Devotions for Worship

Foolish and Wise

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 21:37:44 +0000

The Parable of the Ten Virgins

25 “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps[a] and went to meet the bridegroom.[b] 2 Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3 For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, 4 but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5 As the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and slept. 6 But at midnight there was a cry, ‘Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ 7 Then all those virgins rose and trimmed their lamps. 8 And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9 But the wise answered, saying, ‘Since there will not be enough for us and for you, go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’ 10 And while they were going to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. 11 Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ 12 But he answered, ‘Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ 13 Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

611 - The Ninth and Tenth Commandments

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 21:32:22 +0000

611 – The Ninth and Tenth Commandments

November 8, 2026

Opening Prayer – Small Catechism p. 119

1 Kings 21:1-16 – Bible p. 547

What does Ahab want?

Why doesn’t Naboth give it to him?

What did Ahab do when he couldn’t get the vineyard?

What did Jezebel do?

How did one sin lead to another worse sin in these events?

The Small Catechism

Turn to p.15 to read the 9^th and 10^th Commandments and their explanations.

Draw a rectangle around the word covet in the commandments.

Underline the words – scheme, appears right, entice, force away, and turn against.

Circle – help, be of service, and urge.

What is coveting? (See question 88, p. 116)

1 Timothy 6:6 says, “But godliness with contentment is great gain.” What is contentment?

How are coveting and contentment related to one another?

What tempts us to be dissatisfied or discontented with what we have?

Is all wanting, desiring, and ambition sinful?

What is particularly important about these last two commandments? (See question 92, p. 118)

How do these commandments relate to the First Commandment?

Homework

Read Luther’s Small Catechism – p. 128-132.

Make a list of ten things you are grateful for. Pray a prayer of thanks to God.

Ask your parents the following questions:

What are some things that you are grateful for?

Do you ever feel dissatisfied with the things you have? How do you overcome that feeling?

What is something that you wanted and you worked to get? How did it feel to get it after all the work?

What do you think makes people feel dissatisfied?

A Great Multitude

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 21:29:25 +0000

Revelation 7:2-17

Then I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, with the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm earth and sea, ³saying, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads.” ⁴And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel:

⁵12,000 from the tribe of Judah were sealed,
12,000 from the tribe of Reuben,
12,000 from the tribe of Gad,
⁶12,000 from the tribe of Asher,
12,000 from the tribe of Naphtali,
12,000 from the tribe of Manasseh,
⁷12,000 from the tribe of Simeon,
12,000 from the tribe of Levi,
12,000 from the tribe of Issachar,
⁸12,000 from the tribe of Zebulun,
12,000 from the tribe of Joseph,
12,000 from the tribe of Benjamin were sealed.

⁹After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, ¹⁰and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” ¹¹And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, ¹²saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

¹³Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?” ¹⁴I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

¹⁵“Therefore they are before the throne of God,
    and serve him day and night in his temple;
    and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.
¹⁶They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore;
    the sun shall not strike them,
    nor any scorching heat.
¹⁷For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd,
    and he will guide them to springs of living water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

A Great Multitude

How do you imagine a multitude of people?

- Progressive Field – 35,000 people Huntington Bank Field – 67,000 people

- The Horseshoe – 103,000 people The Big House – 108,000 people

- Biggest stadium in the world – Narenda Modi in India – 132,000!

None of these even comes close to the multitude of people in heaven. The number: 144,000! And that’s only part! But we should talk about this number for a moment. It is symbolic – remember that the reading says that these are the people who are “sealed” as God’s people. That’s a reference to baptism. (People freak out about the “Mark of Beast” but this is God’s mark upon His people.) Well, there have been way more than 144,000 people who have believed in Jesus over the centuries. So, where does 144,000 come from? Well, in the Old Testament, the people of God are the 12 Tribes of Israel. In the New Testament, Jesus chose 12 disciples. 12 x 12 = 144. Then the 1000. This number meant a huge amount of people. Today we might use “millions” or “billions.” So this number is saying that the whole number of God’s people – Old and New Testament – will be many.

And to emphasize this, v. 9 shifts the view beyond this 144,000 number. It speaks of a great multitude of people. They’re from every nation, all tribes, peoples, and languages. They stand before the throne of God and the Lamb; that’s Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. They’re dressed in white robes to symbolize their holiness, and they’re holding palm branches as symbols of peace and victory and worship and praise. And this great multitude of people is worshipping and praise God – specifically for His victory and salvation – and even the angels are joining in.

It’s a glorious vision, but the reading raises the question: Who are these people?

“These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

Okay … what is this “great tribulation”? It’s life. In John 16:33, Jesus says, “In this life you will have trouble … but take heart, I have over come the world.” That word “trouble” is the same word as “tribulation” in this verse. Jesus was talking about the struggle of the Christian life.

We keenly feel that struggle when we fall short of the glory of God. We feel the frustration of temptation’s pull on our lives. We echo Paul’s feeling in Romans, “The good I would, I don’t …” And on top of that, even when we live well, reflecting Jesus’ love and holiness, the world resists the faith – and often there is persecution and prejudice.

And these people have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Isn’t that a strange image? Blood stains clothes. It doesn’t whiten them! But these robes are symbolic of the people’s standing before God. They are white because their sins have been washed away. They are washed and cleansed by Jesus’ blood – the only thing that can take our sins away. He is the eternal sacrifice that has taken away the sin of the world.

The great multitude that no one can number from all over the world – these are the saints. It includes everyone who is holy because Jesus’ blood has cleansed them of their sins … and that number includes you!

This vision is of the whole church across all time in worship before God. So, it includes all those who have gone before us in faith … and those who will come after us … and it includes us. And this is what we confess in the Apostles’ Creed. This is the communion of the saints.

We have divine unity in Jesus. Despite the denominational divisions we see all around us, we are united in Jesus’ washing. And we have unity with all believers across all time and around the globe because Jesus has saved us. So we are united in the song of praise, “Salvation belongs to our God, and to the Lamb!”

So we are gathered in worship – receiving Jesus’ gifts – especially this gift of salvation. He gives them to us in the Word and the Sacraments. In this moment, heaven touches earth. We are never nearer to those who have died and gone to heaven than here, where God meets us and feeds us. They are at the eternal banquet in glory, and we are receiving foretaste of the feast to come … and Jesus and his salvation are our connection.

Even now, Jesus is doing what He does for all the saints.

“Therefore they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. ¹⁶They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. ¹⁷For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

We get tastes of this – moments while we live in the great tribulation. But the day will come! Jesus is shepherding us, the Lamb is leading us, to that great day when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

But for now we still weep. We weep at the world’s injustice. We weep at the suffering we see and feel all around us. We weep at our guilt and sin. And we weep for the loss of those we love.

We’re going to read the names of people connected to our congregation who have died in the past year. Out on the tables, there are remembrances of others – people on our hearts that we miss. And we long for the day … the great Day when Jesus will raise the dead and wipe every tear from our eyes.

But … even now we live in Jesus … and so do they. We cling to the hope of what they fully know. Jesus’ blood washes us and the filth of our sin away, and they are washed and entirely without sin.

We long for the day that the tribulations ends with all the suffering, sorrow, struggle, and shame. But we live with hope and even joy because God will see us through that Day. We are His saints, with the saints who rest in glory. Amen.

611 - November 1, 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 21:27:04 +0000

611 – The Eighth Commandment

November 1, 2026

Opening Prayer – Small Catechism p. 114

Homework Follow-Up

What does it mean to tell the truth in love?

While we want to always tell the truth, are there times that it might be important to not speak the truth?

On p. 112 in your catechism it quotes Proverbs 31:8-9. What is this passage saying to us?

Mark 14:3-9– Bible p. 1586

What did the woman do to Jesus in the reading?

