Devotions for Worship

What to Pray When You're Stuck in the Same Sin

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:56:00 +0000

There are moments in the Christian life when words completely fail you. You know what you believe. You know what you want. You know what you've been forgiven of. And yet you find yourself — again — doing the very thing you swore you were done with. The very habit you brought to confession last month, or last week, or maybe yesterday. And the frustration of that moment is almost impossible to put into language. Almost.

The Frustration That Paul Named First

Before we get to the poem I want to walk you through today, I think we need to sit for a moment in the frustration itself — because it's real, it's biblical, and it's shared by every honest believer who has ever lived. This isn't a niche problem for spiritually immature Christians. This is the condition of the baptized life on this side of eternity.

St. Paul describes it with startling rawness in Romans chapter 7. He doesn't soften it. He doesn't theologize his way around it. He just says it:

"For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate... For the good that I want to do, I do not do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do... What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:15, 19, 24, CSB)

That's the Apostle Paul. The man who wrote half the New Testament. The man who was caught up into the third heaven and heard things too sacred to repeat. And he's saying: I know what's right, I want to do what's right, and I keep doing what I hate. There is comfort in that — not the comfortable kind of comfort that lets you off the hook, but the kind that tells you you're not alone, you're not uniquely broken, and you're not outside the scope of what Scripture addresses. Paul felt this. And he had the courage to name it.

The question is: what do you do with that frustration? How do you pray when you're stuck in the same cycle? How do you even find words for a spiritual condition that feels simultaneously like guilt, helplessness, grief, and longing — all at once? That's the question I want to explore today through one of the most powerful poems in the English language.

Introducing John Donne's Batter My Heart

Last week I introduced you to John Donne, and I said then that I consider him one of the finest poets in the English language — particularly when it comes to poets who write seriously and honestly about the Christian faith. Today I want to share my favorite poem of his. It's called Batter My Heart, and it belongs to a collection known as the Holy Sonnets. It's fourteen lines long. It takes about thirty seconds to read aloud. And it may be the most honest, most theologically loaded prayer ever put into verse.

Before I read it to you, one vocabulary note. The poem contains the word fain — spelled F-A-I-N — and we simply don't use this word anymore. In older English, fain means gladly, or with deep desire. When Donne says he would be loved fain, he's saying this is what he longs for with everything in him. Keep that in mind as we go through it, because the emotional weight of that word matters enormously to what he's saying.

Here is the poem in full:

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like a usurped town to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

What an extraordinary piece of writing. Every time I read it, I find something new in it. And I think that's because Donne is reaching for something real — something that most of us live with quietly, privately, maybe even shamefully — and he's dragging it out into the light and turning it into a prayer. Let's walk through what he's actually saying.

Don't Just Knock — Break the Door Down

The poem opens with what sounds like an almost violent demand: Batter my heart. Pound on it. Don't be polite about this. And then Donne turns to God and essentially says: what you've been doing so far isn't enough. You knock. You breathe. You shine. You try to mend things. And none of it is working.

Notice the contrast he sets up — and it's deliberate and carefully constructed. On one side: knock, breathe, shine, seek to mend. On the other side: break, blow, burn, make me new. They correspond to one another almost like mirror images. Knock becomes break. Breathe becomes blow. Shine becomes burn. Seek to mend becomes make me new. Donne is saying that there are two different levels of intervention, and the gentler one — the tinkering, the patching, the incremental repair — isn't doing the job. What he actually needs is something far more radical.

Here's the image that has always struck me about this: he's not asking God to come in and touch up the paint. He's asking God to come in and tear the whole structure down to the studs. Anyone who has ever been through a serious renovation of an old house knows the difference between a cosmetic fix and a structural one. Sometimes the damage goes so deep that you can't just cover it over. You have to gut the thing and start fresh. That's what Donne is saying about himself. That's what he's saying about the human heart in its condition of sin. Don't fix the surface. Make me new all the way down.

And the reason this resonates so deeply is that many of us have tried the cosmetic approach to our sin. We've made promises to ourselves. We've mustered up willpower. We've said "this time will be different" more times than we can count. And it isn't that we're lying to ourselves — it's that we're genuinely underestimating the depth of the problem. Donne understood this. The heart doesn't need a renovation strategy. It needs resurrection.

The Occupied Town and the Captive Mayor

The second image Donne reaches for is one of the most vivid in all of English poetry, and it's also one of the most theologically precise. He says he is like a town that has been taken over by a foreign occupying power — a usurped town. It belongs by rights to someone else, but an enemy has moved in and taken control. And the rightful sovereign — God — is standing at the gates, trying to get in. And Donne, from inside, is trying to let him in. But he can't. Something is blocking it.

And then he identifies what that something is. The mayor of this town — the viceroy, the one who is supposed to be governing on God's behalf and holding the city for its rightful king — is his own reason. His own mind. And the problem is that his reason, which should be defending him and opening the gates, has been captured by the enemy. It's either weak or it's turned traitor. Either way, the mind that is supposed to know better isn't doing its job.

This is such an accurate description of what sin actually does to us. It's not that we become stupid. It's not that we stop knowing what is right. We often know exactly what is right. The problem is that knowledge alone does not produce righteousness. Paul knew this. Donne knew this. And if you're honest with yourself, you know this too. The mind can acknowledge the truth of God's commands and the goodness of God's ways and still find itself captive to something that pulls in the opposite direction. The mayor has been compromised. The defenses are down. And despite our best efforts to reason our way into better behavior, we find ourselves — again — in the same old place.

Betrothed to the Enemy

The emotional center of the poem comes in the ninth line, and it is heartbreaking in the best possible way: Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, but am betrothed unto your enemy. This is the cry of someone who genuinely loves God — not just someone going through the motions, not just someone performing religious obligation — but someone who actually, deeply, desires God. And yet, in the same breath, he has to confess that he is bound to something else. He is, by nature, by the condition of his fallen humanity, pledged to the enemy.

This takes us all the way back to Genesis 3:15, when God confronts Adam and Eve in the garden after the fall. He speaks to the serpent and says: I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. God is announcing that he is going to drive a wedge between humanity and the devil. He is going to establish hostility where there had been, in the moment of the fall, a fatal alliance. But the implication of what God is saying — and what Donne is picking up on — is that by nature, by the gravitational pull of our fallen condition, we are inclined toward the ways of the devil, the world, and our own sinful flesh. The wedge has to be driven from outside. It cannot come from within us.

Donne feels this with full weight. He's not standing at a theological distance from it, analyzing it clinically. He's living inside it. He loves God. He would fain be loved by God in return. And yet he finds himself more deeply connected to God's enemy than to God himself. And so his prayer becomes: break that bond. Divorce me from it. Untie it. Shatter it. Do whatever it takes — because I cannot do it myself.

Notice that word again in "break that knot again." That single word carries an enormous amount of weight. It's an acknowledgment that this has happened before. God has broken this bond before — in the waters of baptism, in the moment of conversion, in the times of genuine repentance. And here Donne is, needing it broken again. This is not a confession of faithlessness on God's part. It's an honest reckoning with the reality that we keep wandering back. We keep drifting. We keep finding ourselves re-tangled in the very things we thought we were free from. The grace of God is not a one-time fix that holds forever without any further need. We come back. We need to be forgiven again. We need that knot broken again. And the mercy of God is that he does it — again, and again, and again.

The Freedom of Being Imprisoned

The final movement of the poem is the one that stops most readers in their tracks, because it sounds paradoxical to the point of contradiction. Donne says: Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Imprison me. Enslave me — that's what enthrall means in the older sense, to take someone as a captive. And yet this imprisonment is the only path to freedom. This being taken captive is the only way to be truly free. How does that work?

It works because of what we've already established about the human will. We talk sometimes about free will, and there is something real being pointed at when we use that language. But here is the honest theological truth that Donne is pressing into: in our sinful condition, our will is not neutral. It is not standing in an open field, equally able to go left or right. It is already bent. It already has a gravity pulling it toward sin, toward the world, toward the enemy. And so when we exercise our so-called free will in that condition, we are not exercising freedom — we are following the pull of our captivity without realizing it. Real freedom doesn't look like being left alone to do whatever feels natural. Real freedom looks like being reoriented, redirected, taken hold of by someone stronger than the thing that was pulling us down.

This is why Paul can write in Romans 6 about being slaves to righteousness and call that freedom. Not because slavery is good — but because when the alternative is being enslaved to sin and death, being held captive by Christ is the only freedom that actually deserves the name. Donne is praying for that. He's not asking God to leave him alone with his willpower. He's asking God to overwhelm him. To take him. To make him his, even against the resistance of his own compromised nature.

And the final image — nor ever chaste, except you ravish me — is startling, and deliberately so. It's a word that carries the full weight of being seized, overcome, taken with wild and complete abandon. And Donne is saying: purity, holiness, chasteness — these are not things I can manufacture from within. The only way I will ever be truly pure is if God seizes me so completely that there is no room left for anything else. It is a prayer of total surrender, yes — but more than that, it is a confession that surrender itself is something I cannot produce on my own. Even the surrendering requires God to move first.

What This Poem Teaches Us to Pray

So what do we do with all of this? I think Donne gives us something genuinely useful — not just as a piece of literature to admire, but as a model for how to pray when we are stuck in the same cycle of sin and confession and sin again.

First, he gives us permission to be honest. There is no pretending in this poem. There is no performance of spiritual progress. There is just the raw, unflinching acknowledgment of where he actually is: loving God, wanting God, and bound to the enemy by something he cannot break through his own effort. If you have been carrying that frustration quietly — afraid to name it, afraid it means you're not really saved, afraid it means you haven't tried hard enough — Donne's prayer says: name it. Bring it into the open before God. God is not surprised by your honesty. He was there when it happened.

Second, Donne teaches us to ask for the right thing. So much of our praying about persistent sin sounds like we're asking God for better willpower — as though the problem is just effort, and with a little more divine assistance, we could get our act together. Donne asks for something entirely different. He asks to be remade. He asks for the kind of intervention that doesn't just patch the problem but tears the whole structure down and rebuilds it from the foundation. That is a fundamentally different prayer. It is a prayer that takes seriously both the depth of the problem and the extent of God's power to deal with it.

Third, this poem points us — as all honest theology eventually does — toward what Christ has already done. The answer to Paul's cry in Romans 7 — Who will rescue me from this body of death? — is not a technique or a program or a moral framework. It's a person. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. The victory over sin and death has been won. It is a cosmic battle, and Christ has come out the other side holding the victory. The catechism says it as plainly as anything can be said: Christ has redeemed us so that we might live under him in his kingdom, in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. That is the destination. That is what Donne's prayer is reaching toward. Not just relief from guilt, but total transformation — being made entirely new in Christ.

A Prayer Worth Praying

The next time you find yourself in that familiar frustration — the same confession, the same failure, the same desperate desire to be different — I want you to remember Donne's prayer. Not as a magic formula, but as a model for the kind of honesty and the kind of radical asking that the Christian life actually calls for.

Don't just ask God to knock. Ask him to break, blow, burn, and make you new. Don't just ask for a little help managing the sin you keep returning to. Ask God to sever that bond entirely — to divorce you from the enemy's grip and imprison you in a freedom you could never build for yourself. Ask to be seized by a love so complete, so overwhelming, so entirely beyond your own capacity to manufacture, that there is simply no room left for anything else.

That is an enormous prayer. It is almost terrifying to pray it, if you think about what you're actually asking for. But it is the right prayer. It is the honest prayer. And it is the prayer that a good God — a three-personed God who has already broken down the door of death itself to get to you — is more than capable of answering.

So here is the question worth sitting with this week: Is there something in your life that you have been asking God to help you manage, when what you really need to ask is for him to make you completely new? What would it look like to pray Donne's prayer — not as poetry, but as your own honest cry — over that very thing?

Nor Can Death Kill Me

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 19:31:20 +0000

There are things that terrify us, and then there is death — the thing that terrifies us most. And for centuries, poets, pastors, philosophers, and ordinary people have tried to find words that are big enough to stand up to it. Most of those attempts fall a little flat. The words feel inadequate, the comfort feels thin, and death just keeps doing what death does. But once in a while, someone writes something so compact, so precise, so theologically charged and emotionally honest, that it doesn't just describe the reality of death — it talks back to it. It gets in death's face. That's exactly what John Donne does in his famous Holy Sonnet, Death Be Not Proud. And I think it's worth sitting with this poem for a few minutes, because it has something to say to every one of us.

Why Poetry Matters — Especially for People of Faith

I want to acknowledge something right up front: if you heard the word "poetry" and your first instinct was to click away, I understand. My relationship with poetry has been complicated too. I remember reading those sing-songy little ditties in grade school — the kind that are clever and fun and bounce along on rhyme. Those were enjoyable enough. Then high school happened, and suddenly poetry became something you decoded rather than something you experienced. I'd be staring at a page trying to figure out what on earth the poet was trying to say, and it felt more like homework than anything that could actually move you. Even now, when I read something by T.S. Eliot, I find myself constantly reaching for a dictionary, and that constant interruption pulls you right out of whatever experience the poem was trying to create.

But as an adult, and especially as a pastor and theologian, I've come to see poetry differently. What I've grown to appreciate most is this: good poetry takes a very large topic — grief, love, mortality, hope, the nature of God — and it compresses it down into a small, beautifully constructed package where every single word has to carry its weight. There's no room for filler. There's no space to meander. You have to say exactly the right thing, in exactly the right order, and say it in a way that sticks. That discipline, that compression, is actually a profound form of respect for the subject matter. When a poet writes about death, they're not writing a textbook chapter. They're trying to hold something enormous in the palm of their hand and show it to you.

And here's the thing: as Christians, we're already deeply embedded in poetry, whether we realize it or not. The largest single book in the Bible is Psalms — and it is entirely poetry. Not prose with a poetic feel, but actual, structured Hebrew poetry. When the prophets speak their oracles, a great deal of what they say comes to us in poetic form. And when you sit in the pew on a Sunday morning and you open a hymnal and you sing — if you stripped the music away from those hymns, what you'd have left is a poem. The words of "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," the words of "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," the words of "Beautiful Savior" — those are poems. Lutheran hymnody, in particular, has always been deeply theological precisely because it is deeply poetic. Martin Luther himself was a poet. He understood that rhythm and rhyme help truth stick in the mind in a way that plain prose sometimes cannot.

So poetry is not a detour from serious theological thinking. It is one of the primary vehicles through which the church has always done its most serious theological thinking. Keeping that in mind changes the way we approach a poem like Death Be Not Proud.

Who Was John Donne?

John Donne lived from 1572 to 1631, and if you ever get a chance to read a short biography of him, I'd encourage it — his life was genuinely remarkable. He was a scholar, a soldier, a politician, and eventually a priest. He was born into a Roman Catholic family in Protestant England, which, if you know anything about that particular historical moment, was not a comfortable or safe thing to be. There was active persecution of Catholics in England during this period. Growing up under that kind of pressure — holding a faith that the surrounding culture regarded with suspicion and sometimes open hostility — shaped Donne in significant ways.

Later in life, he became a clergyman in the Church of England, which means he, in some sense, crossed the confessional divide that had defined his childhood. Whatever we make of that personally, what's clear is that Donne was a man who thought deeply and seriously about faith, about the church, about what it means to live and die as a Christian in a fallen world. He wasn't writing from a comfortable distance. He had encountered persecution, loss, professional hardship, and the death of people he loved. When he wrote about death, he knew what he was writing about.

Donne wrote across a wide range of subjects. Some of his poems are love poems. Some are meditations on nature. But the collection that concerns us here is a series he wrote called the Holy Sonnets — fourteen-line poems in which he wrestles directly with God, with faith, with sin, and with mortality. These are not polite devotional verses. These are intense, muscular, sometimes almost confrontational poems written by a man who is not willing to let easy answers stand in the place of hard truths. Death Be Not Proud is probably the most famous poem he ever wrote, and it sits squarely at the center of everything the Holy Sonnets are trying to do.

The Poem Itself

Let me read it to you in full, and then we'll walk through it together.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

There it is. Fourteen lines. A sonnet. And in those fourteen lines, Donne manages to do something that whole volumes of theology sometimes struggle to accomplish — he makes the Christian hope of resurrection feel not just intellectually credible, but viscerally defiant. He doesn't just believe in life after death. He is angry at death's pretensions. He's offended by death's swagger. And he's writing to set the record straight.

The Sound of Defiance

One of the first things you notice when you read this poem aloud — and it really is meant to be read aloud — is the sound of it. The opening lines are percussive in a way that is unmistakably intentional. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful. Listen to those hard D sounds hammering through the line. Death. Dreadful. Dost. Die. Poor Death. Donne is doing something very deliberate here. That repeated percussive consonant creates a drumbeat, a rhythm that drives the argument forward and lodges it in your memory. It's almost like a gavel coming down. He is pronouncing a verdict, and he wants you to feel the weight of each syllable.

This is one of the things poetry can do that plain prose simply cannot. The sound of the language becomes part of the meaning. The rhythm is not decoration. It is argument. When you feel that hammering D sound, you feel the poem's central posture — which is indignation. Donne is not whispering comfort into the ear of a grieving friend. He is squaring his shoulders and speaking directly to death itself, and he is not impressed.

And then, right in the heart of that opening movement, comes the line that is really the core of the entire poem: nor yet canst thou kill me. That is an extraordinary statement. Not "thou wilt not kill me forever" or "thou wilt kill me, but it won't be the end." He says: you cannot kill me. Not really. Not ultimately. Death thinks it has power over the believer, but Donne is saying — leaning fully into his Christian faith and hope — that what looks like death's victory is not actually a victory at all. Even in dying, the believer does not fall into death's hands. They fall into God's.

Rest, Sleep, and What Death Actually Offers

Donne spends the middle section of the poem essentially demoting death. He does this by pointing out what death actually delivers — and then noting that what it delivers is not so terrifying after all, when you see it clearly through the lens of Scripture.

He calls rest and sleep "pictures" of death — images or foretastes of what dying is like. And notice what he does with that. If rest and sleep — which are merely shadows, merely pictures of death — bring us real pleasure, real refreshment, real relief from the weight of the day, then how much more must the thing they picture bring? If the photograph of a place is beautiful, how much more beautiful must the place itself be?

The Bible regularly uses the language of rest and sleep when it speaks of death. You see it in the Psalms. You see it in the New Testament, where Paul speaks of those who have "fallen asleep" in Christ — see, for instance, 1 Thessalonians 4:13–14. This is not euphemism designed to soften a hard truth. It is theological description. It is telling us something real about what death is for those who die in Christ — it is rest. It is the laying down of a burden that has grown very heavy. It is, as Donne puts it, "rest of their bones, and soul's delivery." The soul is delivered. Set free. No longer chained to the sin and struggle and suffering of life in a fallen world.

There is something profoundly pastoral about this image. Think about the people you have loved who died in exhaustion — worn out by illness, worn down by years, tired in a way that sleep could no longer fully address. To say that their death was rest — real, deep, lasting rest — is not wishful thinking. It is the promise of God applied to a broken body and a weary soul. Donne is not minimizing the grief of loss. He is placing that grief inside a larger story, one where rest is not a metaphor but a reality.

The Smallness of Death's World

Having established what death actually offers, Donne then turns to look at the world death actually inhabits — and it is not an impressive neighborhood. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, and dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell. Read that slowly. Death does not reign. Death serves. Death is a slave — a slave to the random forces of this world, to the cruelty of powerful men, to the blind accidents of fate, to the slow misery of disease. Death doesn't choose its moments with authority. It lurks in the scummy corners of human existence, dependent on the worst things this world has to offer in order to do its work.

There is something almost pitiful about death when Donne describes it this way. Death is not a king. Death is an instrument of other powers, a tool used by forces that are themselves subject to the greater power of God. And then Donne adds the final insult: even a simple drug, a bit of poppy — opium — can make a person sleep just as well as death can. So even in the one thing death is supposed to be good at, it's not uniquely impressive. Sleep does the same thing, and sleep you wake up from.

Which brings Donne to his closing argument, and it is devastating in its simplicity: One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

One Short Sleep

Notice the proportion Donne assigns to death. One short sleep. He is not denying the reality of dying. He is not pretending grief isn't real or that the grave isn't real. He is giving death its proper scale — which, measured against eternity, is very small indeed. What feels to us like an ending, what feels like the full stop at the end of everything, is — in the grammar of God's story — closer to a comma. A pause. A brief rest before the next and better chapter begins.

When we wake eternally, Jesus raises us from the dead to live with him in everlasting glory. This is not a vague spiritual notion. This is the bodily resurrection that stands at the center of Christian faith — the same resurrection that 1 Corinthians 15:54–57 announces with the words "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" Donne is drawing on that same great biblical tradition when he writes his final line. When death shall be no more — and Donne is echoing here the vision of Revelation 21:4, where God himself wipes every tear from every eye and declares that death shall be no more — death itself will die.

That is the great reversal. Death, which thought itself so mighty, which has been shadowing human beings since the garden, which has taken everyone we have ever loved — death will itself be killed. By the One who died and rose again. By Jesus, whose resurrection is not simply proof that he was who he claimed to be, but is the first installment of the new creation, the guarantee and down payment of our own resurrection. Because he lives, we shall live also — see John 14:19. Death, thou shalt die.

What Donne Shows Us About Living with Mortality

One of the things I find most striking about this poem is how directly it engages with the reality of death rather than sidestepping it. We live in a culture that has become very skilled at putting distance between ourselves and death. People used to die at home, in their own beds, surrounded by their families. The body would be tended to by the family — washed, prepared, cared for in those final hours and days. Death was intimate, present, unavoidable. Now, more often than not, death happens in a hospital or a nursing home or a hospice, and the body is almost immediately placed in the care of professionals. We have funeral homes precisely so that families don't have to be in close contact with the physical reality of what has happened. None of that is wrong — there is compassion and care in those professional services. But the cumulative effect is that many of us have reached adulthood with very little actual experience of the nearness of death, and so when it comes close — when someone we love is dying, or when we face the possibility of our own death — we are underprepared.

Donne wrote in a time when that distance was simply not available. Death came into your home. You watched people die. You handled their bodies. And yet — or perhaps because of that — he could write with this kind of fierce, clear-eyed confidence. He is not writing from ignorance of what death looks like up close. He is writing from full knowledge of it, and declaring that even so, even knowing all of that, his faith is stronger than his fear. The resurrection of Jesus Christ changes the calculus. It changes what death means, what it can claim, and what it cannot touch.

That is the poem's great gift to us. Not a way of avoiding the grief of loss — Donne doesn't pretend grief doesn't exist. But a frame, a posture, a way of standing in the face of death that is rooted not in denial but in the deepest possible theological confidence. Jesus has died to pay for our sins. He has defeated death by rising from the dead. He promises everlasting life to those who trust in him. And in light of all of that, we can look death in the eye and say what Donne says — you are not as powerful as you think you are. Nor can you kill me. Not really. Not finally.

A Poem to Carry With You

I want to encourage you to do something with this poem. Don't just read it once and move on. Read it again, slowly, aloud if you can. Let the sound of those percussive D's work on you. Let the rhythm of the argument settle in your mind. Think about the people in your life who have died — those who died trusting in Christ — and hear the poem say of them what it says: they are at rest. Their bones are at rest. Their souls have been delivered. Think about your own mortality — which every one of us carries with us, even when we're not paying attention to it — and hear the poem say what God's Word says: one short sleep, and you wake eternally. Death, for the believer, is not the end of the story. It is the threshold of a better one.

Good poetry does something that a straightforward doctrinal statement sometimes struggles to do — it makes truth feel true, not just sound true. It takes what you already believe in your mind and moves it somewhere closer to your heart. Death Be Not Proud does exactly that. It takes the resurrection hope that you and I confess every time we say the Creed — "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting" — and it makes it feel like something worth being indignant about, worth insisting upon, worth saying out loud in the face of everything that tries to terrify you.

So here is the question I'll leave you with: how does this poem change the way you think about death — either your own death or the deaths of those you love? Is there someone in your life right now who is facing that reality, either in anticipation or in grief? What would it look like to carry this poem's posture — not denial, not forced cheerfulness, but genuine theological defiance rooted in the resurrection — into that conversation, that hospital room, that graveside? Death, thou shalt die. That is not wishful thinking. That is the promise of the living God, dressed up in fourteen lines of some of the most beautiful English ever written.

Your Giving Reveals What You Actually Believe

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:33:47 +0000

What does your giving actually reveal about you? Not what you say you believe about God — what your giving reveals. That's an uncomfortable question, and it's the one that keeps surfacing as we bring this stewardship series to a close. Because here's the thing: you can say all the right words about trusting God, about believing He is Provider and Father and Sustainer, and then the offering plate comes around and an entirely different set of convictions shows up. The one that actually runs the show isn't always the one you'd put on a statement of faith. Your giving — or your withholding — has a way of telling the truth about what you actually believe when things get real.

If you've been with us through this series, you've heard us talk about giving as an act of grace, about percentage giving as a discipline, and about what it looks like to be a genuinely cheerful giver. This final piece pulls all of that together and gets at the foundation underneath all of it. Because all the mechanics of giving — the percentages, the budgets, the pledges — those are just forms. What fills those forms with life or drains them of it is faith. Specifically: do you actually believe that God will provide for you?

