Ephesians 6 – reading this the other day I felt the old curmudgeon coming back – haven’t heard from him since September 7 and 8 of 2011.. But he is back ……………
You ever wonder about folks who claim to love Jesus but hate everyone else? Or those who say that they have faith in Christ as Savior but they are unkind to everyone? The angel said about Jesus at his birth, that he would “save his people from their sins”. We are very good at telling people what Jesus died to save us from, but we are not so good at telling what he died to save us for. He also died to save us from all iniquity in order to “purify for himself a people to be his own possession who are jealous and zealous to do good works”, (Titus 2:14)’. Paul writes beautifully that good works have been created by God from before the foundation of the world that those who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ “should walk in them”, in other words should do them. The atonement, making us “at one” with God again is also the reestablishment not only of the communion with God but the restoration of the divine image, not just in life everlasting but right now. What does it say about a believer or a church body or a preacher that calls “evil good” and “good evil” and then justifies that position not on the basis of a Biblical mandate, but a human notion of justice? What does it say about us as leaven and salt and light if we allow ourselves to be usurped by popular functionaries to allow un- Christian public activities to continue unchallenged because of some notion that our faith is a “private thing” and therefore unacceptable in the public forum? What does it say about us as a “people zealous to do good works” if we are willing to abandon worship as God’s gift to us because we don’t like the package it comes wrapped in? These are questions that we had better start thinking about as Christians, especially as Lutheran Christians as we live in what some have come to call, ‘the last hours of this world”.