How did people react to her?

What upset them?

What did Jesus do?

What amazing prediction did Jesus make in v. 9?

The Small Catechism

Turn to p.14 to read the 8^th Commandment and its explanation.

Underline all the verbs that describe what we should not do, and the verbs that say what we should do.

What is someone’s reputation?

Why does it matter?

How do people hurt other people’s reputation?

What might we do to help someone have a good reputation?

Homework

Read Luther’s Small Catechism – p. 115-119.

Ask your parents the following questions:

Has anyone ever gossiped about you? What happened? How did you feel about it?

What do you think it means to have a good reputation? What can you do to build a good reputation?

Is it easier to gossip about someone or defend them? What might make on harder than the other?

Are there times that we should keep secrets? How do we know when we should keep a secret and when we should tell someone about what happened?

What a Hymn Carries That a Sermon Can't

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 15:36:09 +0000

There are things a sermon can explain that a hymn simply holds. A sermon can walk you through the theology of the resurrection, trace the argument carefully, point you to the right texts, and leave you theologically equipped. But a hymn — a real hymn, one that has been handled at a hundred funerals, one whose words have soaked into the lives of ordinary believers across generations — a hymn can do something else entirely. It can carry the weight of the thing itself. It can make you feel the truth before you finish thinking it. And sometimes, standing in a room full of people who are singing the same words, it can break you open in the best possible way.

That's what I want to talk about today, as we close out this series on poetry and the life of the Christian. I've been making the case across these weeks that poetry — the kind of carefully crafted, image-saturated, rhythmically deliberate writing that we find in Scripture and in our best hymnody — does something to us that straightforward prose cannot. It gets past the gatekeepers of the analytical mind and lands somewhere deeper. And nowhere has that been more personally true for me than with the hymn For All the Saints.

Who Wrote It and Why It Matters

The hymn was written by William Walsham Howe, an Anglican bishop who lived from 1823 to 1897. He spent much of his ministry in the East End of London, which in the Victorian era was among the most densely impoverished urban landscapes in the Western world. Howe worked among the people who lived in those slums — the poor, the marginalized, the exhausted. Because of that, he became known as the "poor man's bishop" and the "children's bishop." He didn't write hymns for the comfortable and the well-settled. He wrote for people who knew hardship, who knew loss, who needed something real to hold onto when life pressed hard against them.

He wrote more than sixty hymns over his lifetime, and For All the Saints is by far the most enduring. It has outlived him by well over a century, and it has attached itself to the Christian liturgical year — particularly to All Saints Day, that moment in the church calendar when we stop and remember those who have died in the faith, those who labored and struggled and believed and now rest in the presence of Jesus. If you've been in a Lutheran church for any length of time, you've probably sung it. You may have sung it at a funeral. You may have sung it and not thought too carefully about the words, because the melody is so strong and the gathering so habitual that it can carry you along almost automatically.

But I want to slow it down. I want to look at what Howe actually wrote, because what he wrote is remarkable — and if you've been singing it without fully hearing it, I think you're in for something.

Reading the Hymn Carefully

Let me take you through it, verse by verse, and let the language do its work.

For all the saints who from their labors rest,
who thee by faith before the world confessed,
thy name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, alleluia.

Right from the opening line, Howe frames the Christian life as labor. These are people who worked — who strove and struggled and pressed on — and who are now at rest. Notice what the labor was, though: confessing Jesus before the world. That's the specific work Howe has in mind. Not just the general difficulty of life, though that's wrapped up in it too, but the particular calling of the believer to bear witness to Christ in a world that doesn't always want to hear it. And now those people are resting. They've finished the work. And Jesus — whose name is forever blessed — is the one who made their labor possible and their rest certain.

Thou wast their rock, their fortress and their might,
thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight,
thou in the darkness drear their one true light.
Alleluia, alleluia.

The imagery here is military, and that's intentional. Jesus isn't a boat captain gently steering through calm waters. He is an army captain — the one out in front, leading his people through a real battle, a "well-fought fight." And in the darkness — and Howe doesn't soften it, he calls it "darkness drear" — Jesus is the one true light. Not one of several lights. Not a helpful light among other helpful lights. The one. This is the exclusive claim of the gospel embedded in the poetry.

O blest communion, fellowship divine,
we feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in thee, for all are thine.
Alleluia, alleluia.

This is one of the most theologically dense verses in the hymn, and also one of the most comforting. There is a communion — a real, living fellowship — that spans the line between this life and the next. We are feebly struggling. They are shining in glory. But both "we" and "they" belong to Jesus. The line between the living and the dead in Christ is not the end of relationship; it is a temporary separation within an eternal belonging. We are all his. We are all one in him. That is not a sentiment — that is a doctrinal claim about the nature of the church, the body of Christ, which death cannot divide.

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, alleluia.

Verse four is where I feel the weight settle. "When the strife is fierce, the warfare long." Not if. When. Howe is not writing a hymn for people who have found life easy. He's writing for people who are deep in it — who are tired, who have been in the struggle for a long time, for whom the Christian life has not been a pleasant stroll but a real fight against real opposition. And in that weariness, something happens: there is a sound. Distant. Like a song that hasn't fully arrived yet, but you can hear it coming. It's the sound of the triumph that is coming. And something about hearing that sound — even faintly, even at a distance — gives you the courage to keep going. Hearts are brave again. Arms are strong. That is what hope does. Not a wishful hope, not a vague optimism, but the specific Christian hope rooted in what Jesus has already accomplished.

But then there breaks a still more glorious day,
the saints triumphant rise in bright array;
the King of glory passes on his way.
Alleluia, alleluia.

After the long night, the dawn. And Howe calls it "a still more glorious day" — still more, as if every beautiful dawn you have ever seen in your life is only a faint sketch of what this will be. The saints who have died rise triumphant. Not defeated. Not diminished. Triumphant. Garbed in glory, everything that God promised them that they would one day be. And Jesus — the King of glory — passes on his way, leading the procession. This is resurrection language. This is the future that the gospel promises.

From earth's wide bounds, from ocean's farthest coasts,
through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Alleluia, alleluia.

The final verse is almost too much to take in. From every corner of the earth — east, west, north, south, from every nation and every generation of believers — the countless host streams through the gates of pearl. And they are singing. All of it, every verse, every alleluia, every stanza of struggle and hope and battle and triumph, resolves into worship. Worship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The whole story of the church, across all of history, ends in one great song.

When I read those last verses, I'll be honest with you — I get emotional. I don't know the last time I made it through this hymn without crying. And I want to tell you why, because I think it matters for understanding what poetry, what hymnody, is actually capable of doing.

A Personal Story About What This Hymn Holds

We Lutherans sing For All the Saints often — at funerals, at All Saints Day services, at moments when the communion of the living and the dead becomes most visible and most felt in the life of the congregation. For me, though, this hymn carries something specific. It carries the memory of a particular moment that I think I will carry for the rest of my life.

In the fall of each year, the pastors in my denomination gather together regionally. It's part fellowship, part continuing education, and part worship — and one of the things we do at that gathering is remember the pastors and church workers who died in the previous year. We call it the remembrance of those called to glory. It's a solemn and meaningful service. You're in a room full of fellow ministers, fellow workers in the gospel, and together you're pausing to say: these ones ran the race, and they finished it, and they are with Jesus now.

In the fall of 2016, I was at that gathering. My father had died at the end of September of that year. It was still very fresh. And at his funeral, we had sung this hymn — or at least, I believe we did, because it's the hymn I connect so deeply with that time. And so when we came to that service at the conference, and we began to sing For All the Saints, something in me gave way. I was standing among all of these other pastors, my colleagues, and I just wept. Tears coming down my face, unable to hold it back.