An Unexpected Teacher

I want to start with a quote from someone you might not expect to hear in a stewardship conversation. Carl Sagan — the astronomer, the atheist, the man who famously described humanity as living on a pale blue dot in an indifferent cosmos — once said something worth sitting with. He said, to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Think about that for a moment. It's a striking observation. To make a simple apple pie, you need apples — but you didn't make apples. You need cinnamon — but you didn't make cinnamon. You need sugar, flour, butter — none of which you produced from nothing. Every ingredient you reach for in your pantry has a history that goes back further than you can trace, built on resources and processes and raw materials that existed long before you arrived on the scene. Everything we call "ours" was here before us, shaped by forces outside our control, and handed to us in one form or another. Sagan meant this as a meditation on the deep interconnectedness of the physical universe. It's an honest observation from a materialist.

But as Christians, we get to go somewhere Sagan didn't. We know where the universe came from. We know the God of apples. We know the God of cinnamon. We know the God who spoke the cosmos into existence, who designed the seasons and the soil and the seed — and who made us. That changes everything about how we relate to what we think of as "our" stuff. If God made the universe that made the apple that made the pie, then at some level, everything we have traces back to Him. We didn't earn our way into existence. We didn't bootstrap ourselves into the world. We were placed here, given life, given capacity, given resources — and entrusted with them. That word matters: entrusted. Not just given. Entrusted.

What Paul Says About God's Provision

The Apostle Paul was dealing with exactly these questions when he wrote to the church in Corinth. The Corinthians were not a poor congregation — they lived in a prosperous city, and Paul had been encouraging them in their giving toward the collection for the struggling saints in Jerusalem. And as he makes his appeal, he grounds it not in guilt, not in obligation, not in a fundraising strategy, but in the character of God. Listen to what he writes in 2 Corinthians 9:8–11:

And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. As it is written, "He has distributed freely, he has given to the poor; his righteousness endures forever." He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God.

Notice how Paul frames this. He doesn't say, "Give generously because you have enough to spare." He says, "God is able to make all grace abound to you." The giving flows downstream of God's action, not ours. God is the supplier of the seed. God is the one who multiplies it. God is the one who increases the harvest. What Paul is asking the Corinthians to do is to enter into that reality — to act in accordance with who God actually is — rather than to hoard and hedge as if God's provision were uncertain.

And then Paul asks the question that cuts to the heart of all of this, and I want to press on it the same way he does: Do we believe this?

Can Versus Will: The Real Question

Here's where it gets honest. Most of us, if asked whether God can provide for us, would say yes without blinking. Of course He can. He made the universe from nothing. He parted the Red Sea. He raised Jesus from the dead. Saying "God can't provide for me" would feel almost audacious in its absurdity. We don't struggle with God's ability.

We struggle with His willingness. We struggle with whether He will provide for us — for me, specifically, in my situation, with my expenses and my anxieties and my uncertain future. That's the real question, and it's a question of trust, not just theology. It's one thing to affirm in a creed that God is Creator and Provider. It's something else entirely to write a check that reflects that belief, or to give generously when your bank account tells a story of scarcity, or to loosen your grip on financial security because you actually trust that the Father who gave His Son will not fail to also give you everything you need.

Look, there's a deeply human voice in all of us that says: I've got to look out for myself, because nobody else will. That voice is not crazy — it's responding to real evidence. There are real struggles out there. There is real suffering. There are real trials that come into our lives, and sometimes they come hard and without warning. The evidence, viewed at street level, can genuinely look like God is not on top of it. I'm not going to minimize that. But the promise of Scripture — the promise Paul is anchoring the Corinthians to — is that even in the midst of suffering, even in seasons of lack, God is at work for the good of those who love Him. He is not absent. He is not indifferent. He is a Father who loves His children so extravagantly that He gave His only begotten Son for them. If He did that, the promise that He will provide is not an empty one.

Faith Takes Hold of Promises, Not Proofs

Here's a phrase I keep coming back to: faith takes hold of God's promises, not His proofs. This matters enormously when we talk about giving.

Salvation itself is something that we hold by faith. Yes, there is historical evidence — the empty tomb, the eyewitness testimony, the changed lives of the apostles. But no one can hand you a laboratory-grade proof of the resurrection that bypasses the need for faith. We receive it as a promise from a God who has shown Himself trustworthy, and we walk forward on that basis. The same logic applies to how we live our daily lives, including how we handle our money and our possessions. We do not wait for God to prove that He will provide before we give. We give because we trust the One who promised — and then we discover, often in hindsight, that He was faithful all along.

That doesn't mean God's faithfulness always looks the way we expected. And this is important to say clearly: God blesses the faith-filled life, but He blesses it on His terms, not ours. Sometimes He blesses it with the tangible things we hoped for — the provision we needed showing up when we needed it. Sometimes He blesses it with difficulty that stretches our faith and produces in us a deeper trust than the easy seasons ever could. Sometimes He blesses it by bringing us home to Himself in glory, which from His perspective is the greatest blessing of all, even if it doesn't feel that way to the people we leave behind. But He blesses it. That is the promise. And giving from faith means we act on that promise before we see all the outcomes.

What It Looks Like to Give From Faith

So what does it actually look like, concretely, to give from faith rather than from fear or obligation? Let me walk through several dimensions of this.

We give from faith when we recognize that what we have is entrusted to us, not merely given to us.

There's a subtle but significant difference between those two things. A gift you receive is yours to do with as you please. Something entrusted to you carries with it a responsibility — a relationship with the one who entrusted it. Our lives, our time, our bodies, our money, our capacities — all of it has been entrusted to us by our Father in heaven. He isn't standing at a distance, indifferent to what we do with it. He cares. He invested in us. And recognizing that changes how loosely or tightly we hold on to what we think of as "ours." When we're good stewards of what's been entrusted to us, we're not just being financially responsible. We're living out a relationship.

We give from faith when we trust that God genuinely desires good for us.

The ultimate proof of that is the cross — God did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all. That is the measure of how much He desires good for His people. But the good He desires for us isn't limited to eternal salvation. Sometimes the good He desires for us in this life is the joy of generosity itself — the experience of being a blessing to someone else, of seeing grace land in a person's life and knowing that our giving was part of how that happened. That's a genuine gift. God does not give us the capacity to be generous and then begrudge us the joy of it. He wants us to experience the freedom and the delight that comes from an open hand.

We give from faith when we believe that our earthly lives can serve the kingdom of heaven.

We are sinners who have received grace. We live in a world full of sinners who haven't found it yet — or who once knew it and drifted away. The work of the church is to bring grace to those people. That happens in two directions: inward and outward. Inward, toward the people of God who come through the doors every week needing to hear again that their sins are forgiven. Needing to receive that forgiveness made tangible in the Lord's Supper. Needing to be pointed back to their baptism and reminded: right there, God washed you and made you His own. That work is not optional for believers. We need it. I need it. The preaching and the sacraments and the community of the church are not add-ons to the Christian life — they are the means through which God keeps delivering grace to us. And when we believe that, we want to support it.

But the message of the Gospel is not only for those already inside. We want it to reach outward — to people who have never heard that they are loved by a God who bled for them, who have never experienced the freedom that comes with real forgiveness. When we give to support the outward reach of the church, we're giving from faith that this message is worth spreading, that people's lives — and eternities — hang in the balance.

We give from faith when we push back against the effects of sin in the world.

Sin does damage. The brokenness we see in the world — hunger, poverty, suffering, loneliness — is not the way God designed things. The kingdom of God is first and foremost about forgiveness and salvation, but it also reaches into the physical needs of our neighbors. When we give to relieve those needs, we're not just doing charitable work. We're acting as agents of the kingdom, pushing back against what sin has broken, being light in darkness. We do it because we believe that God cares about the whole person — body and soul — and that our giving can be part of how He meets people where they are.

We give from faith when we trust that God provides not just for this life, but for the resurrection.

Here's the thing that shifts everything about how we relate to money and possessions and security: we are going somewhere. No one gets out of this life alive — that's just the honest truth. But because Jesus died and was buried and rose from the dead, those who are connected to Him by faith know that death is not the end. He is going to raise us on the last day, together with all believers, to live with Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. That's the destination. And when that truth actually settles into us — when we believe it not just as a doctrine but as our actual future — it fundamentally reorders what we value. We begin to hold the good things of this life with a lighter grip. We begin to long for what God promises beyond this life even more than what we cling to within it. That shift in perspective is one of the most powerful generators of genuine generosity there is. You simply cannot be both white-knuckled about your earthly security and open-handed in your giving at the same time. Faith in the resurrection loosens the grip.

The Motive Underneath the Mechanics

Every dimension of giving that we've discussed in this series — giving as an act of grace, percentage giving, cheerful giving — all of it finds its source here. The mechanics of giving are only as meaningful as the faith that animates them. A tithe given out of guilt is very different from a tithe given out of trust. A pledge card signed to meet a budget goal is very different from a pledge card signed because you actually believe God's promises and want to participate in His work. The outward action can look identical. The inner reality is entirely different.

And this is why Paul, before he ever gives practical instructions about the collection, grounds everything in the character of God and the promise of His provision. Because if you don't actually believe that God will provide, then every dollar you give feels like a dollar subtracted from your security, and generosity becomes a losing proposition. But if you believe — really believe — that the God who supplies seed to the sower will supply and multiply your giving and increase the harvest of your righteousness, then generosity looks like something entirely different. It looks like participating in a reality that is already underway, partnering with a God who is already at work, and trusting that what goes out from your open hand does not leave you poorer in any way that ultimately matters.

Remember what He was willing to give for you. He purchased and won you not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and His innocent suffering and death. That is what He thought you were worth. That is the measure of His generosity toward you. Everything we give in return — every dollar, every hour, every act of service — is a small response to that immeasurable gift. We give back to Him for the sake of our own hearts, so that we would stay in right relationship with the God who loves us. We give for the sake of our children, so that the ministry that has meant so much to us will still be there for them. We give for the sake of our neighbors, so that the grace we have received might find its way to them. And we even give for our own sake — because returning to the gathering of believers, receiving the Word and the Supper, being pointed again to our baptism, these are the very means by which God keeps giving us the gift of forgiveness, over and over, every time we need it.

So here's the question to sit with this week: Where, honestly, is your giving coming from right now — faith or fear? Not as a guilt trip, but as a genuine invitation to examine what you actually believe. Take it to God in prayer. Ask Him to grow your trust in His promises. Ask Him to loosen the grip of anxiety and self-protection so that something better — something freer, something more joyful — can take its place. Because giving that flows from genuine faith in a generous God is not a burden. It is, in the end, one of the most freeing things we can do.

What Do You Have That You Did Not Receive?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:17:16 +0000

What do you have that you didn't receive? Sit with that question for a moment before you answer it too quickly. Because the honest answer — the one that takes some courage to say out loud — is: nothing. Not a single thing. And once that truth really lands, it changes the way we hold everything we think is ours.

We're in the middle of a stewardship series here at Gloria Dei, and over the past few weeks we've been spending time in 2 Corinthians chapters 8 and 9. Paul is writing to the church at Corinth about their giving — specifically about a collection he's been organizing for the struggling believers in Jerusalem. But what he writes in the process goes far deeper than a fundraising appeal. He gets at something that cuts right to the heart of what it means to live in relationship with a generous God. This week I want to focus in on just two verses from 2 Corinthians 9, but before we get there, I want to spend some time on the foundation that makes those verses make sense.

Stewardship Starts With a Recognition

Here's the core of what stewardship actually is: it's a recognition. It's the recognition that God has not simply handed us things and walked away. He has entrusted things to us. That's a different relationship than ownership. An owner can do whatever they want with what they have. A steward holds something on behalf of someone else — carefully, responsibly, with the original owner always in mind.

Now, I know that can feel a little abstract. So let me bring it down to earth with something that generated a lot of controversy when it was first said, but that I think has a genuinely good point buried inside it. When President Obama was president, he gave a speech about the success of businesses in the United States, and he made the argument — uncomfortable as it was for a lot of people to hear — that business success isn't built solely by the individual. It's built on a whole infrastructure that everyone shares: roads, transportation systems, communication networks, bridges, the legal frameworks that make commerce possible. None of those things belong to any single business owner. They belong to all of us, collectively, and we all get to use them.

Now, was that a politically charged moment? Sure. Did a lot of people react badly to how it was framed? Yes. But strip away the politics and there's something true there that's worth holding onto. The lone self-made person who built everything entirely from scratch, owing nothing to anyone — that's not really how any of this works. We are all, in some sense, beneficiaries of systems and structures and relationships and histories we didn't create.

And that's just at the human level. When you start thinking about it theologically, the picture becomes even clearer. You didn't create yourself. You didn't choose your natural gifts. You didn't manufacture that mind of yours or build those hands from nothing. Maybe you've spent years developing your skills, and that matters — hard work and discipline are real things, and God honors them. But if you peel the layers back far enough, every single capacity you have to work, to think, to love, to earn, to create — it all comes from somewhere. It all comes from Someone. Everything you have and everything you are comes from God. Full stop.

And here's the beautiful thing that follows from that: because God has been so lavishly generous with us, we are invited — urged, even — to give back to him joyfully and generously, so that other people can experience the same love and mercy we've received. That's the whole arc of stewardship. It starts with receiving, and it flows outward into giving.

What Paul Actually Says

So with that foundation in place, let's look at the two verses I want to focus on. In 2 Corinthians 9, verses 6 and 7, Paul writes:

The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

Paul reaches for farming language here, and I think it's worth staying with that image a little longer than we might be tempted to. Imagine two gardeners. One plants two tomato plants. The other plants twelve. Come harvest time, who do you think is going home with more tomatoes? It's not complicated. More seed in the ground means more potential for growth, more abundance at the end of the season.

Or think about investing — which is really just a modern version of the same concept. If you put money into the market and let it work over time, a larger initial investment has the potential to generate a larger return. That's not a guarantee, and Paul isn't making a prosperity gospel argument here. He's not saying "give more so God will make you rich." The harvest he's talking about is the kingdom harvest — the fruit of lives changed, community strengthened, the gospel carried further because the church was resourced to carry it. The point is that generous sowing leads to generous reaping, and stingy sowing leads to a thin harvest.

But then Paul pivots immediately to something that might seem to cut against the farming logic. He doesn't say, "So give as much as possible to maximize the return." He says each person must give as they have decided in their own heart. Not reluctantly. Not under compulsion. Why? Because the motivation matters just as much as the action. God is not interested in money extracted from people through guilt or arm-twisting. He is looking for hearts that give freely, lovingly, because they understand what they've received.

The Heart Behind the Gift

That phrase — "as he has decided in his heart" — is worth unpacking carefully. Paul is saying that giving is, at its core, a heart decision. It flows from what you believe about God, what you've experienced of his generosity, and how you understand your own life in light of his grace. When you look at who God is and what he has done for you, and your response is to say "I love you, Lord, and I want to give back to you from everything you've entrusted to me" — that's the kind of giving Paul is describing.

In the Old Testament, when God's people drifted from him, one of the things he said again and again was that their hearts had grown far from him. They were going through religious motions — offering sacrifices, keeping certain rituals — but their hearts weren't in it. The form was there; the substance was gone. And God was unimpressed. He didn't want their empty ritual. He wanted their hearts.

There's a striking passage in Ezekiel — Ezekiel 36:26 — where God promises to take the hearts of stone from his people and give them hearts of flesh. That image has stayed with me. A heart of stone can't really feel the weight of what it's holding. It can't be moved. It can't be tender. It goes through the motions of life without actually being alive to what's happening. A heart of flesh, on the other hand — that's a heart that can be touched. That's a heart that responds. That's a heart that can feel gratitude and act on it.

And honestly, that's what happens to us sometimes in our relationship with the things of this world. Our hearts get calloused. The weight of financial pressure, the scramble to make ends meet, the constant noise of a culture that tells us we never have enough — all of it can work on us quietly until we find that our grip on our stuff has gotten tighter and our sense of God's generosity has gotten dimmer. It's not dramatic. It's gradual. And that's exactly why Paul frames this as a heart matter. Because the issue of giving is really an issue of the heart, and the heart needs tending.

When we give back to God, we're not just moving money. We're making a statement about who we trust. We're declaring that our lives belong to him, that our security is in him, that we believe he is who he says he is. It's an act of surrender as much as it is an act of generosity. We're giving him ourselves.

No Arm-Twisting. Full Stop.

I want to be very direct about something, because I think it matters. As a pastor, I'll be honest with you: when you start talking about money and church, there is a temptation to lean into guilt. And I understand why that temptation exists, because sometimes people respond to it. You paint a picture of the need, you let the discomfort of that need sit in the room, and some people open their wallets because they feel bad. It works, at least in the short term.

But that is not the good and godly way. That is not what God is after. Paul says it plainly: not reluctantly, not under compulsion. No guilt trips. No arm-twisting. God does not want a gift that was pried out of someone's hands by making them feel terrible about themselves. That's not worship. That's coercion with a Bible verse attached.

And yet — I also want to be honest about the reality we're navigating. The ministry of this church is significant, and significant ministry costs real money. Right now Gloria Dei is operating with a budget somewhere around $800,000. And as we head into budget season, the initial numbers are coming in somewhere north of a million dollars for next year. That's not frivolous spending. That's staff who dedicate their lives to this work. That's building and systems and programs that serve real people. That's missionaries and community ministries and the ongoing work of bringing the message of Jesus to people who need to hear it — including, at some point, to you and to me.

The need is real. I won't pretend otherwise. And the temptation when the need is real and the number is large is to say, "Come on, you have to give — look at what's at stake." But that's not the path. The path is to tell you what God says, to tell you what's true, and to trust that the Spirit of God can move in your heart without me having to manipulate you. That's the deal. I'm going to be straight with you, and then I'm going to trust God with the rest.

The Hilarious Giver

Now, here's something that genuinely makes me smile every time I think about it, and I hope it'll make you smile too. When Paul says "God loves a cheerful giver," the Greek word behind "cheerful" is the word from which we get our English word hilarious. Hilarious. God loves a hilarious giver.

I find that both wonderful and a little convicting, because I'll tell you what — when I sit down with people and the conversation turns to money and giving and pledges, there is not typically a lot of laughter in the room. The mood tends to get serious pretty fast. And I get it. Money is serious. But Paul is reaching for a word that carries joy, gladness, delight — even a kind of exuberance. He's describing giving that doesn't feel like pulling teeth, but more like releasing something with an open hand and finding that it feels good to let go.

How is that even possible? How do you get from the weight of financial anxiety to the lightness of cheerful, almost laughing generosity? Paul's answer is love. It's moved by love. Giving is an expression of grace — the grace we've received overflowing outward toward others. When you really understand what God has given you, when you feel the weight of his love and his sacrifice and the gift of being called his child, the response that wells up is not reluctance. It's gratitude. And gratitude, when it's healthy, becomes generosity.

Now, I want to be realistic here too, because not everyone is going to feel that joy immediately. Sometimes we do the right thing before the joy shows up. I've been there. I've done what I knew was right and found that the warmth of it came later, not in the moment. That's okay. We don't have to have perfect feelings to take faithful steps. But the goal — the thing we're aiming for — is the kind of giving that flows from a full heart, not a reluctant hand. And that's worth praying toward.

What's Keeping You From Cheerful Giving?

Let me ask you a question, and I want you to actually sit with it rather than just read past it: What keeps you from cheerful giving?

There are a lot of possible answers, and none of them are stupid. Maybe it's ingratitude — not in a dramatic way, but just the slow drift of taking things for granted that you once recognized as gifts. Maybe something happened to you in the past, something connected to money or to church or to people who handled one or both of those things poorly, and that experience left a mark. Maybe you've made some decisions with your finances that have put you in a genuinely tight spot, and the idea of giving feels impossible because there doesn't seem to be anything left to give.

Maybe — and this is worth being honest about — you're not sure you see the value in what your church is actually doing with the money it receives. That's a fair question to ask. It deserves a real answer, not a deflection. If you have doubts about whether the ministry of this church is worth supporting, let's talk about that. Come find me.

Or maybe it's something subtler: a heart that has quietly become more focused on the things of this earth than the things of heaven. Not because you made a decision to be that way, but because the world is loud and relentless and it's easy to find yourself organizing your whole life around things that won't last. That's not a character flaw — it's a human condition. But it's worth naming.

I'm not asking you to perform an answer to any of these questions. I'm asking you to actually pray about them. What motivates you to give? What holds you back? What would it look like for you to give intentionally — whether that's a percentage, a tithe, a specific commitment — with joy in your heart rather than a knot in your stomach? These are the questions worth bringing to God, because he already knows the answers. He just invites us into the conversation.

And here's the anchor for all of it — the reason any of this is possible at all. Hebrews tells us that Jesus, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2). He gave everything — not reluctantly, not under compulsion, but out of love, with his eyes fixed on the joy of what his sacrifice would accomplish. He redeemed us. He made us his. And that gift — that unimaginable, undeserved gift — is the ground from which all of our giving grows.

Open Hands

So here's where I want to land. Stewardship is not primarily about budgets, though budgets matter. It's not primarily about percentages, though percentages can be a helpful and biblical framework. It's about the posture of your hands. Are they clenched, holding tightly to what you've convinced yourself is yours? Or are they open — held out, upward, recognizing that what fills them came from somewhere beyond you, and can be released back into something bigger than you?

God has been generous with you. Extravagantly, almost ridiculously generous — with gifts and abilities and relationships and the very breath in your lungs and the redemption of your soul. He asks us to respond in kind, not because he needs our money, but because the act of giving forms us into people who look more like him. Generous people. Joyful people. People who hold the things of this world with an open hand because they know where real treasure is found.

Pray about this. Ask God to show you what's in your heart, and ask him to make it tender toward his purposes. Ask him to replace whatever calcified resistance has built up with something soft and responsive and glad. And then, as he leads you — give. Give freely. Give bountifully. Give with the kind of joy that the people watching might almost mistake for something like laughter.

What would it take for your giving to feel less like an obligation and more like a delight? That might be exactly the question worth sitting with this week.

Transcript generated with A.I. Original script by the author.

What Is Your Fair Share to Give?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 14:58:32 +0000

What is a fair share? It's one of those phrases that gets thrown around constantly in political conversations, and almost everybody who uses it is convinced they know exactly what it means — right up until you ask them to define it. Then things get complicated fast. That same complexity shows up when we start talking about giving in the church, and I think it's worth slowing down and actually working through it together, because the Bible has something genuinely helpful to say here — something that cuts through the noise without leaving us in a legalistic fog.

The "Fair Share" Problem

Let me start with the tax conversation, because I think it frames the question well. I've been reading some statistics lately that are worth sitting with for a moment. The top 10% of household income earners in the United States pay roughly 70% of all federal income taxes. The top half of earners — so anyone above the median income — pay about 97% of total federal taxes. That leaves the bottom 50% of earners paying approximately 3% of the nation's tax bill. And somewhere between 30 and 40% of American households pay no federal income tax at all in a given year.

Now, I'm not raising those numbers to start a political argument. I'm raising them because they make the phrase "fair share" genuinely interesting to examine. Is it fair that the top half pays nearly everything? Is it fair that a significant portion of households pays nothing? Reasonable people with genuinely good intentions can disagree about this, because the answer depends on what you think the government should be doing, what you think fairness actually means, and a whole web of economic and social factors that honest people weigh differently. When it comes to tax policy, the "fair share" question doesn't have a clean answer that everyone agrees on.

But here's what struck me: the church has been wrestling with a version of this same question for thousands of years, and the Scriptures actually give us something concrete to work with. Voluntary giving — which is what we're talking about in the church, nobody is being taxed here — still raises the question of proportionality. What does it look like to give faithfully and fairly when people's financial situations are so different from one another? How do we think about that together as a community?

Giving According to Your Means

Paul addresses this head-on in his second letter to the Corinthians. I've been spending time in chapters 8 and 9 recently, and there's a passage I want to point us to again. In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul is talking about the Macedonian churches — congregations that were going through real hardship, people who did not have abundance — and he holds them up as a model of generosity. Here's what he says in verses 3 through 4:

For I can testify that according to their ability, and even beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the privilege of sharing in the ministry to the saints.

Two things jump out at me in that passage. First: they gave according to their means. That phrase is doing real work. It means the standard isn't a fixed dollar amount that everyone hits — it's proportional to what a person actually has. Paul is recognizing, right there in Scripture, that people have different financial realities, and that God is not asking everyone to write the same check. The measure is relative to what you've been given. Second: the Macedonians didn't stop at their means. They went beyond their means, and they did it voluntarily, even eagerly, begging for the chance to give. That's a remarkable picture of what generosity can look like when it flows from something deeper than obligation.

Why do people have different financial means in the first place? There are a lot of honest answers to that question, and I think we should name them without glossing over the complexity. Sometimes it comes down to the skills a person has developed, and the fact that our economy places different market value on different kinds of work. Sometimes it comes down to effort and the choices people have made over years and decades. Sometimes it's about opportunity — who you met, where you grew up, what doors opened for you. Sometimes it's the relationships you've been able to build. Sometimes it's the level of financial risk a person was willing to take on. And sometimes, honestly, there are genuine injustices involved — things that aren't fair, barriers that shouldn't have existed, circumstances that kept someone from reaching a higher level of financial stability. And sometimes there's just plain bad luck, or poor decisions, or some combination of all of the above.

