day of the week? Were the women expecting to find Jesus’ tomb empty? Who appeared to the women? What message did they have? Who was in the group who came to the tomb? What did they tell Jesus’ disciples? What did Peter (and John) do? Did Peter yet understand what had happened or why? How would you explain it to those who don’t know or understand the events of that first Resurrection Sunday?

Remember to Pray

Remember to pray for our church and for all our members, that none be lost to Christ’s kingdom but that all continue in repentance and be strengthened and built up in the true and saving faith in Christ Jesus through the hearing and study of His Word. We continue to pray for all who have been sick or who are suffering among us – especially Bruce Murphy who is in ICU with septic shock – for those who have been absent from us, for our extended families, for Christians who are alone and have no congregation, and for our adopted soldiers. Pray for God’s help with our church’s financial needs. Continue to pray for the Lutheran Churches in the Philippines, for Christians in Nigeria, Haiti and Chile, and for believers around the world who are persecuted or suffering.

Events and Announcements

The Choir is practicing for upcoming services. More voices are always welcome.

Holy Week Services will be held on Maundy Thursday (April 1) and Good Friday (April 2), with services beginning at 7 p.m. Holy Communion will be held on Maundy Thursday. A pizza supper will be held at 6:20 p.m. on Thursday. No meal will be served on Friday.

Resurrection Sunday will be observed with a breakfast at 8 a.m., followed by Sunday School and Bible Class at 9 a.m. and Sunday Worship at 10 a.m. Members wishing to bring Easter lilies for the chancel area may do so.

Information for bulletins or newsletters may be sent to Pastor Moll by calling him at 479-233-0081 or by e-mail at goodshepherdrogers@yahoo.com.

“Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.” Hebrews 13:20-21

[Scripture in this Newsletter is taken from the King James Version of the Bible]