The man standing next to me was a pastor by the name of Pastor Mark Love. And if you're going to be a pastor, that is a remarkable name to carry — Pastor Love. He is a big man, considerably taller than I am. He looked over at me and he could see immediately that something was wrong. I told him, simply: my dad died. And without a word beyond that, he reached over and pulled me into one of those hugs that a big man gives — the kind that enfolds you completely, that makes you feel, just for a moment, that you are held.

And that hug — that moment of one pastor holding another in the middle of that great hymn — that is what For All the Saints means to me now. It is inseparable from it. Every time I sing it, I am back in that room. Every time I hear those verses about the strife being fierce and the warfare long, I feel the weight of grief. And every time I get to the verses about the glorious day breaking, about the saints rising triumphant, about the countless host streaming through the gates of pearl — I feel what was behind that hug. I feel the comfort and the defiant, grounded, gospel-rooted hope that death does not get the last word.

That is what William Howe was teaching through this poetry. That is the message he carried in those carefully chosen words. And that is what the hymn carried — and continues to carry — in ways that a straightforward statement of doctrine, however true and however well-worded, simply cannot replicate.

Why Hymnody Does What It Does

I've been making this argument across this whole series on poetry, and I want to bring it home here at the end. When we ask what poetry can hold that prose cannot, part of the answer is this: poetry can hold memory, emotion, and theological truth all at once, woven together so tightly that they become inseparable. When I hear those lines about the strife being fierce and the warfare long, I do not simply retrieve a piece of stored theological information about the difficulty of the Christian life. I feel it. I remember it. I am pulled back into every moment in my own life when the warfare was long — including that fall in 2016 — and the truth of the hymn is not just in my head but in my chest.

This is why the church has always sung. It is not decoration. It is not the warm-up before the real content begins. The singing is content. The music carries meaning that the words alone cannot carry, and the words carry structure and precision that emotion alone cannot sustain. Together they do something that neither does separately. They plant the truth in the body as well as the mind. They make the hope of the resurrection not just a proposition to be affirmed but an experience to be inhabited.

There's a reason that when grief comes — when someone you love dies, when the strife is fierce, when the warfare feels long — one of the first things the church does is sing. Not because singing makes the grief smaller, but because the right song can make the hope larger. Because Colossians 3:16 tells us to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs — and that dwelling is not passive. It goes deep. It takes up residence. It is there when you need it most.

William Howe understood something about the people he was writing for. He understood that life in the slums of East London was hard. He understood that the people in those pews were not looking for abstract theological lectures — they were looking for something to hold onto when everything else felt like it was falling apart. And so he gave them images. He gave them a rock, a fortress, a captain in the darkness. He gave them the sound of a distant triumph song heard from within the middle of a long and fierce battle. He gave them the image of the glorious dawn, the saints rising, the King of glory on his way. And those images — because they were poetry, because they were set to music, because they were sung together in community — became something that ordinary believers could carry with them into the hardest moments of their lives.

Living in the Hope That Holds You

All Saints Day, whenever it falls in your congregation's calendar, is not primarily a day of mourning. It is a day of honest grief held within a larger, stronger, more enduring hope. It is the church saying: we see the loss. We feel the absence. We name the people who are no longer in the pew beside us. And we confess, together, that the communion they are in now is not broken — it is merely out of sight. That they are feebly struggling no longer, because they are shining in glory. And that we — still in the struggle, still in the long warfare — belong to the same Jesus they belong to, and he will bring us to the same place.

That is not a comforting fiction. That is the gospel. And when it is spoken in the precision of good poetry and carried in the swell of congregational singing, something happens that is almost impossible to fully articulate. It becomes, in the best sense, more real than real. The promise cuts through the noise and the grief and the weariness and lands. And hearts are brave again. And arms are strong.

I hope you'll sing For All the Saints this All Saints season. I hope you'll sing it slowly enough to hear what Howe is saying. I hope you'll let verse four sit with you — the fierce strife, the long warfare — and let it name what your life has actually cost you, the real weight of living as a believer in this world, the real ache of missing the people who have gone ahead. And then I hope you'll let verses five and six do their work. The glorious day is coming. The saints triumphant rise. The King of glory passes on his way. And from every shore, the countless host streams through the gates of pearl and lifts one great, unending alleluia.

Because here is the thing that Pastor Love's hug communicated without a single word — the thing that the hymn communicates without needing to argue or explain — the victory is already secure. Jesus won it. He is leading you through this life, through the struggle and the darkness and the warfare long, toward that everlasting salvation and that glorious day. And nothing, not grief and not death and not the grinding difficulty of this life, can take that from you.

So hold onto it. Sing it when you can barely say it. And let the poetry do what poetry does — carry the truth deeper than words alone can reach, and keep it there, alive and warm and waiting, for the moment when you need it most.

Article generated with A.I. Original presentation by the author.

What Veterans Need Beyond "Thank You" — A Navy Chaplain on Veterans Day

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 14:11:02 +0000

Veterans Day has a way of sneaking up on you — and then, once it arrives, leaving you a little unsure of what to actually do with it. We know we're supposed to honor veterans. We put up the flags. We say thank you. But if you've ever stood next to a veteran in the narthex after the service and wondered whether "thank you for your service" is enough — or even quite right — you're not alone. That question is part of what drove me to do something I've never done before on A Weekly Word: sit down for a real conversation with someone who lives at the intersection of the gospel and military service every single day.

This episode marks the first-ever interview on A Weekly Word, and I couldn't be more glad we did it. My guest was Chaplain Ross Engel — Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps, sixteen-year parish veteran, and co-host of the Ringside Preachers podcast. We talked for the better part of an hour about Veterans Day, about the challenges veterans face when they come home and walk into our congregations, about identity, about something called moral injury, and about what faithful ministry looks like when your congregation might be standing at a gun range or working in an engine room. I learned a few things. I suspect you will too.

From the Parish to the Deckplate: How Chaplain Engel Got Here

I wanted to understand Chaplain Engel's journey before I asked him anything about veterans, because the path he walked is itself instructive. It turns out it wasn't a straight line. He'd actually wanted to join the Marine Corps in college — pre-9/11, drawn to the challenge of it — but, as he put it with a laugh, he met a girl, reconsidered, and ended up not joining. She's not his wife. That's a whole other story.

Then 9/11 happened. He finished college, went to seminary, and in his very first week there, Navy chaplain recruiters showed up. He commissioned in 2004 with a clear vision: serve as an active duty chaplain, put in twenty-plus years, retire, and then go serve a small congregation that couldn't afford a pastor — one where his TRICARE coverage and pension would mean he could preach without putting a financial burden on anyone. That's the kind of thinking I appreciate. But life intervened again. His then-fiancée was not enthusiastic about military life, and he stepped away from the program.

What followed was sixteen years of parish ministry — Tampa, then just outside Jacksonville — during which he kept bumping into service members, kept having conversations with sailors and soldiers, and kept feeling the pull of that earlier call. He and his wife prayed about it, tried to re-enter the program in 2014 (the Navy had concerns about his, as he described himself, "bigger bodybuilder-type build"), waited, tried again, and eventually the answer came back yes. After more than eleven years at St. Peter's in Middleburg, Florida — leading them through COVID, watching them flourish — he said farewell and went on active duty.

What happened immediately? He deployed for eleven months. Didn't see his family for nearly a year. After a career of being home for dinner, the longest he'd ever been away was a week at a symposium or confirmation camp. He was honest about the toll that took, while also being clear that he and his wife held onto the conviction that this was where God had placed them. Every new set of orders, he told me, they pray the same question: Is God still working through me here? Is this still right for our family? So far the answer has kept being yes.