The point is: financial inequality isn't a new problem. It has existed in every society, in every era of history. It was present in ancient Israel. It was present in the first-century church. And God's approach, both in the Old Testament and in the New, isn't to pretend that everyone has the same resources. Instead, the call is to give faithfully according to what you have.

The Tithe: An Old Principle With Something to Teach Us

When God established the covenant with Israel after bringing them out of Egypt, one of the foundational practices he commanded was the tithe. And I want to be precise here, because we've gotten a little loose with that word in the church. People sometimes say "I gave my tithe" when they mean they dropped something in the offering plate — anything, really. But the word tithe literally means a tenth. A tithe is 10%. The Israelites were called to give 10% of their crops, their herds, the fruit of their labor — back to God, as an acknowledgment that it all came from him in the first place. These tithes supported the worship life of Israel: the tabernacle, and later the temple, the Levitical priests who served the people, the ministry of the whole community before the Lord.

Now, whenever I bring up tithing, I know what's coming. Some of you have the inner lawyer activated the moment I say the word, and you're already formulating your response: "Pastor, we are no longer under the law." And you're right. You are absolutely correct. The tithe as a Mosaic command is not something that has been transferred directly into the New Testament as a binding requirement for Christians. Jesus himself does not command a tithe. What Jesus does say — and this matters — is that we have received freely, and we should give freely. The law of Moses required a tithe. Grace invites generosity from the heart.

But here's the thing I keep coming back to, and I'll just say it plainly: the people of Israel, under the old covenant, before the coming of Christ, before the cross and the empty tomb, before the full revelation of God's mercy — they were required to give 10%. And we, who have received Christ himself, who have received his death and resurrection on our behalf, who have received the complete promise of salvation — are we going to look at what those believers gave and say, "Well, I'll aim for a bit less than that"? I'm not going to camp on this soapbox for long, but I do want you to sit with that for a moment. It's worth thinking about.

Even so, I want to gently pull the focus back from the specific number and toward the principle underneath it. The reason the tithe is so useful as a model isn't because 10% is a magic number in the New Testament. It's because the tithe is a percentage. And percentage giving is intentional in a way that random or occasional giving is not.

Why Percentage Giving Makes Sense

Think about what it means to give a percentage versus giving whatever you happen to have left over at the end of the month, or giving what feels right in the moment when the offering plate comes around. Giving a percentage means you've made a decision. You've sat down, looked at what God has entrusted to you, and said: this portion — this specific, intentional share — I am setting aside for the Lord. That act of intentional designation is itself a form of worship. It's a way of saying, before I plan the rest of my budget, before I figure out what I want and what I think I need, I am going to honor God first with what he's given me.

Jesus talked about seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and trusting that the things we need will follow (Matthew 6:33). Percentage giving is a concrete, practical way of putting that principle into action in your financial life. It shows what you're prioritizing. It shows what you consider the main thing. And it creates a rhythm of faithfulness that isn't dependent on your emotional state on a given Sunday morning.

Now, about that 10%: I do think it's a solid benchmark, and I think it's worth working toward if you're not there yet. Here's why I find it reasonable as a starting goal — it's enough that you actually feel it. It's a real sacrifice. It's not pocket change. But for most people, it's also not going to break them. It won't make it impossible to cover housing, food, utilities, and the ordinary expenses of life. It sits in a zone where it requires genuine trust, without demanding the impossible.

I also want to be honest about the current cultural reality for many of us. If you're aiming to give 10% to the church, and the federal government is already taking somewhere in the mid-30% range of your income, and then you add state taxes and other levies on top of that, the total ask on your finances is significant. That's real, and I don't want to wave it away. It genuinely complicates the conversation, and I think it's okay to name that complexity rather than pretend it doesn't exist.

So here's my practical word for anyone who isn't yet giving by percentage: start somewhere. Start at 3%. Start at 5%. Start at whatever number you can commit to and actually sustain. The goal isn't to jump from zero to 10% overnight and then abandon the practice because it felt impossible. The goal is to begin giving intentionally, and then to grow in what Paul calls the "grace of giving" (2 Corinthians 8:7). We learn to walk before we learn to run. That's just the way growth works.

And on the question of whether to calculate your percentage on gross income or net income — a question I've been asked more times than I can count — here's my simple answer: start with whichever one is smaller. If God blesses that, if you find yourself trusting him more and worrying less, if you discover his faithfulness in the ordinary movements of your financial life, then consider working toward the other. Give yourself room to grow into this. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

What Does "Fair" Look Like in the Church?

So how does all of this connect back to the idea of a fair share in the life of the congregation? I think there are a couple of principles worth anchoring ourselves to as we live together as a community of faith.

Everyone Has Skin in the Game

There's real value in everyone participating in the giving life of the church, even at different levels. Having some stake in the ministry — contributing something of yourself to it — means you are genuinely connected to what God is doing through it. You have skin in the game. And that matters. When you give to the work of proclaiming the gospel, you are not just writing a check; you are investing yourself in the hope that other people will hear the good news and have their lives changed by it. You are saying: I want there to be a place where people can come and hear clearly that they are loved and forgiven by God. I want there to be a pastor who can walk with people through the hardest moments of their lives and point them to Jesus. That's what's at stake, and it's worth being invested in.

Now, there are people in every congregation for whom financial giving is genuinely not possible right now. Life has put them in a place where the numbers just don't allow it. And the church has always understood that. For those brothers and sisters, the call isn't shame — it's to find the other ways they can invest themselves in the ministry. Their time. Their service. Their prayers, which are always possible and always powerful. The principle of skin in the game applies to all of us, even when the form it takes looks different from person to person.

We Sacrifice Together

The second principle is this: percentage giving creates a sense of solidarity in the congregation. When we give a percentage of what we have — each of us, from the most financially abundant to the most financially stretched — we are all making a proportional sacrifice. We are all saying the same thing with our giving, even if the dollar amounts look very different. We are saying: this matters enough to me that I am going to give a real portion of what God has entrusted to me.

I think about my own kids when I try to explain this. Some of them are just getting started in life — entry-level jobs, tight budgets, figuring out how adulting works. They simply cannot give the same dollar amount that their mom and I give. That's just the math of where they are. But for them to give something — to set aside a percentage of their income and bring it to the Lord — that is every bit as meaningful and faithful as what we give. In a sense, their sacrifice might be more striking, because their margin is smaller. And for us to give more than they give isn't unfairness; it's proportionality. It reflects that we've been entrusted with more. We're not all giving the same amount, but we are all in the same posture before God: hands open, acknowledging that what we have came from him, and returning a portion of it in gratitude.

That's a different kind of fairness than the political version. It's not about equal dollars. It's about equal commitment, equal sacrifice, equal acknowledgment that God is the source of everything we have. And there is a genuine bond in that — a way of saying, we are in this together, we are working toward the same thing, we trust the same God with our finances and with the future of this ministry.

Generosity as a Reflection of Who God Is

Ultimately, the reason we give isn't because the church needs money, though of course it does take resources to do ministry. The deeper reason is that giving is one of the ways we reflect the character of our God. Our God is generous — extravagantly, lavishly generous. He did not hold back his own Son. He has poured out mercy on us that we did nothing to deserve. The whole arc of the gospel is a story of God giving freely and richly to people who had nothing to offer in return. As Jesus put it: freely you have received, freely give.

When we give generously, we are not just supporting a budget line item. We are participating in the character of God. We are saying, with our checkbooks and our bank accounts and our envelopes in the offering plate, that we have been shaped by grace into people who give rather than hoard, who trust rather than fear, who look outward rather than inward. That is a powerful witness, and it flows naturally from a heart that has genuinely encountered the mercy of God.

So here is my encouragement as you think about your own giving: spend some time in prayer about what your fair share looks like. Not what the person next to you gives, not what you think sounds impressive, not what you think the pastor wants to hear — what does faithful, intentional, percentage-based giving look like for you, given what God has entrusted to you right now? Ask whether the principle of percentage giving holds real wisdom for where you are in life. Consider how richly God has blessed you, not just financially but in every dimension — his mercy, his patience, his presence through every season you've walked through. And then ask yourself: is there an opportunity here to let the way I give be a reflection of who my God is? Is there a way for my financial life to tell the same story my faith tells — a story of generosity, of trust, of open hands before a God who never runs out?

That's the question worth sitting with this week. Not "how little can I get away with?" but "how might my giving reflect the generosity of the God I say I believe in?" That's the heart of what a fair share really means.

Transcript generated with A.I. Original script by the author.

A Life Worthy of the Gospel

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:35:15 +0000

Philippians 1:12-14, 19-30

I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, ¹³so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. ¹⁴And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.

…

Yes, and I will rejoice, ¹⁹for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, ²⁰as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. ²¹For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. ²²If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. ²³I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. ²⁴But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. ²⁵Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, ²⁶so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.

²⁷Only let your manner of life be worthy^[h] of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, ²⁸and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God. ²⁹For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, ³⁰engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.

A Life Worthy of the Gospel

Imagine St. Paul – a world traveler, evangelist, and writer. He is imprisoned under house arrest in Rome. (There is a whole story of intrigue, danger, and political corruption behind this, which you can read in Acts 21-25.) He is writing to churches that he had established, and for our purposes today, he is writing to the church at Philippi.

When Paul says, “I want you to know that what has happened to me has served to advance the gospel …” They can imagine that because imprisoned Paul once spent a night in jail in Philippi, which you can read about in Acts 16, leading to some miraculous events and conversions.

So, there is Paul – a prisoner, no longer young, and road-weary. He’s gone miles, and miles, and miles to share the message of salvation through Jesus’ death and resurrection. And now, his life is in the balance, and he is ready to die if that honors Jesus. He would also be glad to continue living if that honors Jesus and blesses God’s people. So while he desires to go to heaven, he’s at peace as long as he can serve the Lord.

Paul looked at his life and death, his travels, his past, his suffering, and even his imprisonment through one lens – His relationship with Jesus.

That’s where he points you and me as we look at our lives, too. “Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ.” Literally, “Live in a way that is worthy of your salvation.” That is, after all, the gospel of Christ: salvation because Jesus died and rose for you.

Paul confronts us today with this question: How should we live since Jesus died and rose for us?

For Paul, Jesus’ death and resurrection meant that he left his old life behind. He became a missionary and preached the gospel of the cross and empty tomb everywhere he went, which was, perhaps, from Jerusalem to Spain. Everything in his life revolved around a profound gratitude for what Jesus had done for him. Listen to what he wrote to a young pastor: I thank … Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, ¹³though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy … ¹⁴and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me … in Christ Jesus. ¹⁵The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. ¹⁶But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. Everything was about Jesus, His grace, and His salvation.

What does this mean for you and me?

Some of this is specific and personal. Not everyone is called to be a missionary, like Paul. Not all of us have the same sins as Paul, although we all (hopefully) know the profound power of Jesus’ forgiveness for our sins. But the hope we have in Jesus still gets lived out in our lives, the choices we make, and the desires of our hearts.

In other ways, our response to Jesus’ salvation is broader and more common. Like all Christians, we worship, we display devotion to God’s Word, and receive His sacraments. We live lives of repentance and strive to be obedient to God’s Word. Jesus’ salvation moves our lives, and we have confidence and trust in Christ’s sacrifice.

As Paul wrote to the Philippians, this is what he said about our response to the gospel, “[L]et your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, ²⁸and not frightened in anything by your opponents.”

He says that living a life worthy of the gospel – worthy of our salvation – is displayed when we stand in one spirit. This means that we hold to the teachings of the Apostles and Prophets. We believe Jesus died and rose for us, and we are confident in the power of Jesus’ resurrection and His promises for us. And this is the reason we are not frightened by those who oppose the faith and deny the hope we have in Jesus.

He also says that a life worthy of the gospel is lived together, “with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.” In part, that means coming together to receive God’s gifts. It also means coming together to make sure that God’s gifts are given. We give of ourselves to make sure that the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection – and everything connected to that – is happening in our families, communities, and in the world.

Another way we could say this is that, as people who have received the gospel, we support the work of the Church. We want to make sure that Christ is preached, people are baptized, and sins are forgiven. We want the faith to be fed; for God’s Word to be taught in truth and purity, and for the Sacraments to be administered for us and for the world. It also means engaging in and supporting mercy work: helping one another, feeding the hungry, and attending to “the least of these.”

Over the next few weeks, we are talking about stewardship here at Gloria Dei. Some of this topic is specific to you and your situation. We have different gifts and means, different struggles and needs, and that means our responses will be different. But as we “strive side by side for the faith of the Gospel,” it also means that we will be thinking about how we work together to make sure the gospel is being delivered. We want to make sure the gospel is delivered to us and to our families – we need Jesus’ death and resurrection! We also want to make sure that the gospel is proclaimed in our community – in words and actions that help others receive the good news of Jesus’ salvation.

When Paul speaks of living a life worthy of the gospel, part of that life is this connection we have to one another in a congregation. It is tempting to hear these words, “live a life worthy,” as spoken to “me” as an individual striving to be worthy of the gift “I” have received. And that’s a fine goal, but the verbs here are all plural. This “living a life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” is something we do together. This passage is not just about “me” … it is about “us.” It is about believing God’s Word together. It is about receiving his promises of salvation delivered in the Word and Sacraments together. It is about striving side by side for the faith of the gospel – supporting ministry together in prayer, in work, in volunteering, in showing up, in playing our parts, and, yes, in generous giving.

In the next few weeks, please pray about your part in this work.

We are a church that is growing. That provides us with certain challenges. The various boards of the council, representing different areas of the work we do as a church, have taken a crack at the budget for next year, and right now it is over $1 million for the first time in Gloria Dei’s history. A lot of that is, “the cost of doing business,” supporting the things we need to have staff and property. A good piece of that – over 10% - is also directed toward growth, striving to do more, serve more people, care for our people better, and reach out to others with the Gospel.

The fact is, there are immediate needs, but there is so much more we could do than we are. What we do, we do well! All glory be to God! But there is more work to be done. There are more people to care for and to reach. There are more opportunities to share the Gospel. Because everyone needs Jesus.

So, let’s strive to live a life worthy of the gospel of Christ. And thanks be to God for His grace and salvation. Amen.

611 - September 20, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:26:49 +0000

611 – The Second Commandment

September 20, 2026

Opening Prayer – Small Catechism p. 73

Questions from Your Reading

What does it mean to fear God?

What does it mean to love God?

How does the First Commandment relate to all the other Commandments?

What is God’s name?

Why did God reveal His name to us?

Philippians 2:5-11 – Bible p. 1886

Philippians is an epistle. An epistle is a ________________.

Paul wrote this letter late in his life to a church in Philippi, which is in Greece.

What does this passage say will happen at the name of Jesus?

Why would this happen?

The Small Catechism

Turn to p.13 to read the 2^nd Commandment and its explanation.

Underline the words fear and love.

Circle the words satanic arts. Make a note in your catechism of what that means.

What Are God’s Names?

Why Do God’s Names Matter?

Defining Terms

Curse –

Swear –

Satanic Arts –

Lie –

Deceive –

How To Use God’s Name

Call upon it in every trouble –

Pray –

Praise –

Give thanks -

Homework

Read Luther’s Small Catechism – p. 74-80.

Ask your parents the following questions:

Look up the poem “Oh, My God!” by Billy Collins – one place you can find it is here: https://jamesmacmillan.wordpress.com/2023/12/12/oh-my-god-by-billy-collins/ Do you think this is how God wants people to use His name? Why or why not?

How would your parents feel if you were using vulgar language? What is the problem with talking that way?

When do your parents pray? What do they pray about?

Be Reconciled

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:35:33 +0000

Genesis 50:15-21

When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, “It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him.” ¹⁶So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this command before he died: ¹⁷‘Say to Joseph, “Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.”’ And now, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. ¹⁸His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, “Behold, we are your servants.” ¹⁹But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? ²⁰As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. ²¹So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.

Be Reconciled

Joseph, the son of Jacob … not the husband of Mary … was the subject of our Old Testament reading today. Joseph was the eleventh out of twelve sons. He was also his father’s favorite. Maybe you remember the story about how Jacob gave Joseph a fancy multicolored coat? He would also send Joseph out to check on his brothers to see how they were doing, and when he came back he “gave a bad report” about them.

Then there was his dreams; dreams that indicated that he would rule over his brothers and they would bow to him. (I mentioned he was the eleventh of twelve?)

Joseph’s brothers hated him. They even wanted to kill him. In fact, they grabbed him one time when he came to check on them and threw him in a pit. But opportunity intervened, and some traders came through, and they sold Joseph into slavery. Then they went home and told their father that his favorite son had been killed by a wild animal … and they brought a bloodied, multicolored coat to him as proof.

The traders took Joseph to Egypt. He suffered there. He was a slave, falsely accused of sexual assault, and thrown into prison. He also succeeded there. Joseph trusted God in the midst of all his suffering, and God blessed him … but in His time and in His way; and He did it through dreams.

Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, had two dreams that no one could figure out. Joseph was known for interpreting dreams, and they brought him to Pharaoh. Joseph interpreted his dreams; dreams that predicted years of feast and bumper crops, and years of famine and hunger. It was a warning from the LORD. He told Pharaoh that he should appoint a man with wisdom to prepare for the lean times.

Pharaoh agreed and appointed Joseph for the task. Only Pharaoh was more powerful than Joseph, and Joseph ruled and shepherded the people. He initiated a plan to tax the Egyptians and saved food during those good years, and then he sold it back to them in the lean years.

This famine didn’t only affect Egypt. It was throughout the whole region, including Joseph’s family. They heard there was food in Egypt, so they went to buy some, and guess who they had to deal with. One day, there they were, the men that had meant to kill him and sold him into slavery, bowing before him … just as Joseph’s dreams once predicted.

Joseph had them right in the palm of his hand! Would he take revenge? He didn’t trust them. He hadn’t forgotten what they did to him. He hadn’t forgotten his suffering. And while he did test them, he forgave them, saved them, and gave them a new home, providing for them and their children. He moved the whole family to Egypt, including his father, Jacob.

Our Old Testament reading took place right after Jacob died. The brothers are scared that the only reason Joseph hadn’t taken revenge on them was because of Jacob, so they lied to Joseph. They said, “Dad said you have to forgive us!”

Hear again what Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? ²⁰As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. ²¹So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.

Notice, Joseph comforts them, but he acknowledges their sin … what they did still matters! He also points out that God used their sin for good. They he promised to take care of them.

Forgiveness like that is hard! When you have every right to refuse forgiveness … it is hard to forgive. Especially when you’ve been deeply wronged. Peter gets that. That’s why he asks, “How many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me?” I mean, there’s gotta be a limit, right? But … Jesus forgives all your sin. So, if Jesus has forgiven you for all of your sins – every thought, word, and deed – how do you think you should handle things when someone sins against you?

Don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying there aren’t consequences when people sin. Joseph’s brothers had lasting guilt, which led them to live in fear and doubt! Sometimes, when trust is broken, sins lead to separation in this life.

But forgiveness is different. It is a generous act of God’s mercy. At the Cross, Jesus took your sins upon His body, and He died to pay for them. He is a kind of second Joseph. We have all wronged Him. We have all betrayed Him. And He continues to have words of mercy and forgiveness on His lips.

That’s what all this is for … everything we do here at Gloria Dei … and it is what our lives revolve around as Christians. We are here to deliver and receive Jesus’ forgiveness to sinners. That is why every service has confession and absolution. It is why we cherish baptism, where God works to wash us of our sins and give us faith to receive His grace. It is why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper week after week, because Jesus promised to give us His body and blood to eat and drink in, with, and under the bread and wine to give us forgiveness, life, and salvation.

Because we are forgiven, we strive to forgive. We try to be people who extend God’s mercy – the mercy we ourselves live in – we try to extend that mercy to others. And even when we fall short in those good and godly efforts, we hold on to God’s mercy as our only hope for Jesus’ sake.

So, live in Jesus’ forgiveness. Acknowledge the wrongs you’ve done. Confess your sins. Then trust … trust Jesus … trust His word proclaimed to you … you really are forgiven. Jesus died and rose for you so you can be forgiven … and being forgiven, we can be forgiving. Amen.

611 for September 13, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:34:28 +0000

September 13, 2026

Opening Prayer – Small Catechism p. 66

Where do the Ten Commandments come from?

Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5

Turn in your Bible to Exodus 20 on p. 121-122

Do you notice anything missing from the Commandments? There are no _________________!

Now, look at p. 13-15 in the Catechism. We ________________ the all Commandments within the 1^st Commandment.

- We keep all the Commandments because __________is our ______________.

The Commandments are a summary of God’s __________, and they work in _____ ways in our lives.

1 All three of these also always _________________ us.

Luke 12:13-34 – Bible p. 1632

Luke is a Gospel – a biography of Jesus, written sometime between 55-60 A.D.

- What are the other Gospels?

What happened in the reading?

According to v. 15, what is Jesus warning us about?

Summarize the parable.

- A parable is an _______________ story with a ________________ point.

What did the rich man trust in to make sure he had a good life?

Did it protect him?

What is a god?

“A god means that from which we are to expect all _______ and in which we are to take __________ in all distress.” – Martin Luther, Large Catechism

A god is whatever you look to for ___________ in your life.

A god is whatever you turn to when you need _____________ in your life.

The Small Catechism

Turn to p.13 to read the 1^st Commandment and its explanation.

Underline the words fear, love, and trust.

Circle the word trust, too.

Turn to p. 60. Let’s look at the questions on that page.

Homework

Read Luther’s Small Catechism – p. 58-73.

Ask your parents the following questions:

Did they go through a class for Confirmation? If so, what was it like?

When did they learn about the Ten Commandments?

What do they hope you will learn in your time in 611?

Two Sentences About Money Was Already Too Much

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:03:37 +0000

Two lines. That's all it was — two sentences about money buried inside a two-page sermon. And afterward, someone walked up and said, "Pastor, why do you always talk about money?" I've been doing this long enough to laugh about it now, but that moment stuck with me, because it tells you something important: money touches a nerve. It doesn't have to take over a room to cause a reaction. It just has to show up.

So let me be upfront with you right now. This is the beginning of a series on stewardship, and I know that word can make people a little uneasy. Some of you might already be bracing yourselves. That's okay. I get it. But I want you to stay with me, because what we're going to talk about over these weeks isn't what you might expect. This isn't about arm-twisting. It isn't about guilt trips or budget shortfalls or making the numbers work. It's about something much deeper — about what money actually reveals about what we love, what we trust, and who we belong to. And I think when we look at it that way, it turns out to be one of the more freeing conversations we can have as Christians.

Why Money Is Such a Charged Topic

Let's be honest about why this subject feels loaded. Money is bound up with security, identity, status, and survival. It represents years of work and sacrifice. It's tied to real fears — about losing it, not having enough, or being judged for how much or how little you have. And our culture doesn't exactly help us develop a healthy relationship with it. When I look at advertising, when I look at the way our economy is structured, so much of it is built on envy and the manufactured desire for more. More money equals more stuff, and more stuff is supposed to equal more happiness. That's the story we're told constantly, from every screen and billboard and social media feed.

It's no wonder money grabs our hearts the way it does. It's been designed to. And it's been that way long before modern advertising — Jesus talked about it, Paul wrote about it, the Psalms wrestle with it. Wealth has always had this pull on the human heart, a pull that can become something like gravity, bending everything in its direction if we're not careful.

And here's the other thing worth acknowledging: people have different levels of financial wealth, and that's simply a reality of life in this world. There are all kinds of reasons for that — some of which we'll explore later in this series — but the starting point is just recognizing that truth without shame and without pride. Some of us have more, some have less, and the question for all of us is the same: what is our relationship with what we have?

Because money can be a genuine blessing. It's good to be able to meet your needs. It's good to be able to care for your family, to give a gift, to help someone in a hard season. There is nothing wrong with financial provision — it is, in fact, a mercy from God. But we've all seen what happens when money becomes the organizing center of a person's life. When it's the thing they think about first in the morning and last at night, when every decision filters through accumulation and protection, when relationships get bent around it. That's not a blessing anymore. That's a kind of bondage.

Generosity as an Act of Grace

So where does that leave us? Paul has a lot to say about this, and I want to spend some time in what he writes in 2 Corinthians 8. To set the scene: there's a famine underway, and the church in Jerusalem is in desperate need. Paul is working with the churches in Macedonia and Greece to raise funds for relief. He's not just asking them to write a check — he's talking about this whole effort as part of the gospel itself, as ministry to the saints. And the response he gets from the Macedonian churches is staggering. Here's what he writes:

We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia. For in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints — and this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the will of God to us. Accordingly, we urged Titus that as he had started, so he should complete among you this act of grace. But as you excel in everything — in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in all earnestness, and in our love for you — see that you excel in this act of grace also. (2 Corinthians 8:1–7, ESV)

Read that carefully. These are not wealthy donors writing big checks from a position of comfort. These are people in extreme poverty, going through severe affliction, who are overflowing in generosity. And Paul doesn't describe their giving as admirable discipline or impressive duty. He calls it an act of grace. That phrase is doing a lot of work, and I don't want us to skip past it.

When we think about what marks a Christian life, we usually think about things like sincere faith, being honest, knowing the Scriptures, treating people with love and care. All of that is right. But Paul is putting generosity right alongside those things — not as a financial category, but as a spiritual one. This, he says, is also an act of grace. Giving is something that belongs in the same sentence as faith, speech, knowledge, and love. It's not a separate department of church life. It's woven into what it looks like to be a person of grace in the world.

