Book: Luke

Counterintuitive as it may sound, it is precisely the call to sacrifice which we must embrace and offer to the world today if we wish to see the church grow. People of my generation and younger especially have caught on to the façade of contemporary worship, for it is so clearly divorced from the reality of life, which is hard! Life is hardly ever holding hands and singing kumbaya, it is a daily struggle against sin, and pain, and grief, and shame. Christ delivers us from all those things, but only if we join Him in the fight.

We live in a time of great arrogance. We are an arrogant people, and arrogance comes from pride. Pride was not created for human beings; pride comes from the Fall in the Garden. Pride is the unwillingness to accept the truth out of our own insecurity. One defense against these temptations is humor, for it requires us to be poor in spirit, and embrace humility. Humor for the Christian is a serious virtue, for it teaches us to laugh at ourselves.

Our faith MUST be lived out in action, brothers and sisters! That doesn’t mean our problems go away, but when our hearts cry out, “how long,” we can drown out all those negative thoughts and voices that accuse us with the joyful song of the whole company of heaven. And we can run to the Sacraments and satisfy our spiritual hunger and thirst at the feast we share with all the saints who are cheering us on.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Do we hear them cheering for us? But what are they cheering for us to do? It isn’t for us to mope through life. It is for us to run the race with endurance. This is what we are called to do as disciples of Christ, in the good days and the bad. Our lives are filled with the endless, useless noise of sin. Only by cutting through the noise, and focusing on the call of the Lord and the cheers of the Saints, can we run the race with endurance.

The battle between good and evil must be fought within our own hearts each and every day. This is why our works can’t save us, because we can’t possibly do anything on our own merit to earn our salvation. Only one person lived that perfect life, and that was Jesus Christ, the God-man, who offered himself up as a sacrifice to God for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.

Our earthly lives are fleeting, and most people have great difficulty with that – a lament which is echoed by the author of Ecclesiastes. To cope with our mortality, so many of us resort to vanity – pride in our own achievements or appearance, and devoting our lives to worthless things. We pile up possessions on earth which we cannot take with us when we die. But our most prized possession should in fact be God. As the famous hymn says, “we are rich in things, but poor in soul.” But as Luke’s Gospel challenges us, we must instead be rich towards God.

A person who is held captive by ideology will use his end to justify any means. This is why we see our own social and political discourse breaking down today – ideology, not reason and the love of Christ, is what controls both sides of the debate. We as a people have been taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit. Listen as the Rector discusses Paul’s warning to the Colossians, and to us today.

What are you anxious about? By virtue of living on this side of the veil of tears, the list is long. Sometimes our anxieties are big: the safety and security of our country; the rising tension in national politics; the kind of future our children and grandchildren will be born into; the state of the economy (“did you hear we hit another 40-year high for inflation?”); nuclear war; natural disaster; widespread disease. We are anxious about many things. This is why the story of Martha hosting Jesus at her home is memorable to us, because it is relatable. Being anxious is normal, but it is not helpful. Listen as the Rector explains how we can focus on that which is necessary by the power of prayer.

If we don’t do what we ought, and if we don’t give due diligence to doing the things we should, then we are going to fall down, susceptible to the powers of sin. There is a fatigue currently affecting believers to do this due diligence in the midst of a culture of increasing opposition to the Gospel. We can only overcome spiritual fatigue by trusting God at His Word and resting in his Son Jesus Christ. Listen as the Rev. Galloway instructs us to overcome spiritual fatigue by following in the example of the Good Samaritan.