What struck me most about how he described the transition is this: he didn't see it as leaving parish ministry. He saw it as taking everything the parish had given him — Lutheran theology, the rhythm of Word and Sacrament, the pastoral instinct to sit with people in their worst moments — and putting on different clothes to deliver it. He traded his clerical collar for camouflage. The gospel he carries is the same one.

What Changes When Your Office Is a Gun Range

One of the most vivid things Chaplain Engel described was the difference in where ministry happens. In the parish, your congregation comes to find you, mostly. You have an office. People knock on the door — usually not on their good days. You almost never see where your members work, what their daily environment actually looks and feels like.

In the chaplain corps, he said, most of his ministry happens by going to them. If the Marines are at a gun range, he walks up and down the rows and talks to them between shots. If the sailors are down in the engine room of a destroyer, he goes into the engine room and watches them work. He learns what they do. He asks what's going on — and because he's showing up at work rather than in a moment of crisis, he gets to hear about the good things too. He gets to build the kind of relationship where, when things go badly, there's already a foundation of trust.

He described it as putting into action Jesus' words to be "as innocent as doves and as shrewd as serpents" — knowing how to frame the gospel in a way that doesn't feel like an ambush, but that also doesn't shy away from the real thing. About eighty percent of his conversations out in the field aren't overtly faith-focused, he said, but the care is always there, the listening is always there, and when the moment comes to speak plainly about God's promises, he's ready. He's not behind a desk waiting for people to need him badly enough to come find him. He's already there.

I've thought about that since our conversation. There's something for all of us in that — pastors and laypeople alike. The ministry of presence, of showing up where people actually are, is something the church could stand to recover.

The Identity Problem: Who Are You When You Take Off the Uniform?

When I asked Chaplain Engel about the specific challenges veterans face — the ones our congregations should understand — he went straight to something I hadn't expected: identity.

When you join the military, he explained, you are given a new identity. You are told: you are a Marine. You are a Sailor. There are creeds attached to these identities — the Sailor's Creed, the Rifleman's Creed — language that defines who you are and what you're for. You have a unit, a squad, a ship. You have people to your left and right. You have a community that is literally built into your daily life and a purpose that is spelled out for you in unmistakable terms.

And then you retire, or your enlistment ends, and all of that is gone.

The people to your left and right aren't there anymore. The purpose isn't handed to you each morning. The identity — I am a Marine, once a Marine always a Marine — is still felt, still real in some sense, but you're not doing the things a Marine does. You're at Home Depot, possibly frustrated by the work ethic of your coworkers, as Chaplain Engel described in a story about a soldier from his Jacksonville congregation who retired, stayed home for two months until his wife told him she wasn't used to having him around and he needed to find something to do, and then spent months trying to fit into a civilian work environment that baffled him by its lack of discipline and structure. Eventually he ended up back in a government contracting role, because at least that was a world he recognized.

What does the church offer in this moment? Chaplain Engel was clear and I found it genuinely moving: we can point people to an identity they had long before they ever put on a uniform. A baptismal identity. Child of God. That identity doesn't retire. It doesn't get handed back at the end of a contract. It doesn't depend on physical fitness standards or rank or what you're currently capable of doing. It was given before any of the other identities, and it outlasts all of them.

He also talked about purpose and community — the two other things the military provides so powerfully and that veterans often find themselves without. He described how that Jacksonville congregation worked hard to bring that retired soldier into the life of the church with specific roles and responsibilities: serving on a board, working as an usher and an elder, joining the men's group. Not in a condescending or therapeutic way — not treating him as fragile or broken — but as a neighbor. As someone who belongs. Someone who still has something to contribute and a community worth contributing to.

That's not a complicated program. That's just the church being the church. But it matters enormously to someone who is trying to figure out who they are outside the only world they've known for the past decade or two.

Moral Injury: The Wound the Church Is Equipped to Heal

This was the part of the conversation that stopped me most. I'll be honest — the term "moral injury" isn't one I find myself reaching for often in parish ministry. But Chaplain Engel described it in a way that made me realize it might be more present in our congregations than we recognize, even if we're not naming it that way.

Moral injury, as he described it, is the wound that comes from witnessing or participating in something that violates your deeply held beliefs — from being asked to do things that go against your conscience, from being betrayed by the people you were supposed to be able to trust, from carrying the weight of things you saw or did that you can't reconcile with the person you believe yourself to be. It's not exactly PTSD, though the two can overlap. It's a wound on the soul.

I shared with him a memory from a previous congregation — a man who had served in the 10th Mountain Division during World War II, the soldiers who fought in Italy and the Alps. He told me about his best friend being killed right next to him. And the question that never left him: Why did he die, and why was I allowed to live? That man carried that question for decades. It's the kind of weight that doesn't go away with time, and it doesn't respond to easy answers.

Chaplain Engel pointed out that moral injury probably isn't unique to the military — executives asked to do things that violate their ethics, employees caught in systems that require compromises they hate — but we tend not to name it the same way in those contexts, and so we don't address it with the same intentionality. And in the military context especially, veterans sometimes hesitate to bring these things to a pastor because they assume the pastor won't be able to handle it. They've done things, seen things, that they're sure no one in a church office has ever encountered. They think their story is the worst one you've ever heard.

What Chaplain Engel described as his response to this — and what he commended to parish pastors — is something that made me proud to be Lutheran. He talked about what he called "surprise absolution." Someone unloads a burden — regrets, things done wrong, weight they've been carrying — and without being asked, he says: In the name of Jesus Christ, I forgive you your sins. And they're startled. I didn't ask for that. And his response is essentially: I'm ordained to forgive sinners who confess their sins, and it sounds like you just confessed some sins to me, so I am compelled to offer forgiveness. Now let's talk about what that means.

That is Lutheran theology doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Private confession and absolution — the practice many of us underuse — is one of the most powerful tools the church has for the veteran who is carrying moral injury. Not therapeutic language. Not "you did the best you could." Actual absolution. Actual forgiveness, spoken out loud, in Jesus' name, to someone who has confessed actual guilt. The gospel is specific enough to reach into the darkest places a person has been, and that is precisely what veterans carrying these burdens need to hear.

Chaplain Engel also pointed out that the church has sometimes failed veterans here — particularly Vietnam veterans, some of whom came home to congregations where pastors were preaching against the war in ways that felt like judgment against the people who had fought in it. They were drafted, they served, they came home to a country protesting them and sometimes a church pronouncing judgment rather than offering forgiveness. He acknowledged we've come a long way. I believe he's right. But it's worth remembering, because the theological reflex that produced that failure — prioritizing the church's political comfort over the pastoral needs of the person in front of us — can still show up in subtler forms.

How to Honor Veterans Well — From Someone Who Knows

I asked Chaplain Engel directly: what do you want civilian Christians to hold in mind as we observe Veterans Day? His answer was practical, theologically grounded, and characteristically honest.

First, he affirmed the distinction between the days. Veterans Day is for those who served and are still living — it's a day to recognize their service and sacrifice. Memorial Day honors those who died in service. Armed Forces Day recognizes those currently serving. Getting these confused (thanking a veteran for their service on Memorial Day, for instance) can feel awkward, and Chaplain Engel gently pointed out that this is a small thing worth getting right.

Second, he talked about the discomfort many veterans feel when thanked. He didn't know what to say the first time someone said it to him. "You're welcome" felt presumptuous. He settled on "thank you for your support" — which I thought was gracious and telling. It reframes the exchange as mutual, as a partnership, which is closer to the truth.