We Give Because We Have Received

So what makes giving an act of grace? I think there are two angles to it, and both of them matter.

The first is simply this: we can give generously because we have already received grace. God's people are not giving out of scarcity or fear. We're giving from a position of abundance — not necessarily financial abundance, but spiritual abundance, the kind that doesn't depend on what's in our bank account.

Think about what we've actually been given. Salvation in Christ. Forgiveness of sins. The promise of resurrection and everlasting life. When the Bible describes what we're heading toward — what we sometimes call heaven — it reaches for the most extravagant language imaginable. Streets of gold. Gates of pearl. The finest jewels. I think that imagery isn't meant to be a literal real estate description. It's testimony to the surpassing value of what God has prepared for those who are his. The point is that whatever this world accumulates — the wealth of Amazon, the assets of any fortune on earth — it doesn't come close to the inheritance we have in Christ.

And when that's really settled in your heart, it changes your relationship with money. Not immediately and not perfectly — we're still sinners, still living in a physical world with real bills and real needs. But it loosens the grip. It creates a little bit of distance between you and the things of this world, just enough to say: I don't have to hold onto this so tightly. I've got something far better waiting for me, and I can actually take what God has entrusted to me now and invest it in something that matters — the ministry of the gospel, so that other people can have what I have.

That's not a small shift. That's a complete reorientation of what wealth is for. We're not accumulating for ourselves. We're investing in something eternal. And when we see it that way, giving stops being a loss and starts being exactly what it is: treasure in heaven.

Grace Sets Us Free from the Grip of Idolatry

The second reason giving is an act of grace is that it sets us free from idolatry. Jesus said it plainly — a person cannot serve both God and mammon, cannot serve both God and human wealth. It's not that money itself is evil. It's that it has this extraordinary capacity to take the place of God in our lives, to become the thing we run to for security, the thing that defines our worth, the thing we sacrifice everything else to obtain and protect.

People worship money. Sometimes they know it and sometimes they don't. But when your whole identity is tied up in your net worth, when your anxiety spikes every time the market moves, when your generosity has a very hard ceiling because letting go of resources genuinely frightens you — that's a heart condition. That's what idolatry looks like with a business casual wardrobe.

David knew this about himself. In Psalm 51, he prays: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." He's asking God to do something about the inside — not just the behavior, but the love. Because the question isn't just what we do with money. It's what we love. What do our hearts actually revolve around? What do we reach for when we're afraid? What do we trust to make things okay?

The grace of God addresses that at the root level. When we are baptized into Christ, Paul says we are baptized into his death — and into his resurrection. That means we are connected to a life that death itself cannot end, a future that no financial crash can touch, a treasure that no thief can take and no market can devalue. And being connected to that kind of security frees us from the white-knuckle grip on the things of this world.

Jesus said to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you. That's not a prosperity promise. It's a reordering of priorities that flows from trusting God completely. When we're genuinely seeking the kingdom first, we find — maybe to our own surprise — that God provides enough. Not always everything we want in our more selfish moments, and probably not the version of "enough" that a culture built on envy would recognize. But enough. And more than enough, because he has given us his Son. That is the center of the abundance we live from.

Generosity as a Result of Grace at Work in Us

There's also a second direction to this. We don't just give because we've received grace. We give because generosity is what grace produces in us as it works through our lives. John says it simply in his first letter: we love because he first loved us. The same principle applies here. We have received God's generosity — lavishly, freely, at enormous cost to him — and so we become people who are generous like our God is. It's a family resemblance. It's grace flowing through us into the world.

And that generosity takes different shapes. Sometimes it's physical — feeding someone who's hungry, helping someone who's in crisis, clothing someone who needs it, advocating for justice where sin has caused harm and poverty. All of that is good and right, and it's part of what was happening in 2 Corinthians. Paul was raising funds for real people in real need, and those funds were going to make a concrete difference in their lives. That kind of giving matters. It pushes back against what sin has broken in the world.

But there's also a deeper level of need that generosity addresses. The spiritual need. The need for the gospel itself. And this is where the church's call to support its own ministry comes in — not as an institutional obligation, but as a genuine investment in something of eternal significance.

If you are part of a congregation, if you are hearing God's Word proclaimed there, receiving the Lord's Supper, bringing your children to be baptized, being shaped and formed in the faith week after week — then supporting that ministry is good and right for your own soul. You are receiving something of tremendous value, and contributing to the work that delivers it is part of participating in it fully. But it goes beyond your own benefit. Your giving is what makes it possible for your children to be taught the faith. It's what funds evangelism that reaches people who don't yet know Christ. It's what keeps the doors open so that when someone in your community is at the end of their rope and wandering into a church for the first time, there is a church there to walk through. That is a profound thing to be part of.

The Danger of Pure Pragmatism

Now, I want to say something about how we often approach this in practice, because I think it reveals a real temptation. When I talk with people about giving and stewardship, the conversation often goes very practical very quickly. We think about what the church needs to operate, we look at the budget, we think about doing our fair share. And there's nothing wrong with being thoughtful and responsible — real ministry has real costs, and it's not irresponsible to pay attention to those.

But the danger is that when giving is driven purely by pragmatism, it tends to collapse into legalism. You start checking boxes. You're doing your duty. You're paying the bill that keeps the institution running. And that can feel hollow, because it is hollow. It strips the act of what Paul says it actually is — grace. It turns something that's supposed to be a fruit of the Spirit into a line item on a spreadsheet.

We live in a world that is passing away. The things we accumulate here are temporary. And when we talk about stewardship, what we're really talking about is investing ourselves in something that is bigger than this life and more lasting than anything this world offers. We're talking about treasure in heaven. We're talking about grace, love, reconciliation, holiness — things received as gifts from God and then expressed outward through how we live and what we do with what we have.

That's what moved the Macedonian churches. They were in extreme poverty. They were under severe pressure. And yet they gave according to their means — and beyond their means, Paul says — of their own accord. Nobody twisted their arms. Nobody guilted them into it. They received grace, and it overflowed. That's the picture Paul wants the Corinthian church to see, and it's the picture he wants us to see too.

A Posture of Prayer

As we begin working through this series together, I want to encourage you to do one specific thing: pray. Not pray in the sense of asking God to get you off the hook from thinking about money. Pray in the sense of genuinely bringing this part of your life before him. Ask him to show you how he has blessed you — not just financially, but in every dimension. Ask him to show you where your heart is, what it's attached to, what it's trusting. Ask him to reveal where he might be calling you to be a blessing, where his grace working through you might meet a real need in the world or in the ministry of the church.

Pray about what faithful generosity looks like for you specifically, in your particular season of life, with the particular resources God has entrusted to you. Because this isn't a one-size-fits-all calculation. It's a conversation between you and God about what it looks like for you to excel in this act of grace — just as Paul urged the Corinthians to do.

I'm not going to do any arm-twisting here, and I mean that. What I want, and what I believe God wants, is for giving to flow from a heart that has genuinely received grace and is genuinely responding to it in love. As Paul will say later in this same letter — and we'll get there — God loves a cheerful giver. Not a reluctant giver. Not a guilted giver. A cheerful one. Someone who gives out of joy, out of abundance, out of a heart that has been changed by what Christ has done.

That kind of giving doesn't happen through pressure. It happens through transformation. And transformation begins in the same place David pointed us: in a conversation with God about the state of our hearts, asking him to create in us something clean, something new, something free. So as you go into this week, I'd invite you to begin there — not with the question of how much, but with the question of why, and whether the grace you've received has actually gotten all the way into how you hold the things of this world.

Still Carrying This?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:57:20 +0000

There is a particular kind of weight that doesn't lift on Sunday morning. You've sat in the pew. You've spoken the confession along with everyone else. You've heard the pastor declare absolution over the congregation. You've come forward and received the Lord's Supper — the body and blood of Jesus, given and shed for the forgiveness of sins. And still, when you walk back to your seat, it's still there. That thing. The one you can't quite put down, no matter how many times you try. If you know what I'm talking about, this post is for you.

A Practice That Might Feel Foreign

If you've grown up in a Lutheran or broadly Protestant church, the phrase "private confession and absolution" might land somewhere between unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable. You probably have some kind of mental image of it — likely shaped more by movies than by any real experience. The darkened booth. The latticed screen. The hushed voice on the other side. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been six weeks since my last confession. And then the priest responds, and the whole thing follows its ritual course. Maybe that picture makes you curious. Maybe it makes you skeptical. Maybe it makes you want to click away entirely.

Stay with me. Because what I want to talk about isn't a foreign religious ritual imported from somewhere else — it's actually a gift that belongs to you as a Christian, one that Lutherans have always had, even when we haven't always done a great job of making it available or explaining why it matters. Private confession and absolution is not a requirement. But it is good for you. And for some of you reading this right now, it may be exactly what you need.

I want to start, actually, by acknowledging what I appreciate about the way Roman Catholic practice structures confession. There is a liturgy you follow. There's a predictable shape to the conversation — something to hold onto when the thing you're about to say out loud feels enormous. That's genuinely helpful. When you're carrying something heavy and you finally decide to bring it to someone, having a clear structure means you don't have to figure out how to start. The words are already there. You just have to show up and speak them. I think that kind of liturgical handrail is worth preserving, and as you'll see in a moment, our Lutheran practice has one too.

Why Sometimes the Usual Isn't Enough

In the previous weekly word in this series, we walked through the different ways a Christian can confess sin and receive forgiveness. You can confess directly to God, trusting his promise that if you confess your sins, he is faithful and just to forgive them. You can go to the person you sinned against — and if they're a believer, they can speak forgiveness to you on Christ's behalf. You can come to church, confess with the whole congregation, receive absolution from the pastor, and receive Jesus himself in the Lord's Supper. And for a great many sins, on a great many Sunday mornings, that is genuinely enough. If you walk away from the Table with a clean conscience and a settled heart, thank God for that. Don't manufacture guilt that isn't there. Don't torture yourself when Christ has already set you free. Live in that forgiveness.

But sometimes — and every honest believer knows this — sometimes the usual avenues don't fully reach the thing. There are sins that stick. They have a particular texture to them, a weight that doesn't respond to the ordinary means the way you'd expect. You've prayed about it. You may have even told someone. You've confessed it in church. And it's still there, attaching itself to your conscience like something that won't let go. In twenty-eight years of ministry, when people have come to me for private confession and absolution, it is almost always connected to some form of sexual sin — very often pornography. These are things that are deeply secret, that carry a particular kind of shame, and where the person desperately, urgently needs to hear not just a general word of forgiveness broadcast to a whole room, but a specific word spoken directly to them, about this thing, right now.

That said, it doesn't have to be sexual sin. It can be anything — any sin that has settled onto your conscience and made it feel unclean. Anything that has created that particular spiritual heaviness where you can't quite believe the forgiveness is really for you, for this. Private confession and absolution exists precisely for those moments.

Know Your Enemy

Before we talk about what private confession actually looks like, it's worth pausing to understand what's really happening when a sin lodges itself in your conscience and refuses to leave, even after you've confessed it and heard the absolution. Because that dynamic doesn't come from nowhere, and it isn't spiritually neutral.

There is an enemy at work. His name is Satan — and that name itself is a description of his primary activity. Satan means accuser. It's not incidental to who he is; it's his job. He goes about accusing. He points at your sin. He holds it up in front of your face. He rehearses it with you over and over. And his goal is specific: he wants you to doubt that the forgiveness Jesus won is really for you. He's happy to concede that Jesus died for the sins of the world in some abstract theological sense. What he wants you to believe is that your particular sin — this one, the one you can't shake — is somehow the exception. That this one was too much. That what you did is worse than anything anyone else has ever brought to the cross, and that even Jesus, in his mercy, couldn't cover it.

That's a lie. It has always been a lie. But it is an effective lie, especially when it attaches itself to genuine shame, and that shame has nowhere to go.

What Jesus has actually done — in his death and in his resurrection — is give us a clean conscience. Not a conscience we cleaned up ourselves. Not forgiveness we earned or negotiated. A conscience that has been washed by Christ. In Romans 5 and 6, Paul describes what happens when we come to faith in Christ — through the hearing of his Word, through Baptism — as a death and a resurrection. We have been buried with him. We have been raised with him to a new life. And to use the language Jesus himself uses in John 3, we have been born again. Born with a clean conscience. Not because we made ourselves clean, but because Jesus washed us.

This is why, when someone's conscience is under assault, I keep coming back to their Baptism. You were baptized. That word — Baptism — primarily means washing. Your sins were washed away. Whatever the enemy is holding in front of you right now, the water of your Baptism speaks louder. That clean conscience isn't something you have to produce. It's something Christ gave you. Private confession and absolution doesn't create that cleanness — it delivers what Christ has already accomplished and gives you a place to actually receive it.

What Is Actually Happening When You Go to Your Pastor

Let me be clear about the theology here, because I think it matters practically. When you come to your pastor for private confession and absolution, you are not confessing your sin to him as if he were the one whose opinion about it matters most. He isn't the judge. He isn't the one who grants or withholds forgiveness based on whether he thinks what you did was bad enough to warrant it. You are confessing your sin to Jesus. The pastor is simply his representative — the one God has appointed to that congregation to speak Christ's forgiveness in Christ's name.

That distinction has real pastoral weight. The words the pastor speaks — in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit — those aren't his words. He's not authoring forgiveness out of his own authority or his own goodness. He's delivering something that belongs to Jesus and that Jesus has already purchased for you. The pastor is the delivery mechanism. The forgiveness is Christ's.

Can you do private confession and absolution with a brother or sister in Christ who isn't a pastor? Absolutely. Any believer can remind you of Jesus' atoning sacrifice. Any believer can point you back to the cross and say, Christ died for you. You are forgiven. But there is something particular and valuable about going to the pastor — because he is the one God has specifically appointed and ordained to your congregation to speak those words. There is a clarity and an authority to it that can cut through the noise in a way that is genuinely difficult to replicate in an informal conversation with a friend, however well-meaning that friend may be.

The Concern About Confidentiality

I know what the hesitation is. I've heard it enough times to have it memorized. What's to stop the pastor from bringing this up later? What if he tells someone? What if the next time I see him, he looks at me differently — like he knows, like it's just there between us, and everything is different now?

Let me address this directly. When I was ordained as a Lutheran pastor, I took a vow — a formal, binding vow — to never divulge the sins confessed to me in private confession. This is standard across Lutheran ordination; it is not unique to me or to Gloria Dei. The confidentiality of the confessional is not a courtesy. It is a vow made before God. And the theological reason behind it is exactly what I described above: you're not confessing to me. You're confessing to Jesus. I am his representative in that moment, and what passes between you and Christ in that room is not mine to carry out of it.

Here is what I can tell you practically: the next time you see me after a private confession, it will be as though it never happened. I will not bring it up. I will not reference it. If you bring it up, we can talk — but I will never hold it over you, I will never look at you through the lens of what you told me in that room. Because that's not my job. My job was to deliver Christ's forgiveness to you. Once I've done that, the matter is settled. Christ died for sinners. That's the whole work. You don't get to shock me by being one.

What It Actually Looks Like

If you've never done private confession and absolution before, you might be wondering what on earth happens when you actually sit down with your pastor. The formality of it can feel intimidating — and part of why it feels that way is that we don't practice it much, so it seems more unusual than it actually is. Let me walk you through what it would look like if you came to me.

You'd call the church office, and we'd find a time on the calendar. You'd come in. We'd sit down in my office, or perhaps in the sanctuary, depending on what felt right — somewhere private, with the doors closed. We'd start with a little conversation. How are you doing? What's going on? I want you to know you're welcome here and I'm glad you came. Then I'd pray, asking the Holy Spirit to be present as we go through this together.

Then I'd hand you a hymnal opened to page 292 — the rite of individual confession and absolution — and tell you to follow along. You don't have to have anything memorized. The words are right there on the page. You'd begin: Pastor, please hear my confession and pronounce forgiveness in order to fulfill God's word. I'd respond and invite you to proceed. There's a general confession that follows — acknowledging that you have dishonored God in thought, word, and deed — and that section ends with a crucial phrase: What troubles me particularly is… And that's where you speak it. Whatever it is. You name it. You put it into words out loud, in front of another person, and you let it be what it is.

I might ask some questions as we go. Not to pry, and not to make the experience more difficult than it needs to be, but because sometimes when we confess our sins, even with the best intentions, we hold something back. There's a part of us that wants to confess the general shape of it without naming the actual thing. So I might gently press — not to extract information, but to help you get the whole thing out, because I want you to leave knowing that the whole thing is forgiven. Not most of it. Not the version you were comfortable saying out loud. The whole thing.

After that, I speak the absolution. I speak God's forgiveness to you, directly, specifically. Then we might talk for a little while about practical steps — things you might change, habits that could help, ways to build some accountability or structure around whatever situation contributed to the sin. Not as a penance. Not as a condition of forgiveness — the forgiveness has already been spoken. But because we are God's people, and we want to repent. We don't want to keep walking back into the same sin indefinitely. We want to turn. We want to live differently. So we talk about that, practically and honestly.

Depending on what's going on and how heavy the guilt has been, we might celebrate the Lord's Supper together — receiving Jesus' body and blood one more time, for the forgiveness of sins. I'll speak a blessing over you. And you'll leave.

Luther's Own Words on This

I want to say something about the history here, because I think it's important for Lutherans especially to understand. During the Reformation, one of the complaints lodged against the Lutheran reformers was that they had abandoned private confession and absolution. And Luther pushed back hard on that. He wrote an admonition — an urgent exhortation — insisting that Lutherans should practice private confession. His argument was essentially this: when I urge you to confess your sins, I am urging you to be a Christian. The practice is a gift.

What the reformers objected to was not confession itself, but the requirement — the mandatory, compulsory nature of it in the medieval church, where people would torment themselves trying to remember and enumerate every single sin so they could be sure they'd covered everything and were eligible to receive forgiveness. That kind of anxious, exhaustive self-examination became its own spiritual trap. People weren't coming to confession to receive a gift — they were coming to complete a transaction, and the anxiety of whether they'd completed it correctly undermined the whole point.

So yes, there was an overcorrection. A lot of Protestant Christians concluded that because private confession was no longer required, it was no longer necessary, and quietly let it go. Luther himself was frustrated by this. The right response to removing a burden isn't to throw away the gift underneath it. Private confession and absolution is not required. You will not be denied communion if you haven't done it. God's forgiveness is not withheld from you until you've sat in your pastor's office. But it is genuinely, substantively good for you. It is a means through which Christ delivers his forgiveness to you in a concrete, specific, spoken word — and for some situations, for some weights, that specific word is exactly what's needed.

You're Not Going to Shock Me

I want to close by speaking directly to whatever is holding you back right now — because something probably is. Maybe it's the fear of judgment. Maybe it's the assumption that what you've done is so serious, so unusual, so embarrassing, that your pastor will look at you completely differently once he knows. Maybe you're afraid of the look on his face, or the pause before he speaks, or the way the conversation might feel afterward.

Let me be honest with you. I stand up every Sunday at Gloria Dei and tell you that you are a sinner. That's not rhetorical. I believe it. You are a sinner. So am I. Every person who has ever sat in front of me in twenty-eight years of ministry has been a sinner. The person who came before you was a sinner. The person who will come after you is a sinner. After nearly three decades of hearing confessions, I genuinely doubt that what you're carrying is something I've never encountered before.

And here's the thing about pastoral ministry — this is the work. Delivering forgiveness to sinners. This is not a side task or an awkward addition to the job description. This is the heart of it. Christ died for sinners. That's the whole Gospel. And your pastor's job is to make sure you know that his death was for you, specifically, for this particular thing you've done, and that you don't have to carry it anymore.

If you have prayed about this thing. If you've talked to someone about it. If you've confessed it in church and heard the absolution and received the Supper and it is still sitting on your conscience, still making you feel unclean — come. Make the appointment. Sit down. Say the words. Let the pastor speak forgiveness into your life. Let Christ's representative tell you, face to face, that your sin really has been atoned for. That it really is forgiven. That the blood of Jesus really does cover this, and that you are clean.

You were never meant to carry this alone. Christ didn't die to leave you under the weight of it. He died to take it from you — and private confession and absolution is one of the specific, tangible, concrete ways he has given you to receive that freedom. Don't leave it sitting on the shelf because it feels unfamiliar or risky or more than you can bring yourself to do. It's a gift. It's for you. And whatever is on your heart right now, there is a pastor who will listen, speak forgiveness, and walk out of that room carrying nothing of what you told him — because you didn't tell him. You told Jesus.

What would it mean for you to actually make that appointment this week?

Blessed!

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:00:11 +0000

Brothers and sisters in Christ, you are blessed!

The Psalm appointed for today is Psalm 32:1-7. It is on the insert there in your bulletin, if you would take a look at it. It says:

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
²Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

³For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
⁴For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah

⁵I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah

⁶Therefore let everyone who is godly
    offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found;
surely in the rush of great waters,
    they shall not reach him.
⁷You are a hiding place for me;
    you preserve me from trouble;
    you surround me with shouts of deliverance. Selah

Notice how the Psalm starts with this proclamation: You are blessed! Everyone living under God’s grace – the grace you received in baptism, in the Lord’s Supper, in the proclamation of God’s Word – everyone under that grace that God gives us through faith in Jesus is blessed.

David, who wrote the Psalm, says we’re blessed when we’re forgiven, our sins are covered, and the Lord does not count our iniquity against us. This is an important message for us as we walk through this life. It’s far easier to focus on our failures, our shortcomings, and our sin. But you are not just a sinner! You are also a saint, washed in Jesus’ blood, which covers your sin!

That helps us to understand what David says next, he says we’re blessed when there is not deceit in our hearts. Now, I don’t know about you, but I am able to deceive myself in a hundred different ways, but there is one thing that is perfectly clear to me: I am a sinner who needs to be redeemed by Jesus, and there is no hope apart from Him. To say there is no deceit in your heart is to say we know who we are. It is also to say we know our Savior.

The Gospel of Mark, chapter 2, records a confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees. They’re confused by what Jesus was doing. He was eating with tax collectors and sinners. The Pharisees felt that they were morally superior, and that they were not sinners – at least not like these people Jesus dined with. Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”

We know our sin-sick souls – we are not deceived on that point, we are not kidding ourselves thinking we’re better than anyone. We’ve felt the weight of our sin and the guilt and shame it brings into our lives. That’s where David turns our attention next.

He says, ³For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
⁴For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah

Notice how he describes a guilty conscience. It wears us out. It consumes our thoughts. It makes us feel like our bones are wasting away inside of us. In other words, we feel like the very structure of our self is rotten and untrustworthy. It’s a feeling that makes us groan and cry out in distress.

Why? Because we feel God’s judgment against our sin.

Have you ever had to confront someone – maybe a poor performance review, maybe you caught someone stealing or cheating, maybe you caught someone in a lie. How did they respond to the confrontation? It’s not unusual for people to become hostile and argumentative in that kind of a situation.

Well, God confront us! And we don’t like it when we’re confronted with our sin. No one likes to be judged, but God judges justly. He proclaims that sin is sin, and it is damnable. And we can wrestle against Him all you want, but when God gets you in His grip, you’re not getting free! There is no technicality, loophole, or strategy you can employ against Him. There is only Christ who offers forgiveness and salvation!

You might feel tough and independent. We like to think we are masters of our own destiny. We proclaim: This is my life, my body, my decision. But when a person fights against God, all you do is wear yourself out. You strength is dried up as by the summer heat!

If you’ve felt that futility, if you’ve fought God and known how broken it leaves you, as David knew, you will be quick to confess your sin.

⁵I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah

Now listen to v. 1 again. Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.

Now, v. 5. ⁵I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah

Notice how David talks about sins being covered and forgiven.

It is tempting to try to cover our sin – to keep anyone from seeing the wrong we’ve done. That makes sense, it can be embarrassing, and sometimes we are ashamed of what we do. We want to cover that up and keep it secret, but David tells us, don’t do that! Confess it! Call out to God and confess your sins, because God will cover it. God’s desire is to forgive your sins for Jesus’ sake, to cover it in Jesus’ blood.

This is God’s blessing! He gives you salvation in His Son! He gives you forgiveness for Jesus’ sake! He covers your sin! Because of Jesus, He counts no iniquity against you!

So when you deal with God, let there be not deceit. You can’t fool God anyhow! Confess and receive what God has promised. That’s what David urges us to do in v. 6-7.

He says to pray while God may be found. He’s saying to pray right away; don’t wait to call for forgiveness! Your God is a savior – THE Savior! When the troubles of sin rise like a flood against you, but you are in Christ, it can’t reach you. God is your hiding place. He covers you and protects you from sin’s accusations and from those horrible consequences it brings. He preserves you and gives you everlasting life because Jesus died and rose for you!

He also surrounds you with shouts of deliverance. These are the cries of people who have been freed: freed from sin, freed from guilt, freed from death. That’s you – this congregation and all our brothers and sisters in Christ. You are blessed.

Go! Live in this blessing! Amen.

Your Sin Is Unique?

