The Joshua Victor Theory

    Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. Last week in Psalm 28 we prayed with King David and felt the emotional tug of war waiting for God’s answer to prayers. Today Mark 9 is a lesson on mature discipleship, faith and prayer. A nameless father has a boy who is suffering terribly with epileptic seizures caused by a demon. The father’s faith is faltering; this has happened since childhood. The disciples’ faith appears absent, as Jesus rebukes them and the rest as a “faithless generation,” when they fail to heal him by failing to pray. Jesus seems harsh, as in several places in Mark. But the nameless father persists and his prayer is answered! Jesus lifts the nameless father and us, from faltering to faith. How do we get from faltering to faith? God will always strengthen faith when we ask for it. When it came to the power of prayer, Jesus shows the disciples failed to even use it! Before the disciples had success in casting out...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The Parable of the Sower that Jesus tells today is the first of a great series of parables in the Gospel of Luke, and describes two basic reactions to His parables. He says in verse 10, before explaining the parable, “ To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand. ’” You see, believers will hear and understand the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for unbelievers, they will actually confound them and they won’t understand. This is not just a matter of whether you “get it” or not right away—the disciples didn’t get the parable—but they asked questions to learn more. They were hearing the Word with “honest and good hearts”. Others tuned out or ignored the Word. This parable shows us why sometimes the Word of God is sown like a seed, and it grows and bears ...

Note: The following sermon is part 2 of  a 13 part series on Romans 6-14, adapted from the Series "God's Greater Story" by Rev. David Schmitt of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.               In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Last week we began our sermon series on Romans in chapter 6; how we have been Baptized into God’s Greater Story through Jesus’ death and resurrection. We learned that we are dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. This gives us a new identity in Christ Jesus, where we live not under the law, but under grace. Paul explains in 7:4, where Paul says, “My brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.” We now belong to Jesus Christ, who has been raised from the dead and now raises us to new life also. He is the “Resurrecting Christ,” wh...