Third — and this was something I hadn't thought about — he pointed to the families. He said that when he thinks about those free meals at Applebee's or the discount at the store on Veterans Day, he's come to see those gestures less as thank-yous to him and more as thank-yous to his family for what they endured while he was gone. He was clear: the deployment was often hard work, but it was also an adventure of sorts for him. The truly hard work was his wife holding everything together at home, keeping normalcy for the kids, doing it alone for months at a time. The families bear a weight that often goes unacknowledged. If you want to honor a veteran well, consider also honoring the people who kept the home fires burning.

Fourth, he was careful about how Veterans Day should shape a Sunday morning worship service. He said — and I appreciated this — that he doesn't need a flag paraded in or the national anthem sung or God Bless America worked into the liturgy. What he wants is faithful proclamation of the gospel. If you recognize the veterans in the room, do it warmly and specifically: How are you doing? How can we support you and your family? We want you to know your service matters and your sacrifice matters. And then — always, always — take it back to this: nothing you did in uniform or out of it changes your standing with God. You have a God who loves you, forgives you, and is there for you.

That is the word veterans need to hear, not just on Veterans Day but every Sunday they walk through those doors.

The Chaplain's Role — and Ours

Near the end of our conversation, Chaplain Engel said something I want to close with, because I think it captures the whole spirit of what he does and what the church is called to do for veterans. He said: I don't think my contribution is that I bring God into the battlefield. He's already there. What I get to do is bring God's promises to people who are struggling to see where God is in the midst of it.

That is the question veterans are often carrying — the same question anyone carries in the aftermath of tragedy. Where was God when this happened? Why did my friend die and not me? Where is God in what I did and what I saw? These aren't questions that require a theology degree to answer. They require a pastor — or a fellow congregation member — who is willing to sit still, listen without flinching, and then point back to the God who does not leave us or forsake us, who loves and forgives in spite of our darkest secrets and deepest sins.

What Chaplain Engel is doing for sailors and Marines, our congregations can do for the veterans in our pews. We may not have been where they've been. We may not fully understand what they carried. But we know the Savior who was present in all of it, who bore every weight of guilt and grief on the cross, and who speaks forgiveness to everyone who comes to him — no matter what they've done, no matter what they've seen, no matter how long they've been carrying it alone.

This Veterans Day, go find the veteran in your congregation. Ask them how they're doing — not in passing, but really. Tell them their service matters. And if the moment opens up, remind them of the identity that was theirs before any uniform ever touched their shoulders: child of God, baptized and beloved, forgiven and free. That identity is still theirs. It never retired. And the community gathered around it — your congregation — is theirs to belong to, now and always.

The Hymns You Sing Are Preaching to You

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 13:04:23 +0000

There's a song lodged somewhere in your memory right now that you haven't thought about in years. Someone will hum four notes of it, and every word will come rushing back — clear as the day you first heard it. That's the strange, almost unfair power of music. I can struggle to remember a three-item grocery list, and I'll walk out of the store with five things, none of which were on it. But play me something from the 1980s, and I'm back in high school with every lyric intact. Music does something to memory that nothing else quite replicates. And the church has always known this. Which is why, when we talk about what shapes the faith of believers week in and week out, we can't talk only about sermons and Bible studies. We have to talk about hymns — because the hymns you sing on Sunday morning are preaching to you, whether you realize it or not.

A Poet Worth Knowing

We've been spending some time in this series with poetry — working our way through the 1500s and 1600s, sitting with the poets of the Reformation era and the century that followed. But today we're making a jump. We're leaping all the way to the twentieth century, and we're landing on a hymn that many of you probably know by heart, even if you've never stopped to read it slowly on the page. The hymn is Thy Strong Word, written by Martin Franzmann.

Franzmann was a Lutheran pastor and scholar with a remarkable career. He taught for many years at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis — my alma mater — from 1946 to 1969, and he finished out his career as a tutor at Westfield House in England. He was, by any measure, a serious theologian. At a critical moment in the history of our church body, he was one of the voices making the case for holding fast to Scripture — for treating the Bible as reliable, as the actual foundation of the faith, not a collection of ancient impressions we can take or leave. He understood that what we believe about the Word of God shapes everything else about how we live and worship. And when he sat down to write this hymn, all of that conviction poured into it.

Thy Strong Word is often sung near Reformation time, toward the end of October, but it belongs to no single season. It can be sung any Sunday of the year, and it rewards you differently every time. If you know it, the melody is probably already playing in your head as you read these words. That's not an accident. That's exactly what Franzmann intended — and it's exactly what good hymnody does.

The Architecture of the Hymn

Before we walk through the verses, it's worth stepping back to notice something about the structure of what Franzmann has built here. This isn't a collection of loosely related praise thoughts strung together into stanzas. There is a deliberate arc, a movement, a story being told. And the through-line running from the first verse to the last is a single image: light. Franzmann uses light — its creation, its coming into the world, its work in individual human hearts, its shining from the cross, its eruption into song — to trace the whole sweep of what God has done for us. It's a theological argument disguised as a poem, set to music so you'll remember it for the rest of your life.

The movement goes like this: creation, Christmas, conversion, the cross, and then a cacophony of praise. Five movements. One sustained image. Let's walk through them.

Creation: The Word That Cleaved the Darkness

Franzmann opens where the Bible opens. Thy strong word did cleave the darkness at thy speaking; it was done. For created light we thank thee, while thine ordered seasons run. That word cleave is doing heavy work right from the start. It's not a gentle word. It doesn't say God introduced light gradually or nudged the darkness aside. He cleaved it — cut through it, split it open — and there was light. This is the God of Genesis 1, who speaks and it is so. The universe doesn't talk back. Darkness doesn't negotiate. He speaks, and the darkness has no choice but to give way.

And then Franzmann pauses to give thanks. That's significant. Before the hymn goes anywhere else — before it moves to salvation history or the cross or any of the heavier theological territory ahead — it stops and says: thank you for this. Thank you for the sun. Thank you for the light that lets us see our way through the created world. There is a kind of humility in that. Franzmann isn't treating physical creation as merely a stepping stone to the spiritual stuff. He's saying that the ordered seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the light that comes through your window in the morning — these are already gifts from a generous God, and they already deserve our alleluia.

That refrain — Alleluia, Alleluia, praise to thee who light dost send, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia without end — anchors every movement of the hymn. And it's worth knowing what the word means. Alleluia is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew hallelujah, which means simply, praise the Lord. So embedded in this hymn, over and over, is this call: praise the Lord. Praise him for light. Praise him for creation. Praise him for the ordered world in which we live. Before we get to Christmas, before we get to the cross, we stop and say: even this is worth praising him for.

Christmas: The Light Who Took a Breath

The second movement pivots, and you feel it when you read it. Lo, on those who dwelt in darkness, dark as night and deep as death, broke the light of thy salvation, breathe thine own life-giving breath. Franzmann has shifted registers. He's not talking about physical darkness anymore. He's talking about the darkness that lives in human beings — the shadow of sin and death that has hung over every person who has ever walked this earth. Dark as night and deep as death. That phrase lands hard. Death is not a distant abstraction here. It is woven into the fabric of the darkness Franzmann is describing. And we know, theologically, why. Death entered the world through sin. The darkness people dwell in isn't just ignorance or confusion — it's the consequence of a broken relationship with the God who is light.

And into that darkness, broke the light of thy salvation. This is Christmas. This is the Word becoming flesh, the light of the world arriving in a stable, taking that first breath. Breathe thine own life-giving breath — there is something tender and precise about that image. Jesus didn't just appear as a concept or descend as a spiritual force. He was born. He breathed. He is, as John 1 puts it, the Word made flesh, the true light coming into the world. And the light-giving breath of God — the same ruach, the same Spirit-breath that hovered over the dark waters in Genesis — is now given flesh and bone and a mother and a manger.