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:53:48 +0000

There's a line Martin Luther wrote in his 1529 Large Catechism that stops me every time I read it. In his exhortation on confession and absolution, he says something like this: When I urge you to go to confession, I am urging you to be a Christian. That's not a throwaway line. Luther isn't talking about a religious ritual that makes God like you better, or a hoop you jump through to earn your way back into good standing. He's saying that confession — really confessing your sins and really receiving forgiveness — is simply what it looks like to live as someone who believes that Jesus died for them. It's the heartbeat of the Christian life. And yet, for a lot of us, it's something we've never thought through very carefully. So let's think through it together.

Last week we talked about what confession actually is: it has two parts. First, we acknowledge our guilt — we name our sins and own them. Second, we receive absolution — we receive the forgiveness that Christ has already won for us on the cross. Both parts matter. A confession that stops at guilt without receiving forgiveness isn't really finished. And a claim to forgiveness that never honestly reckons with sin is cheap grace. The two belong together. This week, I want to get practical. How do we actually confess our sins? What does that look like in daily life?

Starting Where We Have to Start: Knowing the Law

Before you can confess anything, you have to know what you're confessing. That sounds obvious, but it's more complicated than it sounds — because sin has a way of hiding from us, especially the sin we're most comfortable with. We don't naturally see ourselves clearly. We need a mirror. And that mirror is God's law.

In Romans, Paul tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But what does that actually look like in my life, specifically? Paul gets at this in Galatians, where he writes that he wouldn't even have known what coveting was if God's law hadn't named it. The law does something to us: it names the thing. It drags out into the open what we'd otherwise leave in the shadows. And once you know what the sin is, once it has a name, you can't un-know it. The law accuses you more, not less, because now you're without excuse.

This is exactly why catechesis — learning the faith in a thorough, structured way — has always been connected to confession. Historically, catechisms were written in part to prepare people for confession. The seven deadly sins and the Cardinal virtues, for example, were lists drawn from Scripture to help people examine themselves honestly: Where am I struggling with pride? With envy? With sloth? As Lutherans, we go right back to the Ten Commandments for this examination. They're our mirror.

But here's something that often surprises people: the commandments aren't only about what not to do. They also teach us what we ought to do. When Jesus expands on the law in Matthew 5:21–22, he makes clear that the commandment against murder isn't satisfied just by never physically killing anyone. Anger toward a brother or sister — harbored, nurtured anger — is already murder in the heart. The commandment reaches further than we thought. It always does.

The same is true with stealing. The commandment isn't just: don't take your neighbor's stuff. It's: help and support your neighbor to keep and improve what belongs to them. Think about that. If someone I know is struggling to hold onto their livelihood and I do nothing — not because I'm actively stealing from them, but simply because I'm indifferent — I've already missed what the commandment is calling me to. God's law is positive as much as it is prohibitive. It calls us toward something, not just away from something.

So the first step in confession is to sit with the commandments — all ten of them, with their full weight — and let them do their work. Think about your vocations: your role as a husband or wife, a father or mother, a son or daughter, an employer or employee, a neighbor, a citizen, a friend. Where have you failed to love God with your whole heart, soul, strength, and mind? Where have you failed to love your neighbor as yourself? That examination, that honest reckoning, is where confession begins.

Four Ways We Confess — and Three of Them Today

Once we've seen ourselves honestly in God's mirror, what do we do with that? There are really four ways that confession and forgiveness can happen in the Christian life. I want to walk through three of them today, and then next week we'll spend more time on the fourth — private confession and absolution — because that one deserves its own full conversation.

1. Confessing to God in Your Heart

The first way is the most immediate: you confess your sins directly to God. And I want to say clearly — there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. You have a direct line to God. Jesus is your intercessor, and he has already made the way open. You don't need anyone else present to come before God and say: This is how I have sinned. Please forgive me.

That is a real confession. It's not a lesser confession. If you know that Christ died for you, that he bore your sin on the cross and made full atonement for it, and you can take hold of that by faith — that is completely sufficient. God hears you. His forgiveness is real. His desire is always to deliver that forgiveness into your life. That's not a reluctant grace that has to be coaxed out of him; it is his will, his joy, to forgive.

Something as simple as: God, forgive me for my sin. I want to do better. Help me. — that's a valid confession. Don't let anyone make you feel like it's too simple or that it doesn't count unless it comes with more ceremony. Christ's work is sufficient, and faith lays hold of it. That said, there are other shapes that confession can and should take, and they're worth understanding.

2. Confessing to the Person You've Hurt

The second form of confession is more personal and often harder: going directly to the person you've sinned against. All sin is ultimately sin against God — that's true, and it matters. But God has also given us relationships, and when we wound another person, something more is needed than a private conversation with God alone. The relationship itself has been broken, and it needs tending.

This is where we actually go to our spouse, our child, our friend, our co-worker — whoever it is we've hurt — and we say: I was wrong. I sinned against you. Will you forgive me, for Jesus' sake? And then, God willing, the person who hears that confession, if they themselves are living in Christ's forgiveness, can say: Yes. I forgive you. Not because they're somehow granting forgiveness out of their own reserves, but because they know what it is to be forgiven. They're not withholding something that belongs to them; they're passing along something that belongs to Christ.

It's usually our closest neighbors who are on the receiving end of this — our spouses, our children, the people who live inside our walls and see us at our worst. That's not a coincidence. Proximity and love make us vulnerable to each other in ways that strangers never are. But this is also exactly why going back to the cross together with that person matters so much. When you confess to your spouse and they forgive you, you're not just repairing a relationship moment — you're rehearsing the gospel together. You're saying: Look, we're both sinners. We're both living in this forgiveness. Of course I forgive you. How could I not?

Now, some people push back here. They remember what the Pharisees said in Mark 2: Who can forgive sins but God alone? And they're not entirely wrong to ask the question. But here's the answer: all forgiveness is God's forgiveness. It belongs to him. What changes is the means by which he delivers it. Sometimes he delivers it to you directly, as you hear his Word and trust it. And sometimes he delivers it through another person — through the spoken word of a brother or sister or pastor who speaks forgiveness into your life. You receive it by faith in every case. The source is always God. The channel simply varies. So when your neighbor forgives you in Jesus' name, that is God's forgiveness coming to you through a human voice. Receive it as such.

3. Corporate Confession and Absolution

The third form of confession is something many of us participate in every Sunday without necessarily thinking deeply about what we're doing: corporate confession and absolution as part of the worship service. At Gloria Dei, and in many Lutheran churches, the service begins with a structured moment of confession and forgiveness. There's a liturgy — specific words, a particular shape to it — and that liturgy is doing something important.

Think about the moments when you know you need forgiveness but you can't quite find the words. There's no dramatic, scandalous sin you're carrying around this particular week. You just know, somewhere in your chest, that you are a sinner — that you've fallen short in a dozen small ways, in your impatience, in your indifference, in your wandering thoughts, in your half-hearted love. You're not sure exactly what to say, but you know it needs to be said. The liturgy of corporate confession gives you the words. It holds you when your own vocabulary for sin and grace runs thin.

But there's something else happening in that moment that's easy to miss. When we confess together — standing together, saying the same words together — we're making a declaration about what we share as a community. I think sometimes we imagine that our particular sins are uniquely ours. That my struggle is so specific, so personal, so unlike what anyone else in the room is dealing with. And there's a sense in which every person's story is their own. But Ecclesiastes cuts right through that: there is nothing new under the sun.

There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come among those who come after. — Ecclesiastes 1:11

The human condition is the human condition. Pride, envy, fear, selfishness, the failure to love — these are not novel sins that arrived with the modern world or belong uniquely to one person in one pew. They are ancient. They are universal. Every generation has pressed the same desperate handprint into the same stone wall. Corporate confession names that reality. It says: we are all in this together. We are all sinners. We all need Christ. And we all stand in this hope — that he really did die for us, that our sins really are forgiven, that the absolution spoken over us is not wishful thinking but a word of God himself.

The pastor or worship leader who speaks that absolution isn't making something up or pronouncing a human opinion. He's delivering what Christ won, in the name and by the authority of Christ. And you receive it by faith, just as you would if you were alone on your knees in your bedroom. The setting is communal. The forgiveness is just as real.

There's a profound comfort in standing in a room full of fellow sinners who are reaching for the same grace you need. The person next to you in the pew has their own version of the same battle you're fighting. They may not know what yours looks like; you may not know what theirs looks like. But you are together in this — together in your need, and together in the hope that Christ is sufficient for all of it. That's part of what the church is. That's part of what Sunday morning is for.

A Word About the Fourth Form — And Why It Matters

I said there's a fourth form of confession — private confession and absolution — and I'm going to spend more time on that next week, because it deserves more than a quick mention. But let me say this much now, so you're not left wondering.

For people who didn't grow up in the Catholic tradition, private confession — going to a pastor individually, naming your sin, and hearing forgiveness spoken directly to you — can sound foreign or even unnecessary. We have a complicated cultural relationship with the idea of confession to another person. It can feel like it puts too much power in the pastor's hands, or like it's adding something to faith that doesn't belong there.

But here's what private confession is actually for. It's for the moment when there is something specific — a particular sin, a burden you've been carrying for months or years — that is genuinely eating at you. Something that makes you wonder: Am I really forgiven? Does this count? Is God's grace actually big enough for this? That doubt, that nagging uncertainty about whether your specific sin is covered — private confession and absolution speaks directly into it. You name the thing. And then you hear, spoken to you personally, by name, in plain language: Your sins are forgiven.

Christ's goal is not to leave you in doubt. He paid for your sin. He died for it. He does not want you walking around wondering whether it counted. He wants you to know. He wants you to believe it and live in it. Private confession is one of the ways he makes that personal and concrete. More on that next week.

What This Is All Adding Up To

Let me bring this back to where Luther started. When I urge you to go to confession, I am urging you to be a Christian. To confess your sins — however that takes shape for you today, whether it's alone before God, or face to face with someone you've hurt, or standing in a pew on Sunday morning — is to live as a person who knows they need a Savior and knows they have one. It's not an act of groveling or self-punishment. It's an act of faith. It's reaching for what Christ has already provided.

The mirror of God's law shows us who we really are. That's not comfortable. It's not supposed to be. But the law's work is not the last word. The last word is the gospel — that Christ died for sinners, that his blood covers what the law exposes, and that his forgiveness is real and available and meant for you, specifically. Confession is the movement from law to gospel, from seeing your sin to receiving grace. Every form of it — private prayer, personal reconciliation, corporate worship — is really the same journey, just walked in a different setting.

So here's the question worth sitting with this week: Where am I avoiding the mirror? Where have I let a sin go unnamed, unconfessed, un-brought-to-God — because naming it out loud (even to him) feels like too much? That's the place to start. Not because confession earns you anything, but because Christ has already earned everything, and he wants you to receive it. Don't leave it on the table.

Lutheran Worship - August 30, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:08:00 +0000

Lutheran Worship

Adult Bible Class

August 30, 2026

Opening Prayer

The Intersection Between Lutheran Worship and Current Events

A Focus from the Past

- Tradition is important among people

- The liturgy is old

- Scripture is ancient

What are some pros and cons of these old influences on the Sunday Service?

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost." – J.R.R. Tolkien

Just because something is old does not mean that it is irrelevant.

- Hebrews 4:12 – God’s Word is living and active …

- Hebrews 13:8 – Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

- Malachi 3:6 – For I am the LORD; I do not change; therefore, you are not destroyed.

When we deal with the things of God, we are dealing with the eternal in the midst of the temporal.

- This stands against the idea that we’re dealing with “real life” issues in this world.

On the One Hand: Over

The Divine Service Stands over the events, priorities, passions, and desires of life.

- Isaiah 40:8 – The grass withers, and the flowers fall, but the Word of the Lord stand forever.

o V.D.M.A.

- People have prognosticated the death of the church for centuries – over a millennium!

- Matthew 16:18 – … on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell sall not prevail against it.

Kingdoms Fall

- Persecution – Rome, Totalitarianism, Communism, some Socialist and other forms of government.

o The culture is toxic, but the church survives.

- Concern over secularism

o John 1:5 – The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

o The darkness cannot comprehend it.

- We have been peculiarly blessed

o Tertullian – “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

o Constantine – religio licita

o Many European and northern Asian monarchies supported and promoted Christianity.

§ A mixed bag of results – from amazing cathedrals, to wars, to mercy ministry, to oppression.

o Pluralistic Democratic Republic

Sabbath is a Scattered World

- Psalm 46:10 – Be still and know that I am God.

- “Hurry is not of the devil; it is the devil.” – Carl Jung

- The frenetic pressure of an overly connected world.

o The “hyperactive hive mind.” – Cal Newport

o F.O.M.O.

- The name: Beelzebub – The Lord of the Flies

- Mark 4:39 – Jesus calms the storm.

o “Quiet” – Stop speaking

o “Be still” – Muzzle, put to silence,

Where do people experience stillness and silence in their lives today?

What does the constant intake of information – much of which is not all that important – do to our souls?

A Voice that Calls People

- John 10 – The Good Shepherd’s voice calls and comforts

o “I have come to seek and save the lost.”

o “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.”

- “Only sinners welcome here.”

A Voice that Challenges the Values and Ideas of Culture

- Names Jesus and His Apostles use for Satan

o Ruler of this World (John 12)

o Prince of this World (John 14)

o God of this World (2 Corinthians 2)

o Prince of the Power of the Air (Ephesians 2)

- Third Petition of the Lord’s Prayer – How is God’s Will done? God’s will is done when He breaks and hinders every evil plan and purpose of the devil, the world, and our own sinful nature which do not want us to hallow His name or let His kingdom come.

We should not be surprised when we find ourselves in conflict with the world we live in.

A comment on becoming too deeply aligned with a political party.

Sunday Service as Sanctuary

- Luther on his death bed, “We are all beggars.”

- The country’s response to 9/11

- Return of young men to church.

- God as a “Rock” and “Hiding Place”

On the Other Hand: In the Midst

Art

The aesthetics of the church is often influenced by where it is found

Architecture

- Finnish Stave Churches

- Gothic Cathedrals

- Puritan Chapels

- Big Box Mega Churches

Music

- Subsets of European

- Asian

- African

- Hispanic Americas

Visual Arts

- From gods to God

- Medieval and Renaissance

Language

- Hebrew and Greek – Original Languages

- Latin Vulgate

- KJV, RSV, NIV, ESV, CSB, etc.

Technology

- Written language

- Musical Instruments

- Clay Tablets, Papyrus, Vellum, Paper

- Tables, Scrolls, Books, Tablets

- Scribes, Printing Press, Laser Printers, Digital Publishing

Concluding Thoughts

- Was this beneficial? Why or why not?

- Lutheran Distinctives

o Law and Gospel

o Tradition with Freedom

o Divine Service

o Seasons of the Church Year

o Delivering Christ’s Gifts in Word and Sacrament

Take Up Your Cross

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:48:01 +0000

Matthew 16:21-28 (ESV)

²¹From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. ²²And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord!^[a] This shall never happen to you.” ²³But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance^[b] to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

²⁴Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. ²⁵For whoever would save his life^[c] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. ²⁶For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? ²⁷For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. ²⁸Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Take Up Your Cross

It had to have been confusing for Peter – a bit of emotional whiplash! This reading, flows directly from last week’s account.

- Who do you (plural) say that I am?

- Peter speaks for all – “You are the Messiah, the Son of God!”

- Blessed are you!

But then Jesus talked about what it means for Him to be the Christ/Messiah: From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. (Matthew 16:21)

Peter didn’t like what he was hearing: Peter took [Jesus] aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

- This suffering and dying (overlooking the rising!) was not what anyone wanted or expected for the Messiah.

- They expected victory, triumph, glory!

Jesus response? “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

Jesus knew that His ministry, without the crucifixion and resurrection, would be useless. Without His death, there is no forgiveness of sins. Without His resurrection, there is no everlasting life for all who believe in Him.

The Cross of Christ – His suffering and death there – is essential. This is why St. Paul said that when he preached to the Corinthian Christians, he was determined to know nothing among them except Jesus … and Him crucified. It’s why he reminds them (and us!) that he delivered as of first importance that which he also received: that Jesus died for our sins, He was buried, and He was raised. All of this was “according to the Scripture” – exactly as God planned it to save us through the Cross.

There is a deep temptation for people to displace Jesus from the cross. On the one hand, we’re tempted to try to climb up there ourselves and do something to atone for our own sins. It seems like sometimes we think that we have to punish ourselves in some way in order to become right with God … as though Jesus’ death was insufficient for the job. On the other hand, we try to displace Jesus on the Cross by making the faith about something other than His death and resurrection.

People try to make the Christian faith about morality, which is just a religion of the law that is written on our hearts. Now, don’t get me wrong! Morality matters, but it will not save you. Remember that in Isaiah 64, God complains that our righteous deeds are like filthy rags to Him. It is only when our actions flow from faith moved by grace that they are pleasing in His sight. We always fall short in some way, so we strive to be moral, but we don’t place our hope there! Our hope for forgiveness is in Jesus’ death!

Sometimes people try to make the Christian faith about “Love.” That sounds nice, doesn’t it? It seems like a great philosopher said, “All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.” But what kind of “love” are we talking about? After all, in 1 John, the beloved apostle says, “God is love.” And God through Christ is all we need. But John also says, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” If we want to depend our ability to love God, or our love for others, that will fall short, too!

We are often tempted to confuse love with niceness, too. We act like it is not loving someone to call sin sin, or to challenge their false beliefs. Now, it matters how we do that. You don’t have to be a jerk – but love desires God’s truth and blessing. Love confronts sin because we know the price one pays for sin – death! We want to share Jesus’ death so that people may have life in Him!

There are some others who make the Christian faith about power, and they wrap their religion in their flag or label it with their political party. But Jesus came not to be served, not to amass power, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.

What Jesus is saying in this reading is that His suffering, death, and resurrection is the plan. He is saying, “This is how I am going to save you!” But Peter says, “No way!” And we’re tempted to do the same – we want to keep Jesus off the Cross.

But notice what Jesus says next, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

What is your cross? We usually understand this as the sufferings we face in this life. To some extent that is true, especially when we suffer in faith and for the Faith! But, in the end, your cross is Christ’s cross. Remember that in baptism we are tied to Jesus’ death and through His death connected to His resurrection so we have a new life. (This is one of the reasons I wanted the painting of the crucifix we have hanging at the entrance of the sanctuary. It’s a reminder that our salvation came through Jesus’ body – delivered to us in the water of baptism and the blood of the Lord’s Supper!)

Jesus says, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” It could also be translated whoever would save his soul will lose it, but whoever loses his soul for my sake will find it.” Your soul is that part of you that lives on even after you die. It is the part of you that will be reunited with your body in the resurrection. And for you to save your soul, you have to die with Jesus. His death has to be your death, so that His life becomes your life.

Jesus asks, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?”

What tempts you at the cost of your soul?

- Wealth? Pleasure? Sex? Prestige? Power? Security? Comfort?

- We make little compromises with the world that work against the kingdom of heaven when our hearts are set on the things of this world instead of the things of God; when we don’t trust or live in God’s Word in all it’s truth and purity. It’s as though we exchange the truth of God for the lies of this life.

If you lost your soul, what could you give to get it back?

- The answer is: Nothing.

- Ephesians 2 says that we were dead in our trespasses and sins apart from Jesus. It is His life, His blood, that is the only thing that can be given to redeem our souls.

- His death is our life. That is why it says at the beginning of Romans 12 that we are to present ourselves as living sacrifices seeking and following God’s good and gracious will.

- This is what it is to take up our cross and follow Jesus. Our life is bound up with His.

So, brothers and sisters, take up your cross and follow Jesus! Do all the hard things that come with following Him. Take hold of those Christian disciplines like prayer, steeping your life in Scripture, tithing, giving, doing good, having mercy, being compassionate, and all the things that are described in our Epistle reading today.

More importantly, though, live in the grace that flows from Jesus’ cross. In Romans 1, Paul says, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel for it is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. Live under the sign of your salvation! God will use it to comfort you with His love and forgiveness. He will use it to encourage others, sharing your hope with your brothers and sisters in Christ. He will also use it to draw others to Jesus’ cross, that they, too, may take it up as the source of their salvation! Bear the mark of being forgiven. In baptism you received the sign of the Cross, both upon your forehead and upon your heart. You are those who have been have been fed by Jesus. Live in His grace as one who follows Jesus through death to eternal life. Amen.

Confession: The Part You Skip

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:46:53 +0000

Most of us, if we're being honest, have a complicated relationship with the word confession. It either conjures up an image we borrowed from somewhere else — a darkened booth, a screen, a whispered ritual — or it sits quietly in the order of service on Sunday morning, something we move through on the way to the hymns. We say the words. We mean them, more or less. And then we move on. What I want to talk about over the next couple of weeks is why that's only half the story — and why the half we tend to skip is actually the most important part.

What Comes to Mind When You Hear "Confession"?

Start with the word itself. If I say confession to most people in our culture, the image that comes to mind is shaped almost entirely by the Roman Catholic tradition — the confessional booth, the priest on the other side of the screen, the formal opening, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, followed by an account of what went wrong, followed by an assigned penance. I know that's an oversimplification, and I say it with genuine respect for my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. But that's the image that floats to the surface, and it's worth naming because it shapes what we think confession actually is — and, more importantly, what it's for.

As a Lutheran pastor, when I talk about confession, I always go back to Luther's Small Catechism, because Luther does something clarifying and important here. He tells us that confession has two parts. Not one. Two. And here's the thing — most of us only ever think about the first one.

The Two Parts Luther Insists On

The First Part: Confessing Our Sins

The first part is the one we recognize. It's the admission of guilt — actually naming the ways we have broken God's law, violated his love, and failed to love our neighbors the way he calls us to in the Ten Commandments and throughout all of Scripture. This isn't a vague, general acknowledgment that nobody's perfect. It's a real reckoning with specific reality: I have sinned. I have done this. I have left undone that. My words, my thoughts, my actions — they have gone against what God has called me to, what he has called me to be.

This matters. Confession as acknowledgment of guilt is not a formality. It's a truth-telling exercise, and Scripture is unambiguous about why it's necessary. The Apostle John puts it bluntly:

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:8–9)

If we say we have no sin, we are calling God a liar. We are saying, in effect, that Jesus didn't need to die — that the cross was unnecessary, that the whole drama of redemption was overblown. That's a steep claim to make. And yet functionally, that's where we end up when we skip confession, or treat it as a minor ritual warm-up before the real service begins. The admission of guilt is not optional. It's the honest starting point of every Christian's conversation with God.

We have beautiful models of this throughout Scripture. The Psalmist in Psalm 38:18 writes simply and painfully, I confess my iniquity; I am sorry for my sin. And then there is Psalm 51 — take a long look at that one if you haven't recently. It's one of the most beautiful and extensive confessions in all of Scripture. David wrote it after his sin with Bathsheba, after the prophet Nathan came and confronted him with what he had done. What you see in that psalm is not just guilt. It's not just self-recrimination. It's a soul that knows its guilt and throws itself entirely on the mercy and faithfulness of God. That is what real confession looks like.

The Second Part: Receiving Absolution

And this is where most of us stop — at the guilt, at the naming, at the sorrow. But Luther insists there is a second part, and without it, the first part is, frankly, just misery. The second part is that we would actually receive absolution — receive forgiveness — for our sins. Not imagine it. Not assume it happened somewhere in the background. Not remind ourselves theologically that it's probably true. Receive it. Real forgiveness, applied. Christ's forgiveness, delivered.

The word absolution sounds technical, but the idea is beautifully simple: you are loosed from your sin. It is taken away. The debt is cancelled. The record is cleared. And the reason this second part matters just as much as the first is that confession without absolution is only half a conversation. What good does it do to admit your guilt if there's no remedy? Imagine going to a doctor, describing your symptoms in careful detail, and having the doctor nod thoughtfully and then send you home — no diagnosis, no treatment, no prescription. The visit accomplished nothing except confirming that something is wrong. Confession without absolution is like that. We've named the problem. We still need the cure.

Where Different Traditions Get Stuck

Different Christian traditions tend to struggle with confession and absolution in different directions, and it's worth being honest about this.

Within the Catholic tradition — and again, I'm speaking about impressions rather than making precise theological claims — there can be a sense that the satisfactions assigned after confession, the prayers or acts of penance, are somehow part of what earns the forgiveness. That the things I do afterward are what settle the account. There's a kernel of truth hidden in this impulse — when we've sinned, we genuinely want to do something about it, to make it right, to demonstrate that we're sorry. That desire isn't wrong. But the forgiveness itself is never something we earn. Not by prayers, not by acts of restitution, not by anything we do. It was won at the cross. It belongs to Jesus.

Within much of Protestantism, the tendency goes in a different direction. The reasoning sounds reasonable enough: I have a direct line to Jesus, so I don't need to confess to anyone. This is just between me and God. And again, there's a kernel of truth here — there is indeed one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus himself (1 Timothy 2:5). My sin is completely and fully forgiven because of what God has done in Christ. That's not in question. But here's what this view tends to miss: God himself appoints people to speak his forgiveness. He doesn't just forgive in the abstract and leave us to figure out whether it applies to us. He sends messengers. He speaks through people. He always has.

Jesus Gave the Church Authority to Speak Forgiveness

This is where I think we need to sit for a moment, because it's something our culture really resists. The idea that Jesus would give other human beings the authority to speak forgiveness sounds like it's inflating the role of the church — or the pastor — beyond what's appropriate. But this is not something we invented. Jesus says it plainly.

