Faith

Who is Your God?

Encore Post: [Eighth is a series of posts on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism] When St. Paul first visited Athens as a Christian, he noticed it was a very religious place. Everywhere he went, he found a temple or sometimes just an altar to this or that god or goddess. That he expected. But what caught him by surprise is there was an altar on which to sacrifice to an unknown god. Someone really wanted to cover all their bases! (Acts 17:16-31)

Our world is also a very religious place. Everywhere you go there are churches, temples and gathering places. “In God we trust” appears on the money of the United States. Conversations often invoke a god, even if it just in cursing. At times of death and birth, a god is often called upon to provide blessings or comfort. For a secular society, gods are everywhere.

God made human beings so that we need to depend upon him. So, even when a person is not a Christian, even if they are an atheist, they need to depend upon someone or something, especially in times of need. Martin Luther describes it this way:

“A god means that from which we are to expect all good and to which we are to take refuge in all distress, so that to have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe Him from the [whole] heart; as I have often said that the confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust be right, then is your god also true; and, on the other hand, if your trust be false and wrong, then you have not the true God; for these two belong together, faith and God. That now, I say, upon which you set your heart and put your trust is properly your god.” (Large Catechism 1.1.2-3)

For Christians, God is not some fuzzy concept, one of many competing gods or goddess, or the whole universe merged as a single being or something we are obsessed with or addicted to. God is our Father, who loved us before he made the world, who knit us together in our mother’s womb, who in the person of the Son of God, suffered, died and rose again, so that we might live with him forever. All other things that we can make into a god are a product of human imagination or are not made to take the weight of our trust. Sooner or later, they will fail. But God will never fail. He is with us, now, through death and into eternal life.

Originally posted at What does this Mean? Blog: https://whatdoesthismean.blog

The posts in the blog What does this Mean? are now available at What does this Mean? | Rev. Robert E. Smith | Substack

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Pastor Emeritus

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Sunday School: Three Men in the Furnace — or is it Four?

Encore Post: Ancient peoples looked upon their leaders as lesser gods, worthy of worship. They built statues to honor themselves and required all people to worship them. This practice continued even in Roman times to the pagan Caesars. It was seen as a patriotic act, similar to saying the pledge of allegiance and saluting the flag. From time to time, kings would enforce public worship of their statues or the statues of their gods to test the loyalty of their subjects.

For Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, loyalty to God was more important than life itself. They trusted God could deliver them and placed full trust in Him. Yet they were prepared for God to take them to His side instead. God sent his Son as the Angel of the Lord to protect His servants in the fire. The writer of the book of Hebrews included these men in the great chapter on faith. (Hebrews 11:32-34) Christian martyrs throughout the centuries looked up to these men for inspiration when called to choose between God and country.

Faith is trusting God to keep his promises. It holds on to the fact that God kept the most important of his promises to his people in the Old Testament. In the person of the Son of God, he became a man in the womb of the Virgin Mary, lived a perfect life for us, suffered and died at the hands of a pagan government, rose again from the grave and ascended to heaven. Because he has done these things, we are certain that he will keep the rest of his promises — to bring us to be with him forever when we die and raise us from the grave on the last day. It is that faith that sustained Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, their friend Daniel, all the martyrs for the faith who obeyed God rather than man. With them numbered may we be, here and in eternity.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Pastor Emeritus

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Sunday School: Job and Suffering Even Though We Don’t Know Why

Encore Post: Job was a good man. He loved God and served Him well. When Job lost everything he had, his friends thought he must have done something very evil. Yet Job insisted he did nothing wrong. He could not figure out why these things were happening to him. Job was right. God allowed Satan to attack Job to test his faith, not to punish him.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, sin, sickness, disaster and death entered the world. Most of the time, innocent people suffer from them. Because God loves us, He does not want people to suffer and to die from these things. He wants us to live the way He intended us to live when He made the world and called it “very good.” So He sent His Son to die in our place and pay for our sins. Now our sins are forgiven and we will live forever with Him. One day, Jesus will return to bring a final end to sin, suffering, grief and death. In life everlasting, He will dry every tear from our eyes.

Yet sin, suffering, grief and death continue in this world — even for us. When Job finally lost his health, he complained to God that it wasn’t fair. He was, after all, a good man. God pointed out that Job should trust Him, even though Job could not understand why he was suffering. God knows what’s best and sometimes He allows evil to happen because ending it is worse than allowing it to take its course. God can use the evil of the world to strengthen our faith — our trust — in him and his promises. Job repented of questioning God and placed his trust in God’s love. In the end, God restored Job’s prosperity.

Rev. Robert E. Smith
Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Christians and Good Works

Encore Post: When the Bible speaks about good works, it really is not talking about the everyday things we think about when we mention good things people do. The good things people do are always colored with mixed motives. Maybe we did them so that people would sing our praises. Maybe we expected to get something from them, a reward, a trophy or a good deed in return. The Hindu idea called Karma is supposed to work that way. If you do good, good will be done to you. Sometimes the things we choose to do are our own ideas. All-night vigils, long fasts, pilgrimages and similar feats are very impressive, but God never actually asks us to do these things.

So, none of them save us or even especially please God — unless we do them because we have faith in God and want to thank him for his love and mercy towards us. Strictly speaking, non-Christians cannot do good works. All the things they do are motivated by the desire to get something out of it. Even Christians who love and trust God aren’t perfect when it comes to doing good with pure motives.

Truly good works, then, are the product of faith in Jesus Christ. Every thankful thought, grateful prayer of thanksgiving, things done because we love God, are good works. Even though a sinful thought or motive might tarnish them, because Christ earned our forgiveness on the cross, God does not count these sins against us, but sees only those things done because we love him.

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Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Grace alone, Faith alone

Encore Post: You’ve seen plenty of ads on websites, TV, billboards, in stores and just about everywhere you go. You can lose thirty pounds if you just eat the new diet. You do not even have to exercise! If you buy that brand new sports car, you can hangout with beautiful women! That brand new pan will make you into a chef and you can clean it in no time! People who know better will tell you if it’s too good to be true — it is! There is no such thing as a free lunch! And most of the time, they’re right!

So, it’s not surprising that people think they need to do something — anything — to earn God’s mercy and eternal life. Every religion on earth is about what you have to do to win the love of their gods. Their gods bless those that do the most. Those that fail have at best a second or third place in their blessings.

Some Christians believe God expects them to do some good works to match the grace God gives them in order to be saved. This may be as simple as accepting Jesus as their savior, inviting him into their hearts. Others feel they must do certain rituals, confess all of their sins, speak in languages they don’t understand or give substantial money for God to bless them. They may even say that they are saved by grace, just not grace alone.

The problem, of course, as we’ve discussed in other posts, is that we are not able to please God by what we do. Without the work of the Holy Spirit, we are dead in our sins. That is why it is such good news that Jesus already has paid the price for our salvation on the cross. Because he did this, God loves us, is gracious to us and gives us salvation as a gift — without strings attached. So it is by grace alone that we are saved. He even places the faith in our hearts that trusts this good news and cherishes this gift. It is this faith alone that saves us, for Christ’s sake alone. This precious truth is the very center of Christian teaching and the most important of all the insights of Martin Luther and the Reformation.

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Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Salvation Guaranteed

Encore Post: When we hear God’s Word, the Holy Spirit creates faith in our hearts. He also comes to live within us. This faith clings to God’s grace and his promise to save us for the sake of Jesus. In Holy Baptism, he places God’s seal on us. We belong to God as his heirs. The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives is God’s down payment on the resurrection of the dead and eternal life with God in paradise.

What this means is we do not need to worry about whether we will go to Heaven when we die. We do not need to worry whether we did enough to earn a second chance from God. We do not need to worry about whether God chose to send us to hell before we were born. We do not need to worry whether we were sincere when we accepted Jesus as our savior or if we cannot remember whether we ever made a decision for Jesus at all. God has done everything to save us even before we were born.

God the Father loved us before he made the world. He chose us then to be His children and set things in motion to adopt us as his heirs. He sent God the Son to die for us. God the Son was born of the Virgin Mary, becoming God with us. Jesus lived a perfect life for our sake, obeying God’s Law and fulfilling it. Jesus then went to the cross, bearing our sins and paying the full penalty for our guilt. He suffered, died and rose again so that We might be declared “not guilty,” forgiven of our sins, and rise from the dead on the last day. God the Holy Spirit comes to us through the Gospel, Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Through these Means of Grace, He created faith in our hearts, so that we trust in God’s promises and the sacrifice of Jesus to save us. He seals us with the name of the Holy Trinity and enters our hearts as a down payment on our salvation. So our salvation is guaranteed by God Himself, because everything depends on him.

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Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Encore Post: Faith is one of those “church words” that everyone knows and uses, but finds hard to pin down. We use it to mean everything from a family of church bodies, to a system of things people believe, to trust in God, to accepting something is true, but that we cannot prove. The Greek language uses one word for both faith and belief. (πιστεύω — pisteoo — to believe, πίστις; pistis; Faith) When the New Testament uses the word, it uses it for both what we believe in and our trust in God to keep his promises to save us.

When the Bible talks about faith in God, (Saving Faith, Justifying Faith) it means a trust in God to keep his promises, especially his promise to save us. This trust is not something we create by things we do. It is created in us when the Holy Spirit comes to us through the Gospel, Baptism or the Lord’s Supper. (Romans 1:17, John 20:30-31, Ephesians 1:13, Romans 1:16-17) Our faith clings to Jesus, believing that his sufferings and death on the cross forgives our sins and gives us everlasting life. This faith responds to the Grace given to us in God’s Word and the Sacraments. It thanks God for his mercy, praises him and gives us the desire to serve God and our neighbors. (much more on this later. For now, see Ephesians 2:10)

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Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Means of Grace

Encore Post: Now and then, the news is filled with excitement over lottery jackpots worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Long lines form at convenience stores as everyone wants to buy a ticket. For all but a handful of people, the only value of the ticket is entertainment. Yet the very lucky winner is very happy indeed. She has won a fortune! Yet her bank account hasn’t changed a penny. Until the money is deposited, nothing has changed — other than she discovers she has more cousins than she ever knew she had!

Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have amazing riches in heaven. God loves us, gives us his grace. We are his children. Our sins are forgiven and we will live forever. Yet without a way of these things coming to us, it is not yet applied to us. To give these gifts to us, God uses the Means of Grace.

The Means of Grace are visible means by which God the Holy Spirit gives the gifts Jesus earned by his death on the cross. He uses these to plant faith in our hearts, strengthen and preserve it. Through them, we receive the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. He uses this to enter our hearts and live there.

These means are the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Holy Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and perhaps Absolution. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper and sometimes absolution are called sacraments.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Baptism Saves You

Encore Post: Perhaps the point of greatest conflict between Lutherans and the Evangelical movement is our confidence that the Bible teaches that baptism saves you. As I noted in another post, most Protestants think of Baptism as a simple ceremony where a Christian declares that he puts his faith in Jesus as his personal savior. They think of baptism as something we do and so think that to say that baptism saves us, that it is the same thing as saying salvation is something we earn by what we do. Yet the Bible clearly says, “Baptism saves you” (1 Peter 3:21-22) and”unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5)

If Lutherans believed that baptism was something we do, we also would reject the teaching that it saves. After all, the heart and center of the Lutheran confession is salvation is by grace alone through faith alone for the sake of Christ alone. But we believe what the Scriptures teach, that salvation is God’s work, not ours. God the Father saved us, not by what we have done, but washing us and renewing us in baptism by the Holy Spirit. (Titus 3:4-7) Jesus gave himself for the church, cleansing us by the water and the word. (Ephesians 5:25-27) In Christ, through faith, God has buried us with Jesus in baptism and made us alive with Christ, forgiving our sins.(Colossians 2:11-14) So, when we say we are saved by baptism, we are saying that God saves us by baptism.

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What is Baptism?

Encore Post: You may have discovered that Christians value Baptism a lot. Yet there are few subjects that the various Christian traditions disagree about more. Catholics believe baptism is a means of grace that removes original sin and forgives all actual sins committed before baptism. It does not forgive sins committed after that — for that you need to go to confession, be absolved and do penance. For many Protestants, it is a work you do in obedience to God’s command, showing you’ve accepted Jesus as your personal savior. For others, it is just a meaningful symbol of salvation.

Lutherans believe that baptism is a means of grace, one of the ways, instituted by Jesus himself, God uses to save us. (Matthew 28:19) It combines the Gospel of Christ’s saving obedience, suffering, death and resurrection with water to wash away our sins. (Ephesians 5:25-27, Titus 3:4-7) It is God himself who does the baptizing, using human hands.

Like the other means of grace, Baptism creates faith in hearts where there is none and strengthens faith where it exists. Baptism also marks us with the name of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It makes us his children and heirs — heirs with Christ.

Finally, it is an undeniable declaration that we are saved. Why? Because we had nothing to do with it. In most cases, it is written in record books we can see and in all cases is written in the Book of Life. When Satan tries to cause us to doubt our salvation, we can tell him: “get lost! I am baptized.” Nothing can separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And where he is, we will also be.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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