Franzmann doesn't linger. He says this in two lines, and then he's already moving. But that compression is part of what makes it a hymn rather than a sermon. He's not trying to exhaust the topic. He's trying to open a door. And he wants the music to carry you through it, so that when you're singing these words, you feel the weight of the darkness and the breaking-in of the light all at once.

Conversion: Declared Righteous, Pressing Toward Glory

The third movement turns toward us — toward what God has done not just in history, but in the life of the individual believer. Thy strong word bespeaks us righteous, bright with thine own holiness; glorious now we press toward glory, and our lives our hopes confess. Franzmann is leaning into Paul here, into the great Reformation recovery of the doctrine of justification. Bespeaks us righteous — God speaks righteousness over us. It doesn't come from inside us. It doesn't come from our efforts or our moral track record. It comes from outside, from God's own declaration, his Word spoken over sinners who have no righteousness of their own. This is what Luther rediscovered in Romans, what the whole Reformation turned on: the righteousness that counts before God is a righteousness that God himself provides and pronounces.

And notice where that leaves us: bright with thine own holiness. Not bright with our holiness. His. We are covered in a light that isn't native to us. We carry it the way the moon carries the light of the sun — not generating it, just reflecting it. And from there, the hymn looks forward: glorious now we press toward glory. We are already in Christ, already declared righteous, already partakers of his light. And we are also still on the way, still pressing toward the day when he returns and what we already are in him becomes fully visible.

There's something in that phrase — our lives our hopes confess — that connects to how Jesus himself talked about his followers. He said I am the light of the world, yes. But he also said, you are the light of the world. The light that enters the darkness at Christmas is the same light that now lives in every person who trusts in Jesus. We are not the source. But we carry the light. Our lives are meant to be a confession of that hope — not because we're performing goodness for an audience, but because when you've been declared righteous by God, when the darkness has been broken over you personally, it changes the way you live in the world.

The Cross: Where the Light Beams Forever

Then comes the verse that Franzmann builds most carefully, the one where his poet's instincts are most visible. From the cross thy wisdom shining breaketh forth in conquering might; from the cross forever beameth all thy bright redeeming light. If you've spent any time learning to read poetry, one of the first things you learn is to pay attention to repetition. A poet chooses every word. Nothing is accidental. When something appears twice in the same stanza, the poet is leaning on it, underlining it, demanding that you notice.

Look at where Franzmann puts his weight: from the cross. First line. Third line. From the cross. From the cross. He could have found other ways to fill those syllables — he's clearly a man who had no shortage of words — but he comes back to that same phrase because he wants it to ring in your ears like a bell. The cross is not one element of the story among others. It is the center. It is where the conquering happens. It is where the victory is won.

And what he says about the cross is important. The cross is where wisdom shining breaketh forth. This is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1 — that the cross looks like foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power and the wisdom of God. The world looks at the cross and sees defeat, weakness, a failed rabbi dying an execution's death. The eyes of faith look at the same cross and see the conquering of sin and death, the love of God stretched out for the whole world to see. It's the same event. But it looks completely different depending on who's looking.

Franzmann also picks up an image from John's Gospel. Jesus speaks in John 3 of being lifted up, just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so that everyone who looks to him might live. The cross is the place of being lifted up — and from that elevation, Jesus is like a beacon visible to the whole world, drawing all people to himself. From the cross forever beameth all thy bright redeeming light. Not just beamed. Beameth — present tense, perpetual. The light from the cross has never stopped shining. It shines today. It will shine tomorrow. It shines into the darkest corners of the darkest lives, and the darkness cannot put it out.

Cacophony of Praise: The Whole Body Joins In

And then Franzmann does something remarkable in the final movement. He's been speaking in the language of light and glory and eternity, and suddenly he gets very physical. Very earthy. Give us lips to sing thy glory, tongues thy mercy to proclaim, throats that shout the hope that fills us, mouths to speak thy holy name. Lips. Tongues. Throats. Mouths. All at once, we are back in the body. We are flesh and blood, not just souls floating toward heaven. And that is completely intentional.

The message of salvation, Franzmann is saying, has been embodied in the Christian. We are not merely carriers of an idea. We are — as Paul says — the body of Christ in the world. And the praise of God is not a purely spiritual transaction that happens somewhere above the collarbone. It comes out of lungs that breathe, throats that vibrate, lips that form words. The same body that Jesus redeemed with his own body is the body that now opens its mouth and calls out: alleluia.

This is incarnational theology in its most practical form. Your lips were redeemed. Your tongue was redeemed. Your voice — scratchy as it may be on a Sunday morning, uncertain as you might feel about whether you're actually hitting the right notes — your voice was redeemed to sing the praises of the God who made you and saved you. And Franzmann presses you toward that. He's not just describing praise. He's asking God to enable it. Give us lips. Give us tongues. He recognizes that even our praise is a gift — something God has to work in us — not a performance we produce.

And then the final shift, the one that's easy to miss if you're singing along on autopilot. The refrain changes. All the way through the hymn, it has been: Alleluia, Alleluia, praise to thee who light dost send, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia without end. But at the very end, it becomes: May the light which thou dost send fill our songs with alleluias, alleluias without end. It's subtle. But Franzmann is doing something with that shift. He's turning the refrain into a prayer. He's asking that the light of God would fill our very songs — that our praise would be saturated with it, animated by it. The alleluia isn't just something we're producing. It's something God's light is filling us to sing. The whole hymn ends with the church caught up into something bigger than itself, swept into the unending praise of the God who created light, who came as light, who declares us righteous, who won the victory from the cross.

What This Means for How You Sing on Sunday

Here's why any of this matters for how you show up to church on Sunday morning. Each of those verses Franzmann wrote — creation, Christmas, conversion, the cross, the cacophony of praise — could be its own book. And in fact, books have been written on each of those subjects. The theology packed into this single hymn is dense enough to keep a seminary classroom busy for a semester. And yet it fits on one page of a hymnal. And because it's set to music, you will carry it with you for the rest of your life, singing it under your breath or in the shower or on a quiet evening when you can't sleep and you need to be reminded of what is true.

That's the power Franzmann understood and harnessed. Hymns are not filler between the sermon and the benediction. They are not mood music to help you settle into the pew. They are theology in a form your memory can actually hold. They are preaching you can sing. And when they are written well — when a poet like Franzmann has done the work of packing Scripture and doctrine and doxology into meter and rhyme — they are doing something in you every time you sing them, whether you're consciously processing it or not.

So here is the invitation: next Sunday, when you open the hymnal, don't just sing the words. Read them. Notice the choices the poet made. Ask what story is being told, what image is being used, what God is being praised for and why. Look for the repetitions — those are the load-bearing walls. Look for the movement from one idea to the next. And then sing it, knowing that this is not just music. It is the church's memory, handed to you in a form you can carry. It is light — thy strong word — doing its work through every verse and every alleluia, pressing you toward the God who created light, came as light, made you light, died to redeem you, and is drawing all things toward the day when there will be no darkness left at all.

What hymn do you know so deeply that it has become part of how you think about God? And do you know yet what that hymn is actually saying?

This article is generated by A.I. from the original content by the author.

Blessed Is the One

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:48:49 +0000

Psalm 1

The Way of the Righteous and the Wicked

1 Blessed is the man
    who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
    nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
²but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and on his law he meditates day and night.

³He is like a tree
    planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
    and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
⁴The wicked are not so,
    but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

⁵Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
⁶for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

Blessed is the One

All month we’ve been saying Romans 3:21-22 – “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it – the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

This passage was important during the Reformation – and IS important now – to reveal to us the true teaching of how a person “gets right with God. Let’s take it a little at a time.

It says that the righteousness of God has been manifested – that is to say, it has been revealed, make known – not discovered, not chosen – this righteousness of God is something God tells us about and He gives to those who believe.