In Matthew 18:18, in the middle of a conversation about what to do when a brother sins, Jesus says, Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. He's talking about the forgiveness of sins. This authority to forgive belongs to the community of believers.

Then in John 20, after the resurrection, Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room. He breathes on them — a remarkable, deliberate act — and says, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven. Catch that. Jesus, freshly risen from the dead, on the other side of the cross and the empty tomb, gives the church the authority to forgive sins in his name. That's not a minor thing. That's a gift — a gift specifically intended to ensure that real people in real time can hear, with real certainty, that they are forgiven.

James makes it practical when he writes that we are to confess our sins to one another and pray for one another. This is not merely a therapeutic exercise in vulnerability. It's the body of Christ doing what Christ empowered it to do — speaking forgiveness to one another, praying for one another's healing, bearing one another's burdens in the most profound sense.

Think about the paralytic in Mark 2. His friends tear a hole in the roof to lower him to Jesus, and the first thing Jesus says — before healing, before anything else — is, Your sins are forgiven. The scribes and Pharisees are offended. Who can forgive sins but God alone? And they're right, in a way — which is exactly the point Jesus is making. He is God. He has the authority. And he has chosen to extend that authority, through his Spirit, to his church.

What This Looks Like at Gloria Dei

This is why, if you come to worship at Gloria Dei, nearly every service begins with confession and absolution. We don't tack it on as a formality. We place it at the beginning because it is the right starting place — we come before God as we are, name what is true, and receive what he has promised.

What we do on Sunday morning is called corporate confession — the whole gathered assembly confessing together. And then I, as the pastor, speak the words of absolution. When I do that, I say that I am speaking in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ. That language matters. I am not forgiving anyone on my own authority. I am an ambassador — and an ambassador speaks on behalf of the king, carries the king's message, and delivers it with the king's authority, not his own. Paul describes this in his letters to the Corinthians — we are stewards of the mysteries of God, ambassadors for Christ. That is not a title of personal prestige. It's a description of a task: deliver the message you've been given, to the people you've been sent to, on behalf of the One who sent you.

So when I speak absolution to this congregation, I am doing exactly that. I am taking people back to the cross — to the place where Jesus stood in our place, bore our sin in his body, and died to atone for it — and I am delivering what he accomplished there into their lives right now, through proclamation. Your sins are forgiven, because he died and rose for you. As Colossians says, he cancelled the record of debt that stood against us, nailing it to the cross. Those sins are left there. He rose and left them behind. That's the word I'm speaking when I speak absolution.

And this isn't limited to pastors in a formal sense. Any Christian can and should speak forgiveness to another — that's part of what it means to be the body of Christ. When you tell someone, I forgive you, and so does Jesus, you are doing something real and holy. But it has been given to pastors to do this in a public, authoritative way on behalf of the whole congregation — to stand up and say, with the weight of ordination and the clarity of commission, your sins are forgiven.

Why Does It Matter That Someone Speaks It to You?

You might be wondering — if Jesus has already forgiven us, why does it matter whether someone speaks that forgiveness out loud? Can't I just know it in my head? And here I want to be direct, because this question is worth taking seriously.

First, this is genuinely hard to believe. Not in a merely intellectual sense, but in the sense that touches the deepest places of guilt and shame. Think about the thing you're most ashamed of. The thing you circle back to in the dark. How does one man's death on a Roman cross atone for that? For the specific thing you did, said, thought, became? Faith is always a miracle. It doesn't arise naturally from within us. It comes from outside us — through the Word, through proclamation, through someone speaking the truth of the gospel into the particular circumstances of your particular life. You need to hear it. God knows you need to hear it. That's why he set things up the way he did.

Second, God wants you to know — really know, not just vaguely hope — that your sins are forgiven for Christ's sake. Not as a general theological proposition, but as a personal reality that belongs to you. And so he sends messengers. He ordains men to this work. He gives you the church — your brothers and sisters in Christ who pray for you, encourage you, and speak the gospel to you — because he knows how easy it is for that certainty to erode, for doubt to creep in, for shame to whisper that surely it doesn't apply to this.

What About Sincerity?

There's a question that almost always comes up here, and I want to address it honestly: doesn't the person confessing have to actually mean it? What if someone just goes through the motions — says the words, hears the absolution, and walks out unchanged? Is the forgiveness real?

A couple of thoughts. First, if someone comes to me and confesses a sin that's been weighing on them, or if they participate in the corporate confession on Sunday morning, they might fool me. I'm looking at the outside. I can't see the heart. But God is not fooled. He knows, and I trust him to do what he does in spite of my limitations as an ambassador. He's the king. He can work beyond the ambassador's knowledge.

But the second thought is more important: even when our sincerity is incomplete — and it often is — Jesus is sincere. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He spoke plainly throughout the Gospels about what he had come to do: to die, to rise, to atone. He meant every word of it. He went through with it. And in Revelation, he declares, Behold, I make all things new — that is a man who means what he says.

The truth is, we will always struggle with our sincerity. We are, as Paul writes in Romans 7, simultaneously saint and sinner, and that tension doesn't resolve itself cleanly this side of eternity. We want to want to repent. We're sorry, and also we're not entirely sure we're sorry. Augustine put it memorably in his Confessions — he prayed for chastity, he said, but not yet. We know that pull. We live in it.

And this is precisely why God gives us the church, our brothers and sisters, and pastors who speak absolution week after week — not because we have it all together, but because Jesus does. His faithfulness covers our inconsistency. His sincerity fills the gap left by ours. The gift of absolution, the gift of forgiveness spoken out loud into your actual life, is there because God knows how much you need to hear it — even when you're not entirely sure you deserve to.

Which, of course, is the point. You don't deserve it. That's what makes it grace. And grace is not abstract. It comes through words, through people, through the church gathered on a Sunday morning saying the hard true thing together and then hearing the even harder, even truer thing spoken back: I forgive you all your sins.

Confession is not the whole story. It's only the beginning. The part that changes everything is what comes next — the door that's already ajar, the light already coming through. Absolution is not a formality at the top of the service. It is the gospel delivered to you, by name, in your pew, in your actual life, this week. Don't skip it. Don't rush past it. Receive it. That's what it's there for.

As you think about your own practice of confession — whether in corporate worship, in conversation with a fellow believer, or in the quiet of your own prayer — ask yourself: am I stopping at the guilt, or am I actually receiving the forgiveness Christ won for me? Because he didn't die so you could feel bad. He died so you could be free. And he wants you to know it.

Transcript generated by A.I. Original by the author.

Lutheran Worship - August 23, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:35:42 +0000

Lutheran Worship

Adult Bible Class

August 23, 2026

Opening Prayer

Why We Preach

To preach is to proclaim, exclaim, cry out.

Preaching was central to Jesus’ ministry

- Mark 1:35-38 - And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. ³⁶And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, ³⁷and they found him and said to him, “Everyone is looking for you.” ³⁸And he said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.” ³⁹And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

- Notice the context!

Preaching was central to the Apostles’ ministry

- Mark 3:13-15a - And [Jesus] went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. ¹⁴And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach ¹⁵and have authority to cast out demons.

- The Acts of the Apostles

Preaching presents God’s Word so people may believe in Jesus

- John 20:30-31 - Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; ³¹but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

- Romans 10:14-17 - How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? ¹⁵And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” ¹⁶But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” ¹⁷So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

This is what you Called me to do.

- Supplement to the Diploma of Vocation – In the name of the Triune God and by His authority, in order that we might carry out His mission to the world, we hereby authorize and obligate you: To administer to us the Word of God in its full truth and purity as contained in the Sacred Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and as set forth in the confessional writings of the Evangelical Lutheran Church as found in the Book of Concord; …

Purpose of Preaching

A sermon is different from a speech or motivational talk.

- It’s not a TedTalk for believers.

- See John 20:30-31 and Romans 10:14-17 above!

- The goal of a sermon is faith and salvation.

- The Word of God is THE Means of Grace

o Baptism and the Lord’s Supper’s power are from God’s Word.

o Absolution is a proclamation of God’s Word.

- The Word of God instructs – See Psalm 119, and the many places the Psalmist says, “Teach me.”

- The Word exhorts – that is, it encourages godly living and doing what is good and right.

In a sermon, the pastor’s hope and desire is that the Holy Spirit would create and strengthen faith in the hearers.

- It is similar to the Sacraments in this way.

- It is different than the Sacraments in that the sermon’s focus includes the Law as well as the Gospel.

Trained for Preaching

Preaching is more than being a good public speaker … but being a skilled speaker helps!

- I have known people who couldn’t give a public speech to save their lives, but they could preach God’s Word with power and skill.

The art and science of preaching is called homiletics – from the Greek word for “conversational”

- This is also where we get the word homily – which is often considered to be a short sermon.

There are different sermon strategies.

- Goal-Malady-Means

- Narrative Preaching

- Stories

- “Doing the Text”

There are even different strategies for the presentation.

- Read a written script

- Use an outline

- Functional memorization

o Mind Palace

Lutheran Preaching

Lutheran preaching has some distinctives –

- Emphasis on the proper distinction between Law and Gospel.

o A proper sermon must proclaim the Gospel.

o It is not enough to talk about Jesus, or a Bible Story; it must proclaim God’s salvation for you.

o There are different metaphors for that salvation we might employ – like justification, forgiveness, resurrection, atonement, etc. – but it must proclaim what God has done for us in Jesus’ death and resurrection.

o “Christ for you.”

- It is seasonal.

o It follows the themes of the different seasons.

o It is guided by the holy days of the Church Year.

- It is pericopal (mostly).

o While there are times we stray from the Lectionary, we tend to live in it.

o Seasons like Lent and Advent give opportunities to preach apart from the Lectionary.

o Occasions like weddings, funerals, and other significant occasions can be opportunities for thematic preaching.

- It is Christocentric

o A lot of preaching focuses on what the hearer should do (anthropocentric). This preaching tends to be Law-focused and is often moralistic.

o There is also a strong trend for preaching to be cathartic or therapeutic. This preaching is often full of stories that touch the emotions and seek to get an affective response from the audience.

o Preaching can (should?) contain all those things, but they have to find their purpose and meaning in the message of Christ crucified and risen for the hearer. This is the message that saves souls.

My Process

The Year

I try to take a long look across the years to try to preach on all the texts over time.

- I got this idea from Eugene Peterson. He would preach on the Gospel for a season, the Epistle for a season, and the Old Testament for a season.

- To try to vary by each time we have a lectionary season, as well. The last time we had Series B in 2022, I preached on the Old Testament readings. The time before, I preached on the Gospels. This year, I will preach on the Epistle readings.

See the chart on the next page. I lay out the year like this (Becka makes it look good).

I try to see if the texts give opportunities for short series of sermons that tie together – like when we have selected readings through a book of the Bible.

The Week

Each week I use the upcoming readings in my devotions.

- Monday – I read all four texts, and listen to Lectionary Kickstart.

- Tuesday – I read the Gospel Lesson

- Wednesday – I read the First Lesson (usually from the Old Testament)

- Thursday – I read the Second Lesson (usually from an Epistle)

- Friday – I re-read the sermon text.

- I incorporate the appointed Psalm and the Collect into my prayers, too.

These all inform the theme of the sermon and the worship service, and I am thinking about the sermon all week.

If all goes well, there will be additional study of the text on Wednesday.

- Looking at the original language.

- Considering the historical context.

- Reading some commentary.

- Starting some writing and or outlining.

The bulk of the writing happens on Friday. If I can, I like to get into the pulpit and practice it a couple times, too. (I will sometimes re-read the sermon on Saturday, too.)

I preach it on Sunday.

- I make the sign of the cross on my head, mouth and heart as a prayer for God to work in my mind, mouth, and faith.

- A sermon is not done until it is preached.

- The sermon at early service is not the same as late. While they are largely the same, they feel different, have some different content, and can be re-ordered.

Remember Where You Came From

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:34:48 +0000

Have any of you ever used a service like 23andMe – these genetic tests to see where your ancestors came from? I did this a few years ago. I’ve always been curious about my grandparents and the generations that came before me. As I expected, my DNA is mostly human … largely Germanic, but a really heavy mixture of Irish, English, Scottish, French, Slavic, and even a little Mediterranean.

Okay, curiosity satisfied about where I came from … what does this mean? Why do we care about such things? Why do we care about family trees and whether or not our great-great-great-grandparents were … well, great, or whether they were scoundrels? And what difference does it make if they were European, Asian, African, or some kind of tribal nomad? What is the value in knowing something of your ancestry?

Well, it turns out that knowing about our families’ pasts gives a sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. We get swept up into the stories of the past, and, whether we like it or not, they often form how we respond to the present. And knowing about your families’ pasts can give a sense of history and home for a person.

This is important for us today, because whether you know about your earthly ancestry or not, as Christians you are part of something bigger than yourself; you are children of God! You’ve been swept up into a great story; the story of God’s love for the world and His redemption of sinners. And you have a history and a home. Your history is intertwined with Jesus’ Cross and the Kingdom of heaven where God seeks and saves people. Your home is a coming new creation – sometimes we call it “heaven” – where we will live with God sinlessly in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.

In Isaiah 51, God says to his people four times – “listen to Me.” We got two of those times in our reading this morning in v. 1 He says, “listen to Me,” and then in v. 4, “give ear to me.” And then God speaks to them about their history and their future. And, friends, because you have been redeemed by Jesus and you have become children of God, this message is about your history and your future, too.

God says through Isaiah, ““Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord: look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug. ²Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him.”

Look to the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug. He’s saying, remember where you came from. He’s saying, “Look, I chose you. I swept you up into this story. I came. I redeemed. I made you mine.” Rocks don’t get themselves out of quarries. God brought you out of sin. God redeemed you from death.

But you are not the beginning of the story. God says, “Look to Abraham. Look to Sarah.” This is the couple that God chose to form the family that would fulfill the promise to bring a savior into the world. These are Jesus’ great-great-great-etc.-grandparents. God blessed them in order to bless the whole world – because everyone who believes in Jesus is now a child of Abraham.

And God takes this dead rock, these dead people, and He restores the Garden of Eden. He re-establishes the sinless, perfect relationship He desired when He created all things. “For the Lord comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.”

God is saying, “This is your story! Just as I chose Abraham, I chose you. I called you. I redeemed you. I saved you.” Jesus blesses us by bearing our sin and shame and everything that brought us death and separated us from God. He bore it to the Cross and atoned for our sin – and in the place of everything that gave us death, He gives us life – His life. And because He did this we are people with a future.

God says, “Give attention to me, my people, and give ear to me, my nation; for a law will go out from me, and I will set my justice for a light to the peoples.”

Now, this word – law – “a law will go out from Me,” – our understanding of this word is shaped by how we understand legal systems, constitutions, and codes of law. But the word here is, perhaps, familiar, it is torah – which has at its core the idea of instruction. God is going to instruct all the people of the world. And, yes, some of this instruction is about how we should conduct ourselves, but it is also instruction about justice and that means it is a revelation about Jesus’ cross where God both administers justice against sin, but also justifies us – that is brings us back into alignment with Him.

“My righteousness draws near, my salvation has gone out, and my arms will judge the peoples; the coastlands hope for me, and for my arm they wait.” Whose righteousness? Whose salvation? God’s! For the original hearers of this message, Isaiah is pointing them forward to Jesus. But there is something else here, it says, “the coastlands hope for Me.” The coastlands were not traditionally Israel – they were the lands of the nations, like the Philistines.

There is a new righteousness that has been revealed – it is the righteousness that comes by faith in Jesus, and it is not dependent upon you. This righteousness is for all people – no matter where they came from, no matter who their ancestors are, no matter what they’ve done, no matter! And this is our reality!

The coastlands – those of us who are not Israel by our DNA – wait for the arm of the Lord. Now Jesus has come and extended his arms on the cross to give us His righteousness and salvation.

One of my favorite parts of every baptism is when I tell the story about when people were bringing little children to Jesus to have him bless them. Do you remember? It says that the disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me and do not hinder them, for anyone who does not receive the kingdom of heaven like a little child will never enter it.” Then he took the children in his … arms … and He blessed them. His arm has embraced you, and he will again extend His arm one day to bring you safely home – to the eternal home He has prepared for you in glory when He raises the dead to everlasting life.

So here you are now, and God says, “Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heavens vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and they who dwell in it will die in like manner …” This world with all its suffering, trials, struggles (and its celebrations and joys which are too few and too far between) this world will end. But, He says, “my salvation will be forever, and my righteousness will never be dismayed.”

Because his salvation will be forever and his righteousness will never be dismayed … because you have a blessed past and a certain future … this means that you have a hopeful present. Look back at what God has done! He will never abandon you! Look ahead to what God has promised! You have nothing to fear!

I don’t know what your DNA says about you, but I know what God says. He says, “You are mine. I have stretched out my arm to save you.” He says, “Look back! I have redeemed you.” He says, “Look to the future! I promise you an eternally blessed home with Me.” So now we can look at this world with hope, peace, and joy because if Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the Living God, has given us a history and a future. Amen.

Why I Hated the Catechism (Then Couldn't Let It Go)

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:17:16 +0000

I hated the catechism. There — I said it. And I'm a pastor. If you grew up in a Lutheran school or went through confirmation class, there's a decent chance you know exactly what I'm talking about. The memory work, the explanations, the questions and answers, week after week, year after year. I could not wait to be done with it. I had a date circled in my mind: eighth grade confirmation. After that Sunday, I told myself, I am never opening that little book again.

What actually happened is the opposite of what I planned. And I think my story might say something useful to you — not just about a small paperback book, but about what it means to keep growing in faith across an entire lifetime.

Where It Started: Memory Work I Didn't Want to Do

I grew up attending Trinity Lutheran School in Manistee, Michigan. My parents made the decision to send me and my siblings there so that we would be taught the faith — not just on Sunday mornings, but every single day. And from very early on, that meant memory work. I don't have sharp memories of kindergarten, but by first and second grade I remember having to memorize Bible verses and the main sections of the catechism — the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer. The basics. The pieces that form the skeleton of what Lutherans believe, teach, and confess.

At that age it was manageable, even if it wasn't exactly my favorite thing. But as I moved through the grades, the memory work shifted. It wasn't just the commandments themselves anymore — it was the explanations. Luther's careful, pastoral unpacking of what each piece means and how it applies to a life lived before God. And the explanations are longer. They're denser. They require more than rote repetition — they require you to actually think about what you're saying. Which, when you're ten or eleven years old and you'd rather be doing almost anything else, feels like an unreasonable demand.

By the time I was heading toward confirmation, I genuinely resented the catechism. It felt like homework that never ended, assigned by people who had decided this was important without ever really explaining to me why it should feel important. I was going through the motions. I was putting in the hours because I had to. And I was counting down to the finish line.

The Surprise Waiting for Me in College — and Again in Seminary

Imagine my frustration when I arrived at college to study Lutheran doctrine and the professor announced that we would be memorizing Luther's Small Catechism. Again. I had already done this. I had served my time. And yet here it was, back on my desk like an assignment I thought I'd turned in for good.

I pushed through it. I memorized it again. And honestly, at that point, it still hadn't clicked for me in any deep way. It was still an academic exercise, still something I was doing because the program required it. But then I got to seminary. And something changed.

At the seminary, I was studying everything at once — the Bible in its original languages, church history, systematic theology, pastoral practice, homiletics. My mind was full. And what I started to notice, almost without meaning to, was that the catechism kept showing up as a kind of organizing framework for everything else I was learning. When we talked about sin and grace, I could feel that conversation fitting naturally into the Ten Commandments section. When we discussed God's care for creation, I found myself thinking about the first article of the Apostles' Creed and the way Luther unpacks it. When we studied prayer, the Lord's Prayer was already there, already providing a map.

The catechism wasn't just a list of things to memorize anymore. It was starting to look like a structure — like the skeleton beneath the skin of everything I believed. All those doctrines I was studying, all those biblical texts I was working through, all those stories of God's faithfulness across centuries of church history — they were finding their places. And the catechism was helping me see where those places were.

Luther wrote the Small Catechism in the late 1520s — around 1529 — and I began to understand for the first time that what he had produced wasn't just a study tool for children. It was a gift to the church. A brilliant, carefully structured summary of the Christian faith designed not just to fill heads with information, but to shape people — to form the way they think about God, about themselves, about how to live. I had spent years resenting this book. At the seminary, I started to see it clearly for the first time.

What the Catechism Actually Does

Let me try to describe what I mean when I say the catechism became a different kind of tool for me — because I think this might help you see it differently too, whether you've been through catechesis yourself or you're thinking about it for someone in your family.

It's a Mirror

One of the ways I've come to use the catechism is as a mirror — particularly in preparation for confession. When I want to examine my conscience, when I want to come honestly before God and name what needs to be named, I go to the Ten Commandments. Not to run down a checklist mechanically, but to let those commandments do what they're designed to do: reveal who I actually am before a holy God. The commandments show me where I've failed to fear, love, and trust in God above all things. They show me where I've hurt my neighbor, where I've been dishonest, where I've served myself at someone else's expense. The mirror doesn't flatter. But that's the point — it prepares me for the grace that follows.

It's a Pocket Knife

One of the early names for the catechism — the Latin term is enchiridion — means something like a small dagger or a hand-held tool. The idea is that this is something you carry with you. Something useful in everyday situations. Something you can reach for when you need it. I almost always carry a pocket knife. Not because I spend my days in dramatic situations that require a blade, but because it's useful in a hundred small, ordinary moments that I can't always predict. The catechism works the same way. It gives you something to reach for — a grounding in the basics of the faith, a few key Bible verses attached to each section, a simple and clear articulation of what you believe and why. When someone asks you what you think about sin, or about God, or about what happens when we die, you're not left stammering. You have something in your hand.

It's a Mentor

The catechism is structured around questions: What is this? What does this mean? How is this done? Where is this written? That format isn't accidental. It's designed to teach you how to think — to form the habit of asking those questions about everything you encounter in the Christian life. And when you ask those questions, you're pushed back into the Scriptures. Luther gives you short, clear answers, but those answers are starting points, not stopping points. They're meant to send you deeper into the Word of God, to see the fullness of what God is giving and promising and doing.

That's ultimately what the catechism is for: it drives you back to Christ. Every section, every question, every answer is oriented toward faith — toward trusting God. You can see this in the very first commandment. We should have no other gods. And the explanation? That we should fear, love, and trust in God above all things. That word — trust — is the hinge on which the whole thing turns. When you get to the Creed, it's all about trusting that God does what He says. When you get to the Lord's Prayer, Luther says that with the words "Our Father," God tenderly invites us to believe and trust that He is our true Father, that He dearly loves us and cherishes us as beloved children. Everything points back to Jesus. Everything points back to faith. Everything points back to the Word where God meets us and works in us.

The Catechism Shaped More Than My Theology — It Shaped My Life

Here's something that surprised me as the years went on. The catechesis I received didn't just shape what I think about God — it shaped how I pray, how I talk to Him, the words and phrases that come naturally to me when I approach Him. I find myself returning to the Small Catechism as a stepping stone back into Scripture, as a way of taking hold of God's promises afresh and then speaking to Him out of what He has already spoken to me.

One phrase in particular has stayed with me for decades. It comes out of Luther's explanation of the Eighth Commandment — the way we used to translate it is that we are to put the best construction on everything. I remember sitting at the dinner table as a kid and hearing my dad quote that. My dad wasn't a pastor. He was an electrician. He wasn't delivering a theological lecture. He was just using language that had become part of how our family thought about how to treat other people. That phrase had done its work — it had moved from a memorized catechism explanation into the actual texture of daily life. That's what catechesis is supposed to do. It's supposed to reach all the way down into the ordinary moments and shape how you see them.

So over the years, the book I was so ready to be rid of at fourteen has become something else entirely. It's a bridge back to the Scriptures. It's a tether that keeps me connected to the faith. It's a companion I return to again and again, not because I've mastered it, but precisely because I haven't — and because every time I come back, I find more there than I saw before.

You Cannot Master This Book — and Neither Could Luther

I want to say something that I hope is genuinely freeing to hear. I have not mastered the Small Catechism. I cannot master it. I've memorized it multiple times. I've taught from it for years. And it still has more to give me than I have yet received from it.

And here's the thing: I am in very good company. Luther himself — the man who wrote the catechism — said that he could not master it. He had memorized it, he could recite it from beginning to end, but he knew that what the catechism requires is not merely head knowledge. It's a life. It's walking out these truths day after day in the actual, complicated, sometimes beautiful and sometimes painful circumstances of a human life. That's what Luther meant when he said he couldn't master it. It wasn't false modesty. It was an honest recognition that the catechism is always pointing you toward something bigger than itself — toward Christ, toward faith, toward the wrestling that belongs to anyone who is seriously trying to walk by faith in a world that pushes back.

And that wrestling is lifelong. My faith at five years old was real, but it was different from my faith at fourteen. My faith at fourteen was real, but it was different from where I am now at fifty-three. And God willing, my faith at eighty-eight will look different still — deeper, more tested, more rested in Him. That's not a problem with faith. That's how faith works. God is continually at work in us. He is teaching us His ways. We are learning to walk in His paths. That's what the life of faith looks like across an entire lifetime.

Catechesis Is Not Something You Finish

We have a cultural habit of treating catechesis as something you complete — a box to check somewhere between sixth grade and high school graduation, or maybe a four-hour Saturday class that gets you to the finish line. I understand why that habit developed. Life is busy. We front-load instruction when people are young and hope it sticks. And to be fair, there is a place for an intensive period of study that gives someone a solid foundation. That foundation matters.

