Our Daily Prayer: Thy Will Be Done

It disturbs me to realize that my will is often opposed to God's will. Even the great Apostle Paul wrote in deepest humility about this fact as he said,

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 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. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? - Rom 7:15-24 ESV

Find it to be a law? Always? Captive to the law of sin in my members? How can this be?

There are those among us Christians who claim to have conquered sin. They claim to be holy. Among Protestants this movement and set of convictions can be traced back over a hundred years to John Wesley, founder of Methodism, who called for Christian perfection. When you examine the teachings of holiness churches today it is not unusual to see statements such as these:

We believe In the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a holy life.

Likewise among Roman Catholics there is still the cult of saints, the belief that some Christians have attained to such Christian perfection in their walk with Christ that they may be called holy and without sin. They are the heroes of faith, if you will. Thus it is appropriate to ask these heroes to help us, assuming that they have special influence with the heavenly Father. And for their sakes, the Father intervenes, sometimes in a miraculous manner, bypassing the usual laws of nature.

Both ways of thinking are quite dangerous ways of approaching the Christian life. More needs to be said about these dangers another time.

For today we return to the LORD's prayer,

Our Father in heaven . . . Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven? 

Are we also not praying that He fill us with His Spirit and grant us the power and strength to submit our wills to His in all things? Are we not praying that He empower us to be holy, even as He is holy? And does He not hear our prayers? Indeed we are and indeed He does answer prayer. Do the so-called Catholic saints know what we do not? Do the holiness Christians have insights that we have overlooked?

Return to what Paul says to us: "I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand." This is what Paul means by the flesh that still dwelled within him and dwells within each of us even after the Holy Spirit has come to make His home within and give us a new birth in Christ Jesus (John 3:3-6). The Spirit empowers us to say yes! to Christ and to His sacrifice for us, but . . . the flesh remains. And within that sinful flesh there is ever the desire to reject the will of God and seek my own instead. Paul warns about this as he writes,

Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. - Gal 6:7-9 ESV

We hear that Word. We ponder it in our prayers. And we strive to do good, believing that sowing to the Spirit will ultimately reap eternal life. But, but, but we fail again and again.

At that point it is ever and always important to remember that our good is good only because God is gracious and merciful in Christ, for none of our good is, in the strict sense of the term ever good! Even our so-called good deeds are infected by the imperfection of our sinful flesh. So Paul reminds us when he says,

"For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what  I keep on doing." 

This is why the entire life of us Christians is hidden in Christ, as Paul says,

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. - Col 3:3 ESV

And this is why we flee again and again to the truth given to us in Christ as taught by John,

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. - 1Jo 2:1-2 ESV

John knew himself. He knew us. Through his writing the Spirit warns that the flesh remains and that we will not be perfected until Christ returns to grant us a new body like His (Phil. 3:20-21). Hidden fleshly desires, ambitions and unbelief remain within even the most dedicated. Aware of the power of this law of sin that ever wages war with our reborn life in Christ, we return each and every day to our Baptism and to the wonder of what that means. Each day we remember that Christ and Christ alone is the complete and full atonement for all of our sins (1 John 2:1-2). When He died and was buried, we were buried with Him. And so we are certain that we who died with Him will be united with Him in the resurrection from the dead. In that faith we rise again each day to give battle to the sin that remains within us and in the world around us. And in that faith we find confidence, victory and hope in this day, as Paul also teaches,

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. - Rom 8:1-2 ESV

Begin each day then in peace and hope. Put your life into the hands of Jesus and live that day in the joy of your Baptism and under the guiding of His Spirit within. Tomorrow is in His hands.

Judging According To The Flesh

Yesterday as I wrote about the rapidly changing views on marriage and sexual license here in the United States I was painfully aware of how different my views are from those self-styled enlightened voices calling for such changes. To most of us who follow Jesus, it seems so very obvious. The definition of marriage is clear : one man and one woman for life! Period, end of discussion. This is what Jesus teaches clearly in his Word. This is how he, our Creator, Master and Lord designed human life. We have no choice but to follow his way of life. He is LORD. He brings light. He is the Light of the world. And when we follow this Light our personal, family and community lives are blessed.

But my conclusions are not at all obvious to those outside Christ's Kingdom, to those who do not accept his authority nor that of the Scriptures as God's Word. You can see this clearly as we pick up the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees. Jesus has just declared himself to be the light of the world.

So the Pharisees said to him, "You are bearing witness about yourself; your testimony is not true." Jesus answered, "Even if I do bear witness about myself, my testimony is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going. You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me. - Jhn 8:13-16 ESV

"You judge according to the flesh!"

Like the talking heads who decided which candidate won the recent series of televised presidential debates here in the United States, the Pharisees brought their own personal agendas into this conflict between themselves and Jesus. They judged him, says Jesus, "according to the flesh!" And as a result they did not accept him nor the light he brought into the world.

