The Joshua Victor Theory

  Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The Bible verse for our focus today will be Acts 2:21, “ And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved .” When you are in trouble or need help, who helps you? Who can you trust? Who are your phone contacts? Your parents or older sibling for advice. Your trusted mechanic for when the car breaks down. Your plumber for leaks, your pastor for spiritual guidance, your doctor for your health. Or in a life-or-death emergency, or when a crime is underway, you call 9-1-1 because they respond 24/7 to emergencies. Anything beyond our own wisdom, expertise, ability to care for ourselves, or above our emotional threshold—we reach out to others for help. We call upon our “helpers.” We take cell phones for granted and calling anyone in the world. It’s astonishing, when you remember that just 200 years ago, there was no such thing as a telephone, and...

    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. These are ordinary questions: “Do you read the Bible?” “How do you interpret that passage?” Now flip them around. What if I asked you: “Do you let the Bible read you?” “Are you letting this passage interpret you?” God’s living and active Word reads and interprets our lives. Sharper than any two-edged sword, God’s Word searches our hearts and minds (Heb. 4:12). The real question is how God’s Word is reading and interpreting our lives. How is God’s Word at work in us? So instead of us acting on God’s Word, God’s Word is acting on us. Let’s try this with Psalm 28, our Introit. On the one hand we could read the Psalms like a Bible study of the prayers and hymns and laments of Old Testament believers. But that wouldn’t let God’s Word “read us.” It keeps God’s Word at arm’s length. For God’s Word to “read and interpret us”, we must find ourselves, our unnamed fears and emotions in the ...

  Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. When you are watching an intense movie or reading a great book, you can instinctively tell when the plot is building to the climax. Jesus’ disciples, James and John certainly sensed something big around the corner, in Mark 10. And they weren’t wrong about that. Jesus had made His third and final prediction of His death and resurrection. He had just talked about eternal rewards, their persecution, and His own betrayal, death, and resurrection. But with the particular skill of selective hearing that we humans are best known for, James and John were caught up anticipating great things, while completely ignoring all the sacrifice and crosses on the road in between. Their request seems audacious: “ Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What do you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one a...

  People beloved by God! Grace and peace to you! I have often focused these last 6 months on themes of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. I sense it’s widespread today, and whether your anxiety and blood pressure rises with the news and ongoing pandemic, or someone who ignores the news but has enough trouble in your daily life alone—we need God’s constant reassurance that He’s with us and in control. Not unique to these times, we often wonder and pray after God’s will. We look at our personal situations and try to discern the future. What’s God doing in my life? What’s next for me? Where is this or that going? How do I know God’s will in all these things swirling around my life, big or small? Well, I’ve got news for you today. I have the inside scoop on God’s will for your life. You want to know what God’s will is in all of this? We heard it loud and clear in 1 Thessalonians 5. God’s will for you in Christ Jesus is that you “ Rejoice always, pray continually, and give thanks in al...

 Sermon notes ·          Read Introit with reference to Hebrew poetry parallelisms. Explanatory, deepening, reflective. Praying the Psalms is an exercise in meditation. Explore in this Psalm how a relationship in prayer creates a wonderful openness between us and God. May He create in us a clean spirit! ·          Context of Psalm: relationship between believer and God. Like many Psalms, shows God’s qualities and the posture of the praying believer. ·          V. 1-2 Humility and repentance before God’s judgment, seeking God’s mercy, faithfulness, righteousness. Acknowledging guilt. No false standing before God. When have you been crushed by your sin, your guilt and failure, and utter unworthiness before God? We cling to His mercy. ·          V. 5 Remember, meditate, ponder—days of old, all you have done, the work of Y...

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. Does God really hear or answer our prayers? Why does it so often seem like He is silent, or deaf to our pleas? Our Introit, Psalm 28, explores this common fear. David, some 3,000 years ago, cried out this theme, found in all the other readings as well. The fear of rejection, silence, unanswered requests…these themes show up all throughout the Bible. We’re not the only ones. It’s the common experience of faith. Faith lives in this tension between the invitation to trust God and call out to Him for help, and His seeming slowness or inaction. Faith lives in this real tension between our present struggles and how and when God will respond.             It’s the Canaanite woman’s struggle in our Gospel reading, Matthew 15. She is crying out for help for her daughter. At first Jesus won’t even answer, then His disciples try to push her aw...

  Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. Last week we left off with Jesus feeding the 5,000. Now at last Jesus gets to pray alone, filling that deep spiritual hunger to reconnect with God. Keeping our eyes on Jesus, we do well to pray with Jesus and reconnect with God in prayer, for the health and nourishment of our soul. Prayer is 24/7 reconnection to the God Who loves us and knows all our inmost thoughts and struggles, Who graciously invites us to pray, “Our Father…” When Jesus finishes praying the disciples are several miles offshore, fighting a heavy wind on the Sea of Galilee. In Job and Psalms, we read that God “ alone stretches out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea” (Job 9:8) and “The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightnings lighted up the world; the earth trembled and shook. Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen” (Psalm...