But here's what I want you to hear clearly: the foundation is meant to be built upon. Catechesis is a lifelong journey, not a destination. It's not something you graduate from. It's something you grow into — year after year, season after season, as God continues to work in you through His Word and Sacraments.

What does that look like practically? It looks like being in church on Sunday — not just showing up and sitting in a pew, but coming to hear the Word proclaimed, to hear that your sins are forgiven, to receive the Sacrament of the Altar where God works in you to shape you and form you and give you life and salvation. It looks like your mind being transformed as you live in repentance. That word — repent — means to change one's mind. It's not a one-time event. It's the posture of a whole life, continually turning back toward God as He continually draws you to Himself.

It looks like coming to Bible study — and if you come to one of my Bible studies, I'll warn you right now, you're not getting away from the catechism. I'm constantly taking us back there, citing parts of it to help us understand what God's Word is saying and what it means for how we live. It looks like reading good books — or listening to them, if reading is a challenge. I want to say something gently here to some of you: the statistics on how many men never read another book after finishing high school are genuinely sobering. I'm not saying that to shame anyone. I understand that reading feels harder for some people than for others, and that life makes demands on your time and energy. But if the words on a page are a barrier, try listening. There are excellent recordings of excellent books. Augustine's Confessions. Good theology written for ordinary believers. Sermons. Podcasts from pastors who will take you deeper into the Word. There are more on-ramps available to us today than at any point in church history. Use them.

Catechesis also looks like finding mentors. Titus 2 describes exactly this kind of community: older men helping younger men to walk by faith, older women helping younger women to live the life of faith. Having people who come alongside you, who have walked with God longer than you have and who can speak into your life out of that experience — that is not optional. That is part of how God intends faith to be transmitted and sustained across generations.

And catechesis is practice. It's confession — confessing your sins, confessing your faith, confessing the hope you have in Jesus. It's learning to pray, to speak to God after He has spoken to you in His Word. And it's learning to speak this faith toward others, because if these are the words of eternal life, and the way a person receives those words is through hearing them proclaimed, then we want the people around us to hear them. We want them drawn to Jesus to receive this everlasting life.

Keep Coming Back to Where God Works

When I think about catechesis — when I think about what it means to live this eternal life in a temporal world — the thing I most want to say to you is this: keep growing. Keep coming back to where God works to shape and form you. He is delivering His grace to you. He is giving you new life, life of the Spirit. And that life is going to show up in how you actually live — in how you treat your neighbor, how you handle your money, how you pray at the end of a hard day, what you say when someone is hurting, what you reach for when you need something solid to stand on.

God is at work in you. That is not a pious platitude — it's a promise. And catechesis is one of the primary ways He has given us to keep that work going, to keep returning to the Word, to keep trusting what He has said, to keep walking in the paths He is teaching us.

I was fourteen years old and I couldn't wait to be done with that little book. Today I wouldn't know how to be a pastor — or a Christian — without it. That change didn't happen in a moment. It happened over decades of God patiently working on a stubborn student. Which raises a question worth sitting with: Where are you in that journey? And what would it look like, this week, to take one step back toward the Word — whether that's opening the catechism again, showing up to Bible study, finding an older believer who can walk alongside you, or simply kneeling down and praying the Lord's Prayer slowly enough to mean it?

Lutheran Worship - August 16, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:23:38 +0000

Lutheran Worship

Adult Bible Class

August 16, 2026

Opening Prayer

A Little History

In modern history, most members of the LCMS are familiar with four hymnals

The Lutheran Hymnal (TLH) – 1941 – This hymnal was commissioned in 1929 used by many Lutheran bodies in America, including the LCMS, WELS, ELS, and SELC. It essentially had one communion service, a very similar non-communion service, as well as Matins, Vespers, and a few other services. Before this, many LCMS churches still conducted services in German. This was often referred to as “The Red Hymnal.” (Although, the ones in the church I grew up in were blue.)

- Can you think of anything in that time period that would make it desirable to no longer lead worship in German?

Lutheran Book of Worship (LBW) – 1978 – The Green Hymnal, was initially an inter-Lutheran project to create a new hymnal. The LCMS withdrew from the project due to theological concerns, but a good number of LCMS congregations used the hymnal when it came out. It included to liturgies for Holy Communion Services.

Lutheran Worship (LW) – 1982 – The Blue Hymnal, was used by about half of LCMS congregations. It blended what the LCMS felt was the best of LBW with modernized versions of parts of TLH. This hymnal captured the old language of “Divine Service” for the Sunday Communion Service and had three settings, including one based on Luther’s German Mass.

Lutheran Service Book (LSB) – 2006 – The Maroon Hymnal. Returned to the older language that had been modernized for LBW and LW in the hymns and included five settings of the Divine Service. Several other services like Matins and Vespers, as well as Compline, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer are included. It is estimated that about 85% of LCMS congregations use LSB.

Tour Through the Hymnal

The Cover – explained on p. ix

- The Cross

o Dark Center Area

o Golden Outline

o Eight Surrounding Squares

- Means of Grace along the Spine

Inside the Front Cover – Prayers for Worship

p. v-vii – Table of Contents

p. viii-ix – Introduction

p. x-xi – The Church Year – Sundays, Season, Feasts, and Festivals

p. xii-xiii – Commemorations … Saints

p. xiv-xxiii – Lectionaries … and the Dates of Easter

p. xxiv-xxv – Glossary

p. xxvi – Singing the Psalms

Psalms … a selection, according to their numbers.

p. 151-218 – Divine Services

- Divine Service 1 – introduced in LBW - Written by Richard Hillert of Concordia, Chicago (LCMS)

- Divine Service 2 - introduced in LBW - Written by Ronald Nelson, Cantor Emeritus of Westwood Lutheran Church, St. Louis Park, MN (ELCA)

- Divine Service 3 – “The Common Service of 1888,” aka The Order of the Holy Communion from TLH, aka “Page 15.”

- Divine Service 4 – introduced in Hymnal Supplement 98

- Divine Service 5 – based loosely on Luther’s German Mass

p. 219-259 – Daily Offices

- Matins

- Vespers

- Morning Prayer

- Evening Prayer

- Compline

p. 260-330 – Other Services and Resources

- Rites like Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, and Funerals

- Prayer Service like the Service of Prayer and Preaching, Responsive Prayer (2 settings), the Litany, and a section of written Prayers, Intercessions, and Thanksgivings (p. 305)

- Confession and Absolution – Corporate and Individual (p. 292)

- Devotional Tools – Daily Prayer and Lectionary

- Athanasian Creed (p. 319)

- The Small Catechism (p. 321)

331-966 – Hymns (although there are another 23 in Lutheran Service Builder, not included in the hymnal).

- Turn to Hymn 631 – Here, O My Lord, I See Thee Face to Face

- Notice the fine print at the bottom of the page

o Text

o Tune

o Copyright information

o Tune name

o Meter

o Scripture Verses

p. 990-991 – Acknowledgements

p. 992 – Copyright Holders

p. 993-997 – Topical Index of Hymns and Songs – very useful!

p. 998-1002 – Authors, Translators, and Sources of Hymns and Songs

p. 1003-1006 – Composers and Sources of Hymns and Songs

p. 1007-1012 – Tunes – Metrical

p. 1013-1017 – Tunes – Alphabetical

p. 1017- First Lines of Hymns and Songs – super helpful!

p. 1022 – Foreign Language Hymns

p. 1023 – Holy Baptism In Cases of Emergency

Inside the back cover – Nicene & Apostles’ Creed and two versions of the Lord’s Prayer

Welcoming the Unwelcome

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:14:47 +0000

You’re not welcome here!

Pastor Fey was about 90 years old when I met him. I was a seminarian working at Messiah Lutheran Church, in St. Louis. He was retired and lived at a nearby nursing home. He was a small man, maybe 5’4” at most, and he was Caucasian – which will be important later. He served in many places over his career as a pastor, but one of them we Buffalo, NY in 1967 during the riot. His congregation had both white and black members, and he loved them all. One night in 1967 while things were very tense in the city, he got a call that one of his African American members was getting close to dying. “Will you come?”

Segregation was real in Buffalo, and there were places where Black people weren’t welcome and places where White people weren’t welcome. Pastor Fey’s member was in an apartment where white people weren’t welcome. “Of course I’ll come. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

When Pr. Fey got to the apartment, there were two very large men sitting at the door. As I’ve thought about this story, it strikes me that they were probably just trying to keep people the love inside safe, but when Pr. Fey walked up to the door, they towered over him and made it clear he was not welcome there.

He told them, “One of my members is in there and they called me to visit.”

They replied, “You’re not going in.”

He replied, “I am going in. My member needs me.”

They threatened him. “We could hurt you! We could kill you!”

“My member is dying, and I am going to see her.”

One of them looked at him and said, “Aren’t you afraid of us?”

Pr. Fey looked at him and said, “What kind of God do you think I serve?”

It can be scary to be unwelcome. Sometimes that hostility comes with unkindness and cruelty. Sometimes people who are unwelcome experience mistreatment and violence. It is extremely hard to do what is right when you find yourself in that place where it is clear, “You’re not welcome here.” It’s hard to meet hatred with love. To meet hostility with courtesy. To do what is right while being wronged.

But I think Pr. Fey was on to something when he asked, “What kind of God do you think I have?”

What kind of God do you think you have?

In our Gospel lesson today, a Canaanite woman came to Jesus and His disciples for help for her daughter. It was clear she was unwelcome. The disciples flatly say, “Send her away.” Jesus is just ignoring her pleas. His answers are cold, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” (Which was true of His earthly ministry. It was the Apostles, these guys who are urging Jesus to send her away, who were sent to the nations!) And then Jesus makes this terrible statement, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

Ouch! Are you offended by Jesus’ words here? (We’re really good at being offended in our culture!)

More important than how you feel about what Jesus said, how did the woman respond to Jesus? She says, “Yes, Lord.” See this. She knows she is not one of the lost sheep of Israel. She is not one of God’s chosen people, the people of the covenant. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

What kind of God does the woman have? Her God might be the God of Israel, but through Israel she knows that God is one who brings salvation. He is a God who promised a house of prayer for all peoples. He gathers outcasts. He receives the praises from all the peoples. This God is good, His steadfast love endures forever. So she looks at Jesus, God’s Messiah, and expects goodness, mercy, and salvation from Him. Because that’s who God is, and she believes God’s messiah will do God’s work. And He does!

This encounter is so important. Don’t sweep it away because it is uncomfortable. Don’t soften it. People try to defend Jesus, “He’s testing her faith.” Or, “He’s testing the disciples.” Or, worst of all, “He’s joking with her.” (Did you think this was funny?)

It’s a hard reality sometimes, but God does what He does. Job learned that, didn’t he? Have you ever been confused by what God does? Have you ever prayed and felt like He was far away? Jesus did. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He’s quoting Psalm 22; the end of that verse says, “Why are you so far from the words of my groaning?”

We can’t always explain what God does. As C.S. Lewis says of Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia, “He’s not a tame lion.” God is not our butler to wait on us hand and foot and see to our every desire. He’s not the great candy-man in the sky. And, friends, that is off-putting for a lot of people. They don’t want a god who doesn’t fit their mold, who sometimes tells them, “no,” or who tells them, “You’re actions are not acceptable in my sight.” God stands as judge over all people, and He sees our sins. Jesus calls us to repentance, to walk in God’s ways, because sin separates us – it separates us from God … and from one another.

Sadly, there are a lot of Christians who like to lean into that un-welcome feeling. Like the disciples, sometimes we give people the message that we want Jesus to send them away. Life is messy, people are complicated, and inconvenient. Sometimes we want to stick with people who are nice, and clean, and like us. Sometimes we act like God’s love is only for certain people. We’re only looking for the “lost sheep of Israel.” Then we look out at people and say, “and you don’t fit this flock.” It’s as if we sometimes forget the Apostolic Mission of the Church.

- Matthew 28:19 – Go and make disciples of all nations.

- Acts 1 – You will be my witnesses at Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

- 1 Tim – God wants all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth – the truth of Jesus’ cross!

Sin separates people from one another so that we look with judgment on people who sin differently than we do. But we’re all in the same boat. We read in Romans 11, “God consigned all to disobedience …” He consigned us all to disobedience, but to what end? So, “that He may have mercy on all.”

The root problem is that sin separates people from God. We cannot overcome this separation. So in mercy Christ came to us. He came proclaiming the Kingdom of heaven to the lost sheep of Israel … and there were gentile dogs who heard His message and believed, too! Jesus went to the cross to atone for the sins of the world – the whole world’s sin was on Him! – and he died for all people.

We were unwelcome in God’s presence, but now we are welcome for Christ’s sake.

And God has placed us here to carry that mercy into the world – a world that will not always welcome us. Will that be uncomfortable? Sometimes. Will it be dangerous? Could be.

What kind of God do you think you have? Do you have a who can save you from death … even if you die? Jesus’ empty tomb would say, “Yes, you do!” You have a God who welcomes the unwelcome. He welcomed you! He leads sinners to repentance. He showers us with grace.

Isn’t that what happened when you were baptized? Doesn’t He give you even more grace when you come to the Lord’s Supper? You have no right to these things, yet God welcomes You in mercy and love. And He places you where you can welcome others to know Jesus – the one who casts out demons, who welcomes dogs like you and me from under the table and makes us sit at the table as children of God. Amen.

A Weekly Word - The Devil Knows the Bible Better than You Do

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:35:22 +0000

The devil passed catechism. He knows the Ten Commandments — all ten, in order. He knows the books of the Bible, the stories of Abraham and Noah and Mary Magdalene, the events of salvation history, the words of the creeds. He could probably outscore most of us on a confirmation quiz without breaking a sweat. And yet the devil is not saved. So if head knowledge alone were the goal of Christian catechesis, we'd have a serious problem on our hands — because the enemy of our souls has already cleared that bar, and he uses every bit of that knowledge to twist, tempt, and pull us away from the very hope that knowledge is supposed to point us toward. That's the uncomfortable fact I want you to sit with today as we talk about what Christian catechesis is really for.

There Is a Lot to Know

Let's start by being honest: there really is a substantial body of knowledge that belongs to the Christian faith, and it matters. When we do confirmation classes here at Gloria Dei, or when we walk adults through a membership class, we cover a lot of ground — and some of it involves straightforward memorization and recall. That's not a flaw in the system. It reflects the fact that our faith is rooted in real history, real people, real events, and real words that God has spoken into the world.

Think about what a thorough catechesis actually covers. The books of the Bible — all sixty-six of them, and in order. The Ten Commandments — and not just a vague sense that there are ten of them, but knowing what each one actually says and where it falls in the sequence. I'll be honest with you: I ask people to list the commandments in order more often than you might expect, and it surprises me every time how many folks who have been in the church for decades can get most of them but stumble on the order. That's not a criticism — it's just a reminder that this material requires real effort to internalize.

Then there are the Bible stories themselves. Do you know who Abraham is — not just the name, but the story? The call out of Ur, the covenant, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, and what all of it has to do with us? Do you know Ruth, and why her loyalty to Naomi matters to the larger story of salvation? Do you know what Peter did on the night Jesus was arrested, and what happened to him afterward on the shore of the Sea of Galilee? Do you know Mary Magdalene — not the cultural mythology that has grown up around her, but who she actually was and what she witnessed? These stories aren't decorative. They are the texture of salvation history, and knowing them gives you the ability to understand what God is doing and has done.

Beyond stories, there are the repeated words and practices of the worshipping community: the creeds, the Lord's Prayer, the hymns that the church has sung across centuries. These aren't just beautiful artifacts. They are the vocabulary of faith — the words that are supposed to be there when you need them, tucked away in memory, ready to surface in a moment of grief or fear or doubt or gratitude. All of that is good. All of that is worth pursuing. The knowledge itself is not the problem.

The Devil Knows, and It Doesn't Save Him

Here's where things get uncomfortable. The devil knows all of these things — and he knows them far better than you or I do. He has been paying attention longer than any of us have been alive. He knows scripture with a precision and depth that should genuinely unsettle us if we think that knowing scripture is, by itself, the finish line.

We see this most clearly in the account of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. Satan doesn't approach Jesus with ignorance. He comes armed with scripture, quoting it accurately, applying it cleverly, using the words of God as instruments of temptation. He knows the text. He knows the promises. And he uses that knowledge not to worship, not to trust, not to rest in hope — but to twist, to leverage, to lead away from the path of faithful obedience. Knowledge in the devil's hands becomes a weapon against the very thing that knowledge is meant to serve.

Paul gets at something similar in Galatians when he reflects on his own experience with the law. He writes that he wouldn't have even known what coveting was except that God revealed it through the law — and then the law became the very thing the devil used to tempt him and lead him astray. The law does its work of revealing sin, and the enemy knows how to use that exposure to drive a person toward despair rather than toward repentance and grace. The knowledge of what sin is can, in the devil's hands, become a doorway to more sin rather than a doorway back to Jesus.

This is why I keep saying catechesis has to be more than head knowledge. Not because head knowledge is bad — it isn't. But because the devil has head knowledge in spades, and he is not saved by it. Something else is required. Something has to happen beyond the accumulation of facts, and that something is faith.

From Facts to Faith — What Formation Actually Means

What we are really after in catechesis — what we are always after — is faith. Not faith as a vague feeling of spiritual warmth, but faith as genuine trust: the conviction that Jesus, the Son of God, came into this world, died to atone for sin, rose from the dead, and lives and reigns to all eternity. And that all of that is true for you, personally — that your sins are forgiven on account of him, that you are held in God's hands, that the verdict over your life has already been spoken from the cross.

There used to be a phrase that was very popular in evangelical circles: having a personal relationship with Jesus. I understand why some people find that language a little squishy or imprecise. But if you put the best possible construction on it, what it's really trying to say is something exactly right: I actually trust and believe that Jesus died and rose for me, that my sins are forgiven for his sake, and that this changes everything about how I live. That's not a bad thing to want to communicate. That's the heart of it.

And notice that when faith is real — when it's not just intellectual assent but genuine trust — it does something. It shapes the way you live. It changes your relationship to God's word, to his commandments, to other people, to your own sin. A person who genuinely trusts that Jesus has won their forgiveness doesn't just know facts about Jesus; they have been changed by Jesus. They walk differently. They pray differently. They see the Ten Commandments differently — not as a list of accusations, but as the wisdom of God showing them what love actually looks like, what it looks like to love God and to love a neighbor from God's own perspective.

That is what catechesis is aiming at: the formation of a life of faith. Not just "what do you know" but "how do you live." And those two things are connected — what you know absolutely shapes how you live — but the knowledge is always in service of the life, never a destination in itself.

The Fear of the Lord — Where Wisdom Begins

The Old Testament has a phrase it comes back to repeatedly, most famously in the Psalms and in Proverbs: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That word "fear" can trip people up, because we tend to associate fear with terror or anxiety — a cowering, cringing response to a threatening power. But in the biblical sense, the fear of the Lord is something closer to what we might call awe-filled reverence grounded in right relationship. It is knowing who God is — fully, honestly, without softening the edges — and standing before him as what you actually are.

Here's what makes that both terrifying and wonderful: God has every right to judge you as a sinner. That is a serious fact, and the fear of the Lord doesn't let you look away from it. But the same God who has every right to condemn you gave his only-begotten Son to die for you, to redeem you — and gives you his Spirit so that you might live by faith. The fear of the Lord, rightly understood, is what you feel when you hold both of those things together at the same time: the gravity of your sin and the immensity of his grace.

Catechesis is meant to cultivate exactly that. It's meant to help you know who God is — not a vague, comfortable deity who exists to affirm your choices, but the living God who is holy and just and merciful and faithful — and to know what he has done, what he continues to do in your life, and how to live in right relationship with him. That right relationship, that fear-and-trust that flows from the cross, is what shapes the whole Christian life. It flows through us and, by the Spirit's work, through us into the world around us.

The Shape of the Christian Life

One of the things that sometimes gets lost when we talk about Christian freedom is that the Christian life actually has a shape. Because Christ has freed us, we can sometimes slide toward thinking that freedom means anything goes — that grace erases all structure, all pattern, all discipline. But that's not quite right.

There is a great deal of freedom and variety in how faith gets lived out across different people and different circumstances. But the Christian life is not shapeless. It has a form, and that form flows out of our baptism. Being baptized into Christ means being connected to his death and resurrection — and that connection means we walk in newness of life. The shape of that newness is what Jesus himself described when he said, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Repent and believe the good news.

That ongoing pattern of repentance and faith — turning away from sin, turning toward the gospel, returning again and again to the promises of God — is not a one-time event at confirmation or at the baptismal font. It is the rhythm of the Christian life. And it is empowered by the Spirit, not manufactured by our willpower. As we take hold of God's promises, as we return to his word, as we live in the forgiveness he has won for us, the Spirit does the work of formation in us. We don't produce this change ourselves. But we do participate in it, and we participate in it by staying connected to the means through which God works.

That's why the shape of the Christian life includes gathering around God's word in worship — not as a social obligation or a cultural habit, but because this is where God shows up to give his gifts. It includes receiving the sacraments — the body and blood of Christ given and shed for the forgiveness of sins, as he himself commanded. It includes confessing the faith together: when you come to Gloria Dei on any given Sunday, we're going to confess the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed, and occasionally the Athanasian Creed. Those creeds are not just historical recitations. They are acts of shared faith — the community standing together and declaring what we trust to be true about God and about ourselves.

And ultimately, the shape of the Christian life is the shape of trust. Trust that expresses itself in prayer — calling out to God, placing ourselves in his hands, believing that he hears and that he acts. This is not the trust of someone who has their theology perfectly systematized. It is the trust of a child who knows their Father and believes he is good.

Formation, Not Just Information

I want to be honest about a tendency I see — and see in myself, so I'm not pointing fingers here. When we think about catechesis, it is genuinely easier to measure information than it is to measure formation. I can give you a quiz. I can ask you to list the Ten Commandments in order, to name the books of the Bible, to identify the difference between Law and Gospel. I can grade that quiz and tell you whether you passed or failed. That is measurable. That is concrete. And because it's measurable, it's easy to treat it as the goal.

But formation is harder to measure, and that doesn't make it less important — it makes it more important, and more demanding. Formation is about habits. It's about the practices that keep bringing you back into God's word, week after week, year after year, so that the Spirit can keep doing his work in you. It's about the way your posture toward the commandments shifts over time — from seeing them as a threat to seeing them as a gift, as the wisdom of God about what love looks like in concrete human life. It's about the way your prayer life matures, not because you've learned more techniques but because you've learned to trust more deeply.

And formation has an outward dimension too. A life shaped by genuine faith in Jesus — by real trust in the gospel — is a life that testifies. Not necessarily with elaborate arguments or formal presentations, but with the kind of honest hope that other people notice and are drawn toward. The Spirit works through that testimony. He uses the witness of a person who genuinely trusts God's promises to build faith in others. Catechesis, at its best, is preparing people not just to know what Christians believe but to live in a way that makes other people want to ask why.

Going Back to Jesus, Again and Again

I want to be clear about one more thing before we close, because I don't want anyone to hear this and think the goal is moral perfection or some kind of spiritual achievement level that you eventually reach and maintain. You are going to continue to sin. I am going to continue to sin. The more deeply you know God's word, in fact, the more clearly you will see your own sin — not because you're getting worse, but because the light is getting brighter. Paul said he wouldn't have known what coveting was without the law. The deeper your catechesis goes, the more the law does its proper work of naming what is actually there.

And all of that — every conviction of sin, every failure, every moment of recognizing how far you fall short — is meant to drive you back to Jesus. Not to despair. Not to a performance of improvement that you hope will eventually satisfy God. But back to Jesus, who died and rose, whose forgiveness is real and full and already accomplished, who does not require you to earn your way back into his good graces because you were never in his good graces on the basis of your own merit to begin with. You are there because of him. You stay there because of him. And you go back to him, again and again, because of him.

That is the life catechesis is meant to form: a life of eternal life, lived in a temporal world, always returning to the One who won that eternal life for us. A life that knows what it believes and lives what it knows. A life shaped by the fear of the Lord — that honest, awestruck recognition of who God is and what he has done — and flowing from that fear, a life of genuine wisdom, genuine love, genuine trust.

So as you think about your own formation in the faith — whether you went through a confirmation class years ago or you're in the middle of one now, whether you feel like your knowledge is solid or you're aware of significant gaps — the question to sit with isn't only what do I know? It's how am I living it? And more than that: am I actually trusting Jesus, or am I trusting my knowledge about Jesus? Because those are not the same thing. The devil knows more about Jesus than most of us ever will. What he doesn't have — what the Spirit gives only to those who are brought to faith — is trust. That's what we're after. That's what all of this is for.

Transcript generated with A.I. Original by the author.

A Weekly Word - Live Forever Now

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:48:05 +0000

Here's a question worth sitting with for a moment: when you think about eternal life, when do you picture it starting? If your honest answer is "after I die," you're not alone — but I want to suggest that answer is missing something essential. The eternal life that Jesus gives doesn't begin at the grave. It began the moment you were united to him. And that changes everything about how we think about what it means to learn the Christian faith.