Flesh in Jesus' usage refers not to the soft substance that covers the bodies of men and beasts. Rather, it refers to that sensuous, sinful nature of a man or woman with a self-centered agenda. To "judge according to the flesh" is decide on the basis of "what's in it for me." The apostle Paul puts it this way:

For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. - Rom 8:7-8 ESV

In the minds of the Pharisees, Jesus was nothing more than some self-promoting carpenter from the nothing-town of Nazareth. "You are bearing witness about yourself," they shouted. "The claims you make are empty and meaningless."

Jesus countered, "Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me. In your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me." 

They said to him therefore, "Where is your Father?" 

Jesus answered, "You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also." - Jhn 8:16-19 ESV

Earlier in the Gospel of John we hear Jesus equating the Scriptures to the voice of his Father.

And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. - Jhn 5:37-40 ESV

The Pharisees and learned Scribes rejected the witness of the very Scriptures they so highly treasured. Driven by their flesh, they persisted in the belief that they could earn the blessings of God by their righteous lives. In this belief they were blind to what these same Scriptures say about sin and about Jesus as the only Savior from God's judgment upon sin. They continued to "judge according to the flesh!"

Bottom line: when we Christians despair about how the morals of this world are changing, let us remember that that this is the world of men and women who "judge according to the flesh!" It has always been so. It will always be so until Christ returns. Until and unless they are reborn by the power and working of the Holy Spirit (John 3:5-6), there will be no changing of their minds. We must ever be conscious of this truth. Jesus' kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

St. Joseph's Dilemma

In my earlier post I pointed to the fact that throughout his life Martin Luther held to the perpetual virginity of Mary. However, he did not spend much time discussing Mary herself. Of her he wrote, 

[Mary] is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin. God's grace fills her with everything good and makes her devoid of all evil. God is with her, meaning that all she did or left undone is divine and the action of God in her. Moreover, God guarded and protected her from all that might be hurtful to her. Luther's Works (LW), American edition, Vol. 43:40, ed. H. Lehmann, Fortress, 1968

Concerning the possibility of her having children other than Jesus, he commented,

I am inclined to agree with those who declare that “brothers” really means “cousins” here, for Holy Writ and the Jews always call cousins brothers. (LW-22:215)

Whether or not the Lord had half brothers “neither adds to nor detracts from faith. It is immaterial whether these men were Christ’s cousins or His brothers begotten by Joseph. (LW-45:205-6)

Nevertheless, Luther led the way to restoring the honor and propriety of Christian marriage by marrying the former nun, Katharina von Bora. Both had taken vows of chastity prior to this. In that sense they were spiritual brothers and sisters of Christ in medieval church eyes. That would mean they had both broken their vows and were committing a kind of spiritual incest. But in Luther's eyes marriage was an honorable estate. In a published sermon on the estate of marriage, he writes, 

Because the union of man and woman signifies such a great mystery, the estate of marriage has to have this special significance. This means that the wicked lust of the flesh, which nobody is without, is a conjugal obligation and is not reprehensible when expressed within marriage, but in all other cases outside the bond of marriage, it is mortal sin. In a parallel way the holy manhood of God covers the same of the wicked lust of the flesh (Ps. 32:1; Rom. 5:7). Therefore a married man should have regard for such a sacrament (a sacred sign of something spiritual, holy, heavenly and eternal), honor it as sacred, and behave properly in marital obligations, so that those things which originate in the lust of the flesh do not occur [among us] as they do in the world of brute beasts. (LW-44:10)

The "lust of the flesh" flows from original sin. The second article in Lutheranism's Augsburg Confession on the doctrine of original sin:

It is also taught among us that since the fall of Adam all men who are born according to the course of nature are conceived and born in sin. That is, all men are full of evil lust and inclinations from their mothers’ wombs and are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God. Moreover, this inborn sickness and hereditary sin is truly sin and condemns to the eternal wrath of God all those who are not born again through Baptism and the Holy Spirit. Rejected in this connection are the Pelagians and others who deny that original sin is sin, for they hold that natural man is made righteous by his own powers, thus disparaging the sufferings and merit of Christ.[41]

Yet no one seems concerned about Mary's husband, Joseph, in the numerous discussions about Mary's perpetual virginity and holiness. He does not utter a single word in the Gospels. None of the church fathers suggest that he was freed from original sin at birth. All I read is that Joseph may have been married earlier and had other children and that those may be the brothers and sisters referred to in the Gospels (Matt. 12:46; Mark 3:31; Luke 8:19). That suggests that Joseph did indeed have a healthy and active sex drive. So what about Mary's duty to protect her husband from the sinful lust of his flesh? Recall the Apostle instructions to married couples:

But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. - 1Cr 7:2-5 ESV

I end this discussion with an invitation for you to ponder Joseph's dilemma of possibly being married to a perpetual virgin.