And he does this apart from the law – there is nothing you do to get this righteousness, you cannot earn it, cannot win it, no matter how hard you try or how well you “follow the rules” – which usually means following our spin on God’s rules.

But this isn’t new – the Law and the Prophets bear witness – that phrase is code for the Scriptures, or at least that part of the Scriptures that we call the Old Testament. This is saying that this was always God’s plan. When sin entered the world, God was not taken by surprise, and even before it was necessary, God the Son was ready to come to die to atone for our sins and rise to give us everlasting life.

So how does one get this righteousness of God? It is only through faith in Jesus Christ. People like to say there are many ways to God, but God has said that the only way to come to Him is through Jesus. But here’s the thing, to be forgiven and to become righteous through Jesus, all that is necessary is to believe in Him. Believe He is the Son of God, just as He is the Son of the Virgin Mary. Believe He died and rose for you. Believe He ascended into heaven, and lives and reigns to all eternity. Believe He is coming again to judge the living and the dead – and that His judgement on you is righteous, forgiven, redeemed.

And who can receive this righteousness? It is for all who believe.

This message, which is also called the Gospel, was revolutionary in the 1500’s because it had been buried in many places and people were left believing that they had to do something to save themselves.

The church told them they had to do acts of penance to gain forgiveness. This get’s the cart before the horse though! When we sin against someone else, we should absolutely do what we can to make it right, but we don’t do that to earn forgiveness. We do good to those we’ve sinned against because we are forgiven, and this is pleasing to God. The motivation is completely different, and it is important!

The church told them they could buy forgiveness buy purchasing indulgences. They even said they could buy forgiveness for their dead loved ones, because they taught that when you die you didn’t go to heaven, even if you were a Christian. You had to be punished as a consequence for your sins in purgatory.

It was a spiritually terrifying and abusive time. Many saw God as a strict judge, angry, waiting and eager to condemn them. Romans 3 says something different, though. It says that His desire is to save sinners … and it always has been. In fact, He has saved us by Jesus’ death and resurrection. That message works in us to create faith so we believe and receive the righteousness of God.

Amazing! Freeing! What a relief!

But, our sinful hearts are exceptionally skilled at twisting God’s Word, and Satan’s oldest trick is to get us to not believe God’s Word. So, even in this message of Good News and salvation, a certain lie – a false idea – starts to form. It sounds something like this: God has saved me from my sins (true), they are all forgiven (also true), I don’t need to do anything to save myself or make God happy with me (again true), in fact, I can’t save myself anyhow (which is still true), so it doesn’t matter how I live now that Jesus has saved me. And that last little bit is very false.

God has a plan – a design – for how our lives should be lived. In faith, we know that – and the saints of old testify to the fact that how we live matters since God has saved us from sin and death. Our first reading today, Psalm 1, talks about this and presents life as two different ways – the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked.

It begins, “Blessed is the one” – and for us, our minds go directly to the greatest blessing we have received – the righteousness of God – having our sins forgiven for Jesus’ sake.

Blessed is the one who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, - this person does not listen to false teachers and their lies about God’s Word - nor stands in the way of sinners, - the Christian does not linger in sinful behaviors, that is not the way we live! Instead, we repent. - nor sits in the seat of scoffers; - the scoffer judges everyone else a fool compared to himself, and the Christian resists the temptation to sit over God’s Word to judge and mock what God has said. ^{2 [}B]ut his delight is in the law of the Lord, - that word, law, means God’s teaching, and it includes everything God teaches, not just the stuff about what we should and should not do. In that way, it also includes the full message of God’s love and salvation! No wonder the Christian delights in God’s law! [A]nd on his law he meditates day and night.

Meditation is something that people get confused about these days. They think that to meditate is to empty their minds. That is not what the Bible means by meditation. The best example of meditation – a negative example, though – is worrying. When we worry, our minds run over things that happened or that we are afraid will happen over and over and over again. This Psalm teaches us to meditate on God’s Word – partly so that it will guide us, but more importantly so that it will give us the righteousness of God that comes through faith in Jesus.

The psalm says that such a person is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. Question: Do trees plant themselves? Do people choose to be born? Do they choose to be born again? No. This passage reminds us that God saved us from the terrible place we had been planted and He places our roots in the waters of baptism which flow with Jesus’ life and forgiveness for us. The psalm is saying that we are like a divine orchard … and our Lord Jesus is the divine gardener who tends to us so that we will bear fruit – which is the good works God created us to do.

This fruit that we bear, it is the result of Jesus’ work in us, and it reflects the fruit of a very different tree – the cross where Jesus died to atone for our sins. When He rose and appeared to Mary, she thought He was a gardener – because He is! By the Holy Spirit he tends us and fills us with faith and life. He causes us to prosper.

The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; ⁶for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

There are two ways – the way of the wicked and the way of righteousness. The way of the righteousness of God is lived by faith and it is blessed. But maybe you’re not feeling all that blessed or righteous. What should you do? Well, prayer is good. And hearing God’s Word proclaiming His forgiveness is good, and it will teach you how to live as one who has the righteousness of God. But when you live this life, you’ll struggle as you see yourself falling short over and over again, to say nothing of the struggle of living this life in the world. And that will drive you back to prayer. And that should lead you back to God’s Word – the Law that says, Do this! And you should strive for it! But it should also lead you to God’s Word – the Gospel message that your sins are forgiven, you are righteous for Christ’s sake – and you live in God’s love no matter how much you struggle to feel righteous or blessed. Amen.

A Message to Proclaim the Kingdom

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:46:33 +0000

We know very little about the man. He was educated, literate, and a physician. At some point, he became a Christian, a partner in Paul’s ministry, and the author of two books in the Bible – one a chronicle of Jesus’ life, and the other a historical account of the ministry of the apostles. His name was Luke, and his books are the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.

Today, October 18, is set aside by the Church to celebrate St. Luke the Evangelist. (That’s a fancy word that means a person who announces good news – especially the good news of Jesus’ salvation by His life, death, and resurrection.)

Today is also set aside here at Gloria Dei as LWML Sunday. LWML – Lutheran Women’s Missionary League – has long focused on ways to support the important work of evangelists – good news announcers. LWML has at its heart the desire for everyone to hear about God’s love for sinners, and the forgiveness of sins that flows from Christ’s cross.

This is the work Jesus has always been about! His first sermon was, “The kingdom of God has come, repent and believe the good news!” He sent His disciples out to proclaim that message, and, today, we read about the time Jesus sent seventy-two others to go ahead of Him, announcing the good news of God’s kingdom. They were evangelists!

The work of sharing the good news of God’s love ultimately belongs to Jesus, but he includes His followers in that work. And today, He works through His followers – people like you and me – to carry a message to proclaim the kingdom – to proclaim all the work God does to redeem sinners.

It’s a daunting task. It’s a big world out there, and there are so many people who need to hear about Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection so they can believe, too! Not only that, but there is resistance to Jesus’ message, which can be discouraging or even frightening!

What should we do in response to this need? How do we even begin such a task?

Jesus gives us a good place to begin in our Gospel reading today. In Luke’s gospel, chapter 10, verse 2, Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.”

“The harvest is plentiful.” Do you believe that? Do you believe that there are many people out there who would love to hear this good news that you believe? There are! But they don’t want to just hear us talk about Jesus, they want to see us live our lives as thought we were betting our souls on Jesus salvation. (Because we are!) But what people often get wrong about the Christian faith is that they think this is some kind of morality project. It is not. The Christian faith is, first and foremost, the story of God who saves sinners. It’s not about the things you do to be a better person. That’s all downstream from God’s intervention in your life. Our first message about Jesus is that He seeks and saves the lost, binds the brokenhearted, comforts the sorrowing, forgives the unforgivable, and raises the dead. I believe there are many people in this world who have crushed, emotionally killed, and culturally confused about what it means to be loved, that the harvest is truly large, and the need is great.

