The Meyer Minute

The Meyer Minute for February 27, 2015

I'm working on my sermon for Sunday, "Leaving Despair Behind." Following Jesus means that we're on a journey to be with Him forever in heaven. So we'll want to travel wisely and lightly, leaving unnecessary baggage behind. Since His resurrection and ascension offer us a great hope which in turn spins off little hopes for us in our daily struggles, we strive to journey in hope and leave behind despair, the opposite of hope.

 

Not easy!  Time after time, temptations to despair will still come, but the Spirit of God can raise us heavenward with hope. Martin Schalling put it this way in his hymn, “Lord, Thee I Love with All My Heart.”  "And should my heart for sorrow break . . ."   Let me interrupt the quotation to say, my heart has broken and yours has too. Our hearts are sure to break again, as much as you and I don’t want that. "And should my heart for sorrow break, my trust in Thee can nothing shake. Thou art the portion I have sought; Thy precious blood my soul has bought. Lord Jesus Christ, my God and Lord, my God and Lord, forsake me not! I trust Thy Word!"

 

"Hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given us" (Romans 5:5). Leaving despair behind!

The Meyer Minute for February 25, 2015

“Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?” (Isaiah 40:26).

“Researchers believe awe is powerful because it takes us out of our own heads. ‘Awe minimizes our individual identity and attunes us to things bigger than ourselves,’ says Paul Piff, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine.”

“Life up your eyes on high and see: who created these?”

“Awe is an emotional response to something vast, and it challenges and expands our way of seeing the world. It might be triggered by an encounter with nature, a religious experience, a concert or a political rally or sports event. We’re not likely to find it on a treadmill at the gym.” “People report having three awe experiences a week on average.”

Only three? No wonder the world around us is spiraling out of control, people seem unreasonable and willful, and we despair of any good. Only three? Maybe that’s why we Christians don’t seem different than run of the mill people. Only three awesome experiences a week?

The quotations come from an article by Elizabeth Bernstein, “Feeling Awesome: Studies Find an Emotion Has Myriad Benefits” (Wall Street Journal, February 24; D3). She calls it awe. In the Bible it’s called the “fear of the Lord.” “Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good?” (Psalm 34:11-12).

“Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?” 

The Meyer Minute for February 24, 2015

Pastor Mike Coppersmith shared an illustration about eternity. He took a tape measure, the kind a carpenter uses, and pulled the tape out only a short length. “The first half-inch is our life in this world,” he said, “and the rest is eternity” as he pulled more and more and more of the tape out. “What we do here, in this first half-inch, is our preparation for all the eternity that is to come.”

Way back in 1650 the Puritan Richard Baxter put these words on the lips of a person who didn’t think hell was a real possibility, until he found himself there. “How many weeks and months and years did I lose, which if I had improved, I might now have been happy! Could I find no time to study the work for which I had all my time? No time, among all my labors, to labor for eternity? Had I time to eat and drink and sleep and none save my soul? Could I take time to secure the world and none to try my title to heaven?”

Today I’m preaching the funeral sermon for a church member who died unexpectedly, a good, faithful Christian man.  I’m going to use Pastor Coppersmith’s illustration.  Richard Baxter summed it up this way: “Study thoroughly this one word – eternity.”

The Meyer Minute for February 23, 2015

People say, "the devil is in the details." Is that simply an expression or do you take it as a statement of fact as you go about your daily duties? Beheadings and civil unrest and so many other horrors are evidence of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, but the most important battle ground of good and evil is in your own heart. "Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death" (James 1:14-15).

God brings you forgiveness of sin through His Word and Sacraments but evil impulses remain in the Christian heart. "I have the desire to do what is right, 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" (Romans 7:18-19). Spiritual complacency is never in order; spiritual struggle is the order of every day. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12). Work it out with total dependence upon the Spirit of God in your heart struggle against sin. "We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15). Since the devil is in the details, let Jesus be in the details all the more.  

The Meyer Minute for February 19, 2015

Last Sunday I gave the children's message at church. Thirteen little ones came to front, sat down on the floor, and eagerly started talking when I asked how their Valentine's Day had been. They jabbered about what they had done at preschool for Valentine's Day, what they gave and got, what candy they ate. When I asked if their parents loved them, the consensus was that sometimes parents do, other times they don't. That was a revealing answer; sometimes parents have to show "tough love." As they grow, they'll learn, we pray, that they were blessed with total love, even when they didn't "feel the love."

Wanting to move to Jesus' love, I asked "Who loves you the mostest and the bestest?" A little blonde girl put up her hand and said, "Grandma!"  The older people in church laughed, no doubt because they knew that grandparents can indulge the little ones, don't have to do "tough love" (been there; done that), and also laughed because they knew the minister wanted the answer to be Jesus.  But that little girl, I wish I knew her name, gave a profound answer.  Our views of God are strongly shaped by our experiences with parents and grandparents. I once interviewed an adult, a Christian adult, who had been sexually abused by his father. Because of that terrible childhood, he struggles whenever he hears us fellow Christians talk about our "loving heavenly Father." "Children learn what they live." 

"Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.  Little ones to Him belong; we are weak but He is strong." Do they begin to learn that as they look up to you and me?

