If the bus for heaven pulled up outside the front doors of this church this morning and was leaving in five minutes, would you get on? That seems like it ought to be an easy one, right? Who wouldn’t get on the bus for heaven?! But it’s not that easy, is it?
Imagine that you have in front of you a standard sheet of paper, and a line runs straight down the middle of the page. One column is marked “Good”, and the other column is marked “Bad”. So you’ve got a chart in front of you with one column for good things and one column for bad things. Now, under which column are you going to place the following words: Hostility? Crush? Cursed?
By and large, the commandments are not too difficult to understand. The 1st Commandment is clear enough: You shall have no other gods. I think we all understand that means we should not fear, love, or trust in anything more than God.
Words are powerful things. You’ve heard the popular playground poem: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” False. Words can cause a whole lot of hurt. Words can do a whole lot of damage. In the book of James the human tongue is compared to a fire that can set an entire forest ablaze. With such capacity for destruction, we have to conclude that words are powerful things.
“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.” (Nicene Creed) You recognize those words, don’t you? Those words are from the Nicene Creed. We confess them together each week. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder and we confess to each other and to the world that we believe that the Holy Spirit of God is “the giver of life.”
Our text this morning is a portion of a prayer that Jesus spoke to his Father on the night he was betrayed. This prayer is often called Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer,” and in this prayer, he prays for himself and for his apostles and for his whole Christian Church on earth. It is a precious prayer to us, and we are blessed that the Holy Spirit saw fit to have this prayer recorded in the Scriptures, because in this prayer we hear what our Lord desires for his Church.
“I remember the last time I saw…” Have you ever said that? We often remember the last time we see someone, usually someone we love. We remember the last time we saw mom or dad, grandma or grandpa. Sometimes we remember exactly what they were wearing and exactly what they said to us. The image seems somehow “burned” or laser-etched into our memory.
A number of years ago I was talking to a man who had been one of my coaches in high school. Now, just to give you a window into the thinking of teenage high school boy who loved and lived sports, coaches are a “big deal.” But now, as an adult, I was talking to this man. And as our conversation ended, he called me something.
A remarkable thing took place in South Africa on December 3rd, 1967. On that day a doctor named Christiaan Barnard performed the very first human heart transplant. He removed from a patient a diseased and failing heart, and he replaced it with a strong and healthy heart.
On Sunday evening April 18, Pastor Willitz received a divine call to serve as Pastor at St. Johns in Goodhue, MN.