That's where I want to begin this three-part series on catechesis — not with a curriculum or a classroom, but with a question about what's actually at stake when the church teaches the faith. Because I think we've sometimes drifted into thinking about Christian formation the same way we think about education in general, and while there's some overlap, there's also a crucial difference. Getting that difference clear is going to shape everything else we talk about in this series.

Sunday School, Bible School, and the Language We Inherit

Think about the words we use when we talk about passing on the faith. Sunday school. Vacation Bible school. Adult Bible class. We've borrowed the whole vocabulary of the educational world and planted it inside the church. And I want to be careful here — that's not necessarily wrong. There's nothing bad about those words, and there is absolutely an educational dimension to learning the Christian faith. You do need to know things. You do need to understand what the Bible says, what the creeds confess, what the sacraments mean. Knowledge matters.

But the technical term the church has used for centuries for this work of teaching the faith is catechesis. And catechesis isn't quite the same thing as education, even though it borrows some of education's tools. The difference is in the goal. And in our current cultural moment, I think that difference is more important than ever to name clearly.

When we think about education today — and I mean education broadly, the way our culture generally thinks about it — the purpose has increasingly narrowed down to this: the individual gains a body of knowledge or a skill set so that they can go out into the world and be productive. We have honest conversations with young people about going to college or trade school so they can earn enough to support themselves. There's nothing wrong with any of that. But there's been a shift. The question driving education has become "what do I get out of this for my career?" rather than "here is a body of truth that will change who I am and the way I engage with the world." The focus has tilted from formation to function.

The Problem with Graduations

Here's another piece of education culture that we've absorbed into the church without always thinking about it: the idea that learning has ending points. We call them graduations. Preschool graduation. Kindergarten graduation. Middle school graduation. High school graduation. College graduation. The whole structure of education in our culture is built around the assumption that at some point, you've mastered enough of a subject to move on. Degree in hand, you walk out the door, and you're considered sufficiently equipped for whatever you've been trained to do.

Now, the church has something that can look a little like this — confirmation. There's a moment, typically in early adolescence in Lutheran tradition, when students who have been learning the faith stand before the congregation and publicly confess what they believe. And if you've watched many confirmations, you know there can sometimes be a sense — from students, maybe from parents — that this is a graduation. That this is the finish line. That the studying is done.

But here's the thing: confirmation was never intended to be a graduation in that sense. The moment isn't saying, "You've passed the test and you're done." The moment is saying something far more significant: "I have come to know what the Christian faith is about, I confess this faith as my own, and I intend to live in this faith for the rest of my life." That's not an ending. That's a beginning — or rather, it's a public declaration of a beginning that God already made in baptism. The student isn't crossing a finish line. They're stepping into a race that doesn't end this side of eternity.

That subtle distinction matters enormously, because if we treat confirmation as a graduation, we end up with adults who figure they completed their Christian education somewhere around eighth grade and haven't thought much about it since. And the faith doesn't work that way. It never did.

Catechesis Is Formation, Not Just Information

So what is catechesis actually for, if it's not about crossing finish lines? The goal of catechesis is the formation of the whole person in the faith. Not just the accumulation of correct information — though again, that matters — but the actual shaping of a life around the truth that God has revealed. Catechesis is meant to take hold of a person. It's meant to work its way into how you think, how you love, how you forgive, how you use what you own, how you treat the people around you. It is, in the deepest sense, about learning how to be human — the kind of human being God redeemed you to be.

And catechesis, understood this way, is never really finished. It can't be, because you are never finished changing. Your relationships change. Your seasons of life change. The world around you changes. The questions you're asking at fifty are not the questions you were asking at fifteen. The griefs you carry at seventy are different from the griefs you carried at thirty. And through all of it, you need to keep returning to the words of life that Jesus gives, because those words are addressed to you — to who you actually are right now, in this moment, in this season.

"Lord, to Whom Shall We Go?"

There's a passage in John 6 that I think gets at the heart of why catechesis is different from ordinary education. Jesus has been teaching a large crowd — not just the twelve disciples, but a much wider group of followers. He's talking about being the bread of life, making the kind of claims that are genuinely offensive to the people listening. He tells them that unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood, they have no life in them. And the crowd does not receive this well. It's strange. It's hard. And the text says that many of his followers turned back and stopped walking with him.

Then Jesus turns to the twelve and asks them directly: "You don't want to leave too, do you?" And Peter speaks up. What he says is one of the most honest and beautiful confessions in the Gospels:

"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."

Peter isn't saying that everything Jesus taught was easy to understand or comfortable to hear. He's saying that there is nowhere else to go. That Jesus — and only Jesus — has the words that carry eternal life in them. That's the irreplaceable, non-negotiable center of Christian catechesis. We are not teaching a philosophy. We are not passing on a self-improvement program. We are passing on words of eternal life, because the one who speaks them is the Messiah, God in human flesh, who came into this world to redeem us by his death and resurrection.

That changes the stakes of every Sunday school lesson, every Bible class, every confirmation session, every sermon, every conversation between a parent and a child about who Jesus is. This is not just education. This is eternal life being handed from one person to another.

Eternal Life Is Not Just a Future Event

And here's where I want to push a little harder on something we tend to assume. I think most of us, when we hear "eternal life," picture something that begins after we die. Heaven is coming. Resurrection is coming. And yes — all of that is true, and it is glorious, and we hold on to that hope. But eternal life isn't only a future reality. If you are in Christ, you have eternal life right now. Today. In the middle of your ordinary Tuesday.

In Romans 6, Paul makes a staggering claim about baptism. Everyone who has been baptized into Christ has been baptized into his death. And the reason for that is so that we might walk in newness of life. There's a real sense in which, because of your union with Christ, you died two thousand years ago — connected to Jesus at the cross. And having received his death, you've also received the gift of his resurrection. You are walking around in resurrection life right now. That's what it means to be a Christian.

So the question catechesis has to keep answering isn't only "what will eternal life look like someday?" It's "how do you live eternal life in a temporal world?" How do you carry this gift — this life that goes beyond the grave — into the grocery store, into the workplace, into your marriage, into your grief, into your failures, into your ordinary days? That's not a small question. That might be the central question of the Christian life. And it's what catechesis is trying to address, week after week, year after year.

The Shape of the Life We're Learning to Live

When Lutherans think about catechesis, we think about the catechism — Luther's Small Catechism and its core parts — as a kind of framework for this formation. And it's worth thinking about what that framework actually teaches us.

The Ten Commandments give us the shape of a life lived in right relationship with God and with our neighbors. Jesus himself summarized the whole law this way: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Those two great commandments are not abstract principles. They are the pattern of the eternal life we're learning to live right now. And one of the tasks of catechesis is helping us figure out what that love actually looks like — especially in a world that has thoroughly confused itself about what love means.

We use the word "love" to cover an enormous range of experiences. I love my wife. I love my children. I love the Lord of the Rings. I love a good ham sandwich. Those are not the same thing, thanks be to God. The morality that flows from our faith is rooted in the eternal truth God has given us, and catechesis helps us understand what genuine love — the love that reflects God's own love — actually looks like when it walks into a real situation with real people.

The Apostles' Creed gives us the story we're living inside of — the story of what God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has done and is doing. It retells the atonement. It declares the resurrection. It names the work of the Spirit who delivers all of that to us. And the writer of Hebrews tells us to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. Catechesis trains us to keep doing exactly that — to keep looking to Jesus in two inseparable ways. First, as the Lamb of God who has atoned for our sins, so that we live in faith trusting that this atonement is genuinely for us, that we are truly reconciled to God. And second, as the one who shows us what it looks like to be fully, truly human — to love God completely, to love our neighbor radically, to display courage and gentleness, mercy and truth, all at once. We're not going to do that perfectly. Our relationship with him is always and only rooted in the fact that he died and rose for us. But we want to strive toward his likeness, empowered by the Spirit who lives in us.

The means of grace — baptism, confession and absolution, and the Lord's Supper — are the places where this eternal life is delivered and renewed. We don't just believe about these things; we receive them. And catechesis teaches us to keep coming back to these gifts, because we are people who forget, people who drift, people who need to be repeatedly reminded of what God has actually done for us.

Vocations, Neighbors, and Where the Eternal Life Shows Up

I want to make sure I say this clearly: none of what I'm describing means that earthly education and earthly work don't matter. They do. The vocations we carry throughout our lives are deeply important, and they're not separate from our catechesis — they're the context in which our catechesis gets lived out.

Think about where most of us spend the majority of our waking hours. Not in a church building. Not in a Bible study. We're at work. We're at school. We're in neighborhoods, in stores, on job sites, in hospitals, in schools, in offices. And all of those places are filled with neighbors — people we're called to love for Christ's sake. Our vocations are often the very places where we have the greatest opportunity to do genuine good for other people. We can see this clearly when we think about providing for our families — the connection between work and care is obvious. But it's worth pausing to notice that the work we do often makes life better for people we'll never even meet. The teacher shapes minds. The nurse tends bodies. The contractor builds shelter. The farmer feeds people. Our ordinary work, carried out with faithfulness and love, is a form of service to our neighbors, whether we frame it that way or not.

And all of that becomes richer, more purposeful, more rooted when it's understood in light of catechesis — in light of what God is teaching us in his Word about who we are and what we're for. Because remember: catechesis deals with eternal life. And that eternal life doesn't stay locked inside the church on Sunday morning. It bleeds into Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. It shapes the way you treat the difficult colleague. It shapes the patience you have with the person who frustrates you. It shapes the generosity you show with the resources you've been given.

You Are a Person With a Purpose

A lot of what our culture tells us about the world — especially when it comes from a purely secular educational framework — is that this is all more or less a cosmic accident. That there's no grand meaning. That we construct our own purpose as we go, and when we're gone, we're gone. Catechesis tells a completely different story. This world was created by God. He has a plan. He has a purpose. And he has a specific purpose for you, as one of his children.

That purpose, at its deepest level, is to display God's salvation. Not to broadcast your own holiness — we're not in the business of declaring ourselves better than the people around us. Quite the opposite. In 1 Timothy 1, Paul calls himself the foremost — the chief — of sinners. And he doesn't say that as a form of false humility. He says it in order to make a point: if God can save someone like me, then God can save anyone. Your life, marked by forgiveness, shaped by grace, honest about its failures and honest about its hope, is itself a testimony. The message you carry isn't "look how righteous I've become." It's "look how gracious God is — he saved me."

That's what it means to be an agent of grace in the world. You become someone who carries this hope outward, not because you've achieved some level of spiritual accomplishment, but because you've received a gift that is simply too good not to share. And catechesis keeps equipping you for that — keeps reminding you of the gift, keeps shaping you into the kind of person who can speak that hope naturally and honestly into the lives of the people around you.

Peter writes in his letters that we who belong to Christ have become, in a sense, aliens and strangers in this world. And I think in our current cultural moment, it's worth embracing that a little. The way Jesus lived — radically loving people across every social boundary, firmly committed to truth, deeply prayerful, courageous and tender at the same time — that looks genuinely strange in our world. And maybe that strangeness is exactly what people need to see. Not a Christianity that has smoothed off all its edges and made itself as comfortable as possible, but a Christianity that actually looks like Jesus.

Learning How to Live Forever, Starting Now

This is what I keep coming back to: catechesis is really about learning how to live forever — not just for the seventy or eighty or ninety years God may give us on this earth, but for the life that has already begun in us, the life that death itself cannot end. The Holy Spirit is doing the work of sanctification in us right now — making us holy, not because we've earned it, but because we've been declared holy in Christ, and because that declaration is producing real change in real people over the course of real lives. We call that process becoming like Jesus. We never complete it here. But we keep at it, because it matters, and because the Spirit is genuinely at work.

And we need to keep being reminded. That's the honest truth about why catechesis doesn't end. We forget. We drift. We get absorbed by the noise of a loud world and lose sight of what's actually real and lasting. We need to come back again and again to the words of eternal life — the words that remind us our sins are forgiven, that God has a purpose for us, that we have been united to Jesus in his death and resurrection, and that the life we're living right now is already the beginning of forever.

So here's the question I want to leave you with as we begin this series: where are you, right now, learning to live the eternal life that Christ has given you? Not where you were learning it when you were twelve, or twenty-five, or even a few years ago — but now, in this season, with the questions and the griefs and the joys you're actually carrying today? That's worth sitting with. Because the words of eternal life are still being spoken, and they're still addressed to you.

A Weekly Word - What Redemption Costs

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:51:32 +0000

There's a moment in the book of Ruth that doesn't get nearly enough attention. A man wakes up in the middle of the night, probably startled, and realizes there's a woman lying at his feet. He asks who she is. And instead of waiting for him to figure out what to do next, she tells him. She names what she needs, names what God's Word says he's supposed to do, and asks him to do it. That scene — set at a threshing floor in Bethlehem sometime during the dark days of the judges — turns out to be one of the most quietly powerful pictures of faith and redemption in the entire Old Testament. And it points, with stunning precision, straight to Jesus.

The World Ruth Walked Into

To understand why the story of Ruth lands the way it does, you have to understand the world it's set in. Ruth's story takes place during the time of the judges, and that era is not a pretty one. The book of Judges is essentially a long, painful record of people refusing to live according to God's Word. There's unfaithfulness, violence, moral chaos, and a repeated cycle of Israel turning away from God, suffering the consequences, crying out for help, and getting rescued — only to drift away again. It's exhausting to read, honestly, because you keep hoping someone is going to get it right and they mostly don't.

But Ruth's story is a bright spot in all of that. Here, right in the middle of a generation marked by faithlessness, you have a handful of ordinary people who are actually trying to live according to what God said. They're not perfect. They're navigating grief and poverty and legal complexity and social vulnerability. But they're doing it with integrity, and God is working through them in ways they probably couldn't fully see at the time.

That context matters because it tells us something about how God operates. He doesn't wait for the perfect historical moment or the perfect community of people before He starts working. He works in the middle of the mess. He works through the faithful few when the majority have lost their way. And He works through ordinary circumstances — a harvest, a family connection, a late-night conversation — to accomplish something that will echo across centuries.

Two Widows and a Field

Ruth came from Moab. She wasn't an Israelite. She had married into a Jewish family — the family of a woman named Naomi — but her husband died, along with Naomi's other son and Naomi's own husband. Naomi was heading back to her hometown of Bethlehem, and she told both of her daughters-in-law to go back to their own families and start over. One of them did. Ruth didn't. She famously told Naomi that wherever Naomi went, she would go. Naomi's people would be her people, and Naomi's God would be her God.

That's not a small thing. Ruth was leaving everything familiar — her homeland, her family, the culture and religion she grew up in — to follow a grieving mother-in-law back to a country where Ruth herself would be the foreigner. She was stepping into an unknown future based entirely on faith in the God of Israel. And then they arrived in Bethlehem with essentially nothing.

There was no safety net in the ancient world the way we think of one today. No Social Security, no government assistance programs, no food bank with regular hours. But God had built provision into the Law of Moses. Farmers in Israel were commanded not to harvest all the way to the edges of their fields. They were supposed to leave the margins — the corners of the fields, the grain that fell during harvest — for the poor and the foreigner to come and gather. It was called gleaning, and it was one of God's built-in systems for making sure that the most vulnerable people in society weren't simply left to starve.

So Ruth went out to glean. And the field she ended up in belonged to a man named Boaz.

Who Boaz Was

Boaz is described in a way that the text wants you to notice. He's a man of standing, but more importantly, he's a genuinely godly man. He isn't just leaving the field margins because it's the law. He's attentive to the people who come to glean. He notices Ruth. He finds out who she is and what she's done for Naomi. He tells his workers to leave extra grain behind for her and to make sure she's treated well. He's not checking a compliance box — he's actually caring for people the way the law was designed to encourage.

But there's more to Boaz's connection to Ruth than just being a generous landowner. Boaz was a relative of Ruth's deceased husband. And in the Law of Moses, that meant something specific and significant. It meant he was a potential kinsman-redeemer.

The kinsman-redeemer was a formal role with real legal weight. If a man died and left a widow and property behind, a close male relative had both the right and the responsibility to step in, acquire the property, provide for the widow, and continue the family line. It was one of the ways God's Law protected women in a society where a woman without a husband or father was extraordinarily vulnerable. The kinsman-redeemer wasn't just doing a favor — he was fulfilling a duty, and it was a duty that could be costly. Taking on a widow meant taking on responsibility for her care, her welfare, and in many cases, children who would legally bear her first husband's name rather than his own.

Naomi recognized that Boaz fit this role. And she had a plan.

The Threshing Floor

What happens next is one of those passages where careful readers slow down and look twice. Naomi tells Ruth to clean up, put on her best clothes, and go to the threshing floor where Boaz will be celebrating the end of harvest. She tells Ruth to wait until Boaz has eaten and drunk and is lying down for the night, then to go to him quietly, uncover his feet, and lie down there. And she tells Ruth that Boaz will tell her what to do next.

It's worth being honest about the fact that this is a passage with some ambiguity in it. The "uncovering of feet" language in the Hebrew could be straightforwardly literal, or it could be a euphemism for something more intimate. Commentators have discussed this for centuries. What we can say is that both Boaz and Ruth are consistently described throughout this story as people of godly character, and the text seems to want us to take that seriously. Whatever happened on that threshing floor, these were not people who threw their integrity out the window.

What's interesting, though, is that Naomi told Ruth that Boaz would tell her what to do — but it's actually Ruth who takes the initiative. Boaz wakes up around midnight, discovers a woman at his feet, and asks who she is. And Ruth tells him her name, and then she tells him exactly what she's asking for: You are my redeemer. Spread your wings over me.

That phrase — spread your wings over me — echoes language Boaz himself had used earlier in the story when he blessed Ruth, saying that she had come to take refuge under the wings of the God of Israel. Now Ruth is asking Boaz to embody that same protection. She's telling him: the God you serve has made provision for women like me, and you are the one He's placed in my life to fulfill that provision. I'm asking you to be who God made you to be for me.

It's bold. It's clear. And it's an act of faith in God's Word, not just a request to a man.

The Legal Process and the Cost

Boaz responded to Ruth with honor, but he also told her something she didn't know: there was actually a closer relative who had the first legal claim on her and on the property connected to her late husband. That man had to be given the opportunity to act as redeemer before Boaz could step in. So Boaz went to work on it through the proper legal channels.

He went to the city gate — the place where legal transactions and public decisions were made in ancient Israel — and he gathered witnesses and called the other relative to come. The conversation that followed is almost a little funny in how it unfolds. The other man heard that there was property associated with Naomi's family that was available to be redeemed, and he was interested. Land is land. Property is valuable. He was ready to claim it.

Then Boaz mentioned the other part of the arrangement: the day you acquire the property, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite, the widow, in order to maintain the family name and care for Naomi. And the man immediately changed his answer. He relinquished his claim. He wasn't willing to take on what came with the property — the responsibility, the obligation, the cost of caring for this widow.

Boaz was willing. Boaz did what this unnamed man would not. He took on the full weight of the redemption — not just the benefit of the property, but the real, life-changing cost of becoming responsible for Ruth and for Naomi. He married Ruth. She became his wife. And the text gives every indication that this was a genuinely good and loving marriage, not just a legal transaction.

A Son Named Obed, and Everything That Followed

Boaz and Ruth had a son. They named him Obed. And here's where the story opens up into something much, much larger than one family's narrative.

Obed grew up and had a son. That son's name was Jesse. Jesse grew up and had several sons, the youngest of whom — a shepherd boy — was chosen by God and anointed by the prophet Samuel to be king over Israel. His name was David. You've probably heard of him.

David became one of the greatest kings in Israel's history, and God made a covenant with him that one of his descendants would reign forever. And down through the generations — son after son after son, across hundreds of years of history — the line of David continued. Until one night in Bethlehem, the very city where Ruth had gleaned in Boaz's fields, a child was born to a young woman named Mary and her husband Joseph, who were themselves descendants of the house and lineage of David. That child was Jesus.

This is why Mary and Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem when Caesar Augustus called for a census. They were going to their ancestral city because they were of the line of David. And the line of David ran directly through Ruth — a woman from Moab, a foreigner, someone who was technically outside the people of Israel — who had come to faith, clung to Naomi, gleaned in a field, and asked a kinsman-redeemer to spread his wings over her.

God wove her into the very lineage of the Savior of the world.

The Outsider Who Was Brought In

That detail about Ruth being a Moabite is worth sitting with for a moment. Moab was not exactly a friendly neighbor to Israel. The Moabites had a complicated history with the people of God. And under the Law of Moses, there were actually restrictions about Moabites entering the assembly of the Lord. Ruth, by every outward marker, was on the outside of the covenant community.

And yet God brought her in. He brought her in through faith — through her commitment to Naomi and to Naomi's God, and through the faithfulness of a man named Boaz who was willing to act as her redeemer. God used her, in her very foreignness, as part of His plan to bring the Savior into the world. The bloodline of Jesus runs through a Moabite woman who converted and clung to the God of Israel.

That's not an accident and it's not a footnote. It's a signal of something that runs all the way through Scripture: God's saving purposes were never meant to be limited to one ethnic group or one nationality. He has always been in the business of drawing in people from every culture, every background, every nation — people who, by human reckoning, might seem like outsiders — and claiming them as His own. The inclusion of Ruth in the genealogy of Jesus is one of the earliest and clearest pictures of that reality.

And it's not just Ruth. Matthew's genealogy of Jesus — which opens the New Testament — includes four women, and each of them has a story that involves some kind of boundary crossing, some kind of unexpected inclusion. God is showing us from the very beginning that the salvation He's bringing through Jesus is for everyone. The door has always been wider than people assumed.

What Boaz Did — and What Jesus Did

It would be a mistake to read the story of Ruth and Boaz as simply a beautiful ancient love story, though it is that. The deeper architecture of the story is about what redemption costs and what it looks like when someone steps up to pay it.

Remember the unnamed relative who walked away? He was interested in the property but not in the full weight of what redemption required. He wanted the benefit without the burden. When he found out that acquiring the land meant taking on responsibility for Ruth — a foreign widow with no resources — he backed out. He was not willing to be her redeemer.

Boaz was. And it cost him something real. He took on a woman who, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, came with complications. She was a foreigner in a society where that mattered. She had no dowry, no family standing in Bethlehem, no social capital to offer. She came with an aging mother-in-law who also needed care. Boaz looked at all of that and said yes anyway. He spread his wings over her. He paid the cost of redemption because he was willing to, because he was a man of genuine godly character, and because — you get the sense — he genuinely cared about her.

The parallel to Jesus is not subtle, and I don't think it's meant to be. We are the ones who need a redeemer. We are the ones who, by every outward marker, should be on the outside — not because of our ethnicity, but because of our sin, our failure, our inability to save ourselves. We are the Ruth in this story, lying at the feet of the only One who can cover us, asking to be brought in.

And Jesus is the Boaz who was willing to pay what our redemption actually cost. He didn't look at the price tag and walk away like the unnamed relative. He looked at the full weight of what it would take to be our kinsman-redeemer — and He paid it on the cross. He took on everything that came with us: our sin, our guilt, our death, our broken history. He spread His wings over us. He brought us in.

Learning to Pray Like Ruth

One of the things that strikes me most about this story is the way Ruth approached Boaz. She didn't just show up and hope for the best. She named what she was asking for. She appealed to the Word of God — to the promise built into the law about what a kinsman-redeemer was supposed to do — and she said, plainly: this is what God's Word says. You are the one to fulfill it. I'm asking you to be my redeemer.

There's something in that posture that I think is worth carrying into our own life of prayer and faith. We have promises. We have a Redeemer who has made specific, concrete commitments to us in His Word. He has said that in faith in Him, our sins are forgiven. He has said that He is at work in our lives. He has said that He will come again and take us to be with Him. He has said that nothing — not death, not hardship, not the weight of our own failures — can separate us from His love.

We are allowed to go to Him with those promises in hand and say: This is what Your Word says. These are Your promises. I'm holding You to them. Be the Redeemer You said You would be. That's not a lack of faith — that's exactly what faith looks like. It's trusting God's Word enough to actually stand on it, to come to Jesus and say, I believe You meant what You said, and I'm asking You to do it.

Ruth didn't approach Boaz with timidity or embarrassment about what she was asking. She came with clarity, grounded in what she knew God had said. She trusted the provision that God had built into His law and she appealed to it directly. And Boaz honored that. He did what a redeemer was supposed to do.

Jesus will do the same. More than the same. Because unlike Boaz, Jesus has already paid the full cost of our redemption before we even came to Him. The cross came first. The wings are already spread. We are already covered. We come to Him now not to initiate the process but to receive what He has already accomplished, to trust what He has already done, and to hold onto His promises through all the uncertainty and difficulty of life until He comes again.

The story of Ruth and Boaz is ancient. The threshing floor in Bethlehem is long gone. But the shape of what happened there — a redeemer who was willing, a faith that took God at His word, an outsider brought into the family of God — that shape is the very shape of the gospel. And it is, right now, your story too. What God's Word says about Jesus and about what He has done for you is not metaphor. It is promise. Reach out and take hold of it.

Transcript generated with A.I. Original script by the author.

God's Treasure

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:03:02 +0000

Matthew 13:44-52

The Parable of the Hidden Treasure
44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
The Parable of the Pearl of Great Value
45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, 46 who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.
The Parable of the Net
47 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. 48 When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. 49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50 and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
New and Old Treasures
51 “Have you understood all these things?” They said to him, “Yes.” 52 And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

(ESV)