The Joshua Victor Theory

“ Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters !” (Isaiah 55:1a). Come to Jesus Christ, the Living Water! Amen! Today is Pentecost, one of the three great Jewish festivals of the Old Testament, and the day full of grace when Jesus poured out His Holy Spirit on the disciples. But I want to talk to you about one of the other of the three great Jewish festivals—the one mentioned in our Gospel reading, John 7! Because at the Feast of Tabernacles (which means tents or booths) Jesus prophesied about sending His Holy Spirit on the disciples.  So, in John 7:37, it says, “ on the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out… ”  So, if you look earlier in the chapter, you find out that this last day of the feast is referring to the Feast of Tabernacles. It was a joyful, annual holiday, rich with reminders of how they lived in tents in the wilderness as God lead them to the Promised Land. There was lots of beautiful imagery—God dwelling among His people in Hi...

            Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. 1 Peter 4 & 5 tells us that Christians are to expect fiery trials and suffering for the name of Christ, and that Christ endured the same. Jesus Christ, being God’s own Son, and suffering in the flesh Himself, changes everything for us. That God would not remain aloof and distant from our sufferings but come down under it and in the midst of it, and feel the pain, the loneliness, and the struggle of it all, is amazing. No other god has wounds.             It’s hard in the midst of suffering not to be overwhelmed by a sense of the meaninglessness or injustice of it all. On the one hand, if a person believes in God, they are troubled by the question of evil, and wonder how God could allow it. On the other hand, if a person doesn’t believe in God, it must amplify the meaning...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. The Apostle Paul was engaging in what we might call “street evangelism” in our reading from Acts 17. Paul was in Athens, Greece, the famous ancient city known in part for its great philosophers Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Paul found opportunities to speak to Jews, people at the local markets, God-fearing Gentiles, and here he goes to the Areopagus or “Mars Hill”, and found the debaters and local armchair philosophers. Everywhere he talked about faith in the True God.  Paul had to choose a different starting point with this crowd because they didn’t share the common background of the Old Testament, as the Jews and God-fearers did. Paul was provoked in his spirit--he was passionately upset--by all the idols he saw there. Worshipping false gods lowers our human dignity, because it’s a sham, and God’s first commandment is that we shall have no other gods before Him. It should stir up our e...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. 1 Peter 2 beautifully pictures our growth and sanctification in the Christian faith, and teaches what the Christian church is. We aren’t lone individuals, but members of the spiritual house of Christ.  Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation--if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.  Peter calls us back to the basics.  Infants crave pure milk because it is their life, their growth, and even the sharing of their mother’s immunity. The pure milk we crave is God’s Word. As a new Christian learns the words of faith, they start to explore what it means to trust in Jesus and follow Him. But even mature Christians still depend completely on God for salvation. Jesus used infancy as a picture of our complete dependency on God.  Jesus’ disciples frequently became competitive in an unhealthy way, glory-seeking, exalting ...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.  A rapidly growing technology in our everyday lives is Voice Recognition, which tells one person’s voice from another. They say that our “voiceprint” is unique, just like our fingerprints.  The technology is rapidly being developed, even though it’s been around since the dawn of mankind. God designed our brains to be incredible information processing systems, and all of the mind-boggling “technology” of Voice Recognition is programmed into your mind, and works without you even having to understand how!  Just because it's so ordinary and common to us that we recognize so many unique “voiceprints”--we don’t ever really stop to be amazed by the huge processing and identification task that our brains go through instantaneously when we recognize, oh, that’s mom, or dad, or my sister or my friend from work or church or wherever. Not only do we need a finely tuned and worki...

Grace, mercy, and shalom to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.  Last week we heard how Jesus re-entered the lives of His disciples in their fear and uncertainty, by bringing His peace or shalom to them by His presence. Today, we walk the Emmaus Road with two disciples, outside the inner group of 11, but clearly recognized and welcomed by the 11 whom they ran to after this encounter.  Jesus finds the Emmaus disciples, Cleopas and an anonymous disciple on a sorrowful journey home. Disillusionment and confusion filled the air as they talked about the events of that weekend. Heaviness filled their hearts. Have you been on a journey like that? Maybe recently? With that choking feeling in your throat or a heaviness in your heart? You know that familiar place down Emmaus Road. And it’s so perfect that God hid Jesus’ identity from them, while He walked along with them. Jesus listened and talked to them unnoticed, before the “big reveal” in t...