“But the laborers are few.” We can understand this in a couple of ways. First, we need more professional church workers: pastors, DCE’s, teachers, and missionaries. We should pray that God gives us those workers. Also, these are noble tasks, and if God calls you to this work, it is a blessed life! But, secondly, we also need folks who just go about their lives, living like light to the world, sharing our hope, loving our neighbors, supporting others, and gathering in worship. In our hymn today we sang, “If you cannot speak like angels,, If you cannot preach like Paul, You can tell the love of Jesus, You can say He died for all If you cannot rouse the wicked With the judgment’s dread alarms, You can lead the little children To the Savior’s waiting arms.” Simply put, we are those who wrap our lives around “Words of Life, words of Hope” because they “Give us strength, help us cope In this world, where e'er we roam Ancient words will guide us Home,” and they have that same message for all who will believe in Jesus!

So, because the harvest is great, and the laborers are few, we take Jesus’ prayer request to heart. “Pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send our laborers into His harvest.”

This, above all, is where we begin with God’s Kingdom’s mission: we pray. We pray for God to send workers – again, both professional workers and everyone who will share the hope of Jesus. That means you might be the one who gets sent! Or it might be that your role is to pray and keep praying for God to bring people into the lives of people to share Jesus’ salvation with them!

This is what Jesus teaches us to pray for in the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. We pray that people will hear the name of Jesus and find their salvation in Him. We pray that God’s kingdom of grace will come to us, but also to everyone, because this kingdom is wherever God is working to redeem sinners. We pray that God’s will would be done, trusting that God wants all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth that all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, but are also saved through grace believing in Jesus, the crucified and risen Son of God.

This is our first work as Christians: we pray, we intercede, we call upon God for our needs and the needs of others, remembering that their greatest need is to be saved from sin and death – and that is why Jesus died and rose! He has saved us from sin and death and given us a new life – a life that is available to all who believe, a life that is founded on His mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

So pray. Pray to the Lord of the harvest, for the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few, and we have a message to proclaim – the kingdom has come! Salvation has come!

Have you ever thought about the people God placed in your life who pointed you to Jesus and helped you to experience his love? They were an answer to this prayer to bring God’s grace to you. Perhaps you are an answer to a prayer to bring God’s grace to someone else. You are definitely among those called to pray that God sends laborers into the harvest, because that privilege is given to all whom Jesus has redeemed and made His own. Amen.

Whatever

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:44:30 +0000

1965 – The Who – My Generation

This year also represents the beginning of a new generation: Generation X – 1965-1980

1965 also gives us one of the earliest examples of a change in the way people use the word – “whatever.”

This change was so important that Gen-X is also called the “Whatever Generation.”

Whatever began to be used is a cynical dismissive way. “If you don’t do your chores, you can’t take the car tonight.” “Whatever!” “I don’t like your attitude mister!” “Whatever!”

It became a way to say, “I don’t care what you think.”

It became extremely cynical.

Politicians lie, cheat, and don’t take care of their constituents – “Whatever!”

Argument with a friend – “Whatever!”

Rain on your wedding day? Ironic? – Whatever!

Bad things happen, there’s nothing you can do about it! – Whatever!

In Philippians 4:8, St. Paul uses this word in its proper sense – Whatever: meaning anything or everything!

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Anything and everything true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise – think about these things.

It’s an interesting idea about what we fill our heads with! Are these the things we usually think about?

Worries, troubles, what’s wrong with the world, … more like Gen-X’s “Whatever!”

Why would Paul urge us to focus our thoughts on these things? To ponder them? To meditate upon them?

It is a recognition that all that is true and honorable and just and lovely etc. comes from God. James says every good and perfect gift come from down to us from our heavenly Father.

Thinking about these things shapes us, and Paul wants us to imitate them – to live this way.

But this is not an easy task! It is good for us to fill our minds with whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise – but it isn’t easy.

Whatever is true? – Gaslighting, A.I., but Jesus is the truth – Cross

Whatever is honorable? – Age of Disrespect, F-Biden/Trump – Those who seek first the Kingdom of God and righteousness

Whatever is just? – Political corruption – Justification by Faith

Whatever is pure? – Sinless?

Whatever is lovely? – Redemption story.

Whatever is commendable? – Praiseworthy – not necessarily praiseworthy in the world’s eyes, praised by God! (Love, joy, peace, patience, mercy, hope, kindness)

Whatever is excellent? – word indicates character

Whatever is worthy of praise – Creation, Redemption, Salvation, Light in the dark, faith, Courage to live for Christ.

Whatever … think about these things.

We use that word another way – at any cost, “Whatever it takes.”

This is our story – God did whatever it took to save us

Incarnation – Jesus’ ministry – miracles – parables – preaching – suffering – dying – rising – All for you!

Drives us to seek God’s kingdom – Whatever

Devil will accuse – Whatever!

World will mistreat – Whatever!

Flesh will resist – Whatever!

Saved by Jesus from whatever we have done, called to whatever God’s plan is, with us whatever happens. Whatever shall we do with such a blessing – such good news? Share it – support it – live for it. Because it is worth it whatever comes our what because Jesus did whatever – as in everything – that was necessary to give you and me a new life, hope, and a future. Amen.

Of the Same Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:40:06 +0000

I want to start with the same mental image as last week. Imagine St. Paul. He’s an old man and under house arrest in Rome. He will appear before Caesar to plead his case any day now, and he doesn’t know whether he will live or die after that appeal. So, between having time on his hands and thinking about the end of his life, he is writing to the churches he established. And the letter we are particularly interested in today (and for the next few weeks) is the one addressed to the church at Philippi.

As Paul writes to the Philippians, he knows the struggle and sacrifice that went into sharing the gospel with them. He knows what he went through, but more importantly, he knows that Jesus suffered, died, and rose to save those people from sin and death. He doesn’t want them to lose that message. He doesn’t want them to lose a treasure so dearly bought! And, he doesn’t want all this work to fade away when he’s gone.

So he wrote in his letter, “if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, …” In other words, “If this message of the gospel meant anything …” “… complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.”

“Complete my joy.” Show me that this message of Christ crucified and risen has taken root among you. How? By being of the same mind. Having the same love. Being in full accord and of one mind.

Let’s unpack those things.

First: Being of the same mind.

Max Lucado once wrote, “When fishermen don’t fish, they fight.” His point was that unity is found in a common purpose, a common mission. That purpose or mission flows from what people think and what they value. In sports, the team knows that scoring more points and playing better defense leads to making it to the playoffs and having a chance to win a championship.

Here in the church, what unites us? We have the mind of Christ. That is the mind we want to have in each of us – thinking about and valuing what He thought and valued. So we look at Jesus’ message. He says, “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He says that God’s rule and reign has come among us, and we see that kingdom at work when God is redeeming sinful people like you and me. The clearest picture of the mind of Christ and the kingdom of heaven is the Cross. It was there that, “for the joy set before Him, Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame,” because there He atoned for the sins of the world.

This message is what is central in our minds! Christ came for sinners! Which means that Christ came for us. This is why we do what we do: worship, funerals, baptisms, teaching Bible studies… All of it goes back to the belief that Jesus died for me. But Jesus did not die for just you and me: He died for the sins of the world. That means that our minds are united in the desire for that message to go out so people can have the hope, forgiveness, and salvation that we cherish. As John wrote, “These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of Go, and that, by believing, you may have life in His name. “For there is no other name, given under heaven, … by which we must be saved,” than the name of Jesus.

Our minds are united in Jesus’ mission – the salvation of souls. This drives what we do