Means of Grace – Page 2 – What Does This Mean?

God’s Masks

Encore Post: Children love to play dress-up. They walk in their parent’s shoes, try on their clothes, put on costumes in their toy chest or use other toys as masks. Adults sometimes do the same on Halloween or at a masked ball. Most often actors will go to great lengths to look the part.

God also chooses to wear masks. Because he is absolutely holy, no sinner can stand in the presence of his full glory and live. (Exodus 33:20) So, God approaches people through priests, prophets, bushes, a donkey and the person of the Son of God before he was born in the person of Jesus. Most often, the Son of God is called the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, God appears to us in flesh and blood in Jesus. In him we know and see God. (John 1:18) Through him, we receive the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. Through him, we can approach God and call him father. When God sees us now, he sees his sinless Son and calls us saints — Holy Ones. (Ephesians 1:4-6)

God also chooses to give his gifts of grace, faith, the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation through his Word, read and preached to us, and through the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In theology, we call these the Means of Grace. We have no promise that he will come to us in any other way. In these means, we know without a doubt that God loves us.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

Preach the Word

Encore Post: The pastoral ministry is all about feeding Christ’s sheep. Jesus and his Church have given pastors the privilege of distributing the means of grace publicly. Pastors preach God’s Word and the administer his sacraments as God’s representatives and in the name of the church. (See Augsburg Confession 5) We can believe that, when a pastor does these things according to God’s Word, it is God himself speaking to us, baptizing us and giving us the body and blood of Jesus himself with the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. Of all these acts, the one a pastor does most often is preaching.

The New Testament uses several words for preaching, almost all tied to what a herald does. The main word used is κηρύσσω (Kerusso) — to announce, make known, proclaim. (2 Timothy 4:2) Preaching is all about delivering a message from God. That message is mainly the good news of salvation won for us by Jesus on the cross. But it also extends to the whole counsel of God.

Pastors preach not only on Sunday morning during a worship service, but also anytime someone needs to hear from God’s word. It may be urging them to repentance, or may be assuring them that God forgives them for the sake of Jesus Christ. During a worship service, a sermon is much more formal than that. Most often a sermon takes the message in a passage read earlier, it explains those truths to God’s people, and urges them to believe these words. It is not about teaching, presenting all kinds of facts to be remembered. It is not entertainment, helping people to escape from their day-to-day lives just for a little while.

Preaching is all about changing the lives of those who hear the message. It does not do so because of the pastors skill, his inspiring insights, or how hilarious is jokes are. The point of a sermon is to bring the message that God put it in the scriptures to people. It’s all about changing lives, and strengthening the faith of those who hear. You may remember the words of a talented speaker for a long time. But a sermon is God’s gift to you. It contains the Gospel, which gives you his grace. It is the very words of eternal life.

Why do Pastors Baptize?

Encore Post: Because God calls the church to organize its work in an orderly fashion, the church has designated those God has called to bring his word to them to be the usual baptizer. Their pastor represents God, who is actually the one who baptizes, and represents them, acting on their behalf. They welcome new Christians into the church and into the congregation to which they now belong. Pastors maintain a record, so there is assurance, even years later, that they were baptize.

Since the days of the apostles, pastors have baptized new Christians. We see this in the book of Acts, in the letters of St. Paul and in the writings of the earliest leaders of the church. Pastors need to know whom God has placed in their care. When they baptise, they know the new Christian bears the cross of Christ and is in their flock. They will faithfully nourish them and hand their care to the next pastor when their ministry in a place comes to an end. Finally, when pastors baptize a new Christian in a regular service of a congregation, those believers brothers and sisters get to know them. They recognize their fellow laborers in Christ, with whom they live, grow and will likely die.

When an emergency threatens the life of someone not baptized and a person is brought to its waters without a pastor or away from worship, their pastor will announce that baptism in church with a rite of thanksgiving, so their congregation can rejoice that God has found his lost sheep and brought him or her home.