The Meyer Minute for February 18, 2015

There is a beer commercial, the beer is Dos Eques, that features an older man seated between two beautiful younger women in a restaurant.  The man's complexion is sun-tanned, his short beard is a mix of gray and black, and he's obviously led an adventurous life, although we know nothing about him. This mysterious man looks into the camera and says, "Stay thirsty, my friend.  Stay thirsty."

I'm sitting at my computer this Ash Wednesday morning, no sun tan, weary of winter, no beard and I have not led an adventurous life, but have lived for many years. As I have hopefully matured through my years, I look at you and say, "Stay desperate, my friend.  Stay desperate for salvation.  Use this Lent to realize that ultimately you have nothing except help and hope in God.  Stay desperate to know God's Son and the faith, hope and love that He is bringing, desperate to know Jesus Christ and the power of His resurrection in your life. Take nothing for granted.  Stay desperate, my friend, desperate for salvation."

The Meyer Minute for February 17, 2015

Today…Shrove Tuesday…Mardi Gras…and also transition time for many Christians as we voluntarily shift our spiritual mood from Christmas joy to Lent’s somber reflection upon our sin.

Early in His visible ministry, Jesus was asked why His disciples did not fast. “And Jesus said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day’” (Mark 2:19-20).

Jesus was thinking ahead to His crucifixion, a fearful time for those first disciples. Today He is alive, and this Bridegroom loves His church and we should never put aside the joy of our salvation. Lent invites us to deepen our joy by reflecting on our need for a Savior. With the terrors of ISIS, with anarchy in some city streets, with darkness deep in my heart and yours… “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 52:17). Whatever form your Lenten fast takes, let it be motivated by your heartfelt yearning to be a guest at His heavenly wedding feast.

“Therefore in our hymns we pray Thee, grant us, blessed Trinity,

At the last to keep Thine Easter with Thy faithful saints on high;

There to Thee forever singing Alleluia joyfully.”

(Lutheran Service Book, 417, 4)

The Meyer Minute for February 13, 2015

People identify themselves as “Christian.” Fine, but I’ve come to appreciate even more those who identify themselves as “followers of Jesus.” To step out the door in the morning knowing that you’re following Jesus means a day of interesting discipleship, something the static word “Christian” doesn’t convey.

Peter, James and John had no clue what was ahead when Jesus asked them to follow Him up on a mountain. “He was transfigured before them, and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus” (Mark 9:2-4). Think of yourself as following Jesus and you’re promised a radiant white experience some day to come. “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?” (Revelation 7:13).  The answer is they’re people who followed Jesus.

What to do in view of coming glory? The disciples on the mountain were terrified by the sight, the fear of God. “They were terrified, and a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son, listen to him’” (Mark 9:6-7). As you step out the door, follow wherever He will lead you today, and all the while you follow, “listen to him” in your mind and memory. He has the words of eternal life (John 6:68). “And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only” (Mark 9:8). Who knows what God has in store for you today? “No eye has seen or ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him (1 Corinthians 2:9). Follow Jesus!  

The Meyer Minute for February 12, 2015

15,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, born this day in 1809. Time tempts us to forget how raw partisan feelings were when he was assassinated on April 15, 1865.

Historian Jill Lepore reviews “Mourning Lincoln,” a new work by Martha Hodes of New York University. “Reading thousands of diaries and letters written by ordinary Americans in the days and weeks after Lincoln’s death, she (Hodes) finds little evidence of national unity in the face of tragedy; instead, she finds shock, jubilation, confusion and, above all, disagreement. In Washington, secessionists draped their houses in black crepe, not out of grief over Lincoln’s death, but out of fear. ‘Hurrah!’ one 17-year-old South Carolina girl wrote in her diary. ‘Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated!’ In Virginia, a 5- or 6-year-old freed boy asked, when he heard the news, ‘Have I got to go back to massas?’” (New York Times, February 8; Book Review)

In the same way non-historians can romanticize the past, Christians can be naïve to the cost of following Jesus in an alluring world of sinful, self-willed people. “When tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others…hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Mark 4:17-19).

“Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Indeed, historians recall us to the weary fact that the soul of humanity isn’t evolving into something better. We’re still so sinful. The One Book calls us to carry the cross of the Suffering Servant into the world the way it really is on this side of eternity.

The Meyer Minute for February 11, 2015

Desire in marriage… It’s more important than we might realize. Of course, in the run up to Valentine’s Day, desire – amorous desire – plays a key role in commercials, but that’s not what I have in mind.

“Marriage is about as good a predictor of economic success as are education, race and ethnicity, according to a 2014 study by Robert Lerman…at the University of Virginia.” And in our national concern about income inequality, “they concluded that if married households today equaled the numbers seen in 1980, ‘the growth in median income of families with children would be 44 percent higher.’ The study also found a link between the decline in the number of Americans ‘who form and maintain stable, married families’ and the growth in income inequality.’”

One reason why married couples (not living together but married) tend to do well over the long haul is desire. Louis Ulmer, 34-years-old of Anchorage, Alaska says, “Being married gives us the desire to have greater financial security and less debt. My wife and I enjoy every minute of those moments together, which in turn leads us to plan more effectively for retirement so we can continue to afford the lifestyle we want.” (New York Times, February 8; 15)

Proof that the Creator did well in designing marriage! Desire was corrupted by sin (see Genesis 3:16) but the God who selflessly loves us sanctifies the desires of husbands and wives for each other. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Husbands and wives desiring each other…Christian marriage is “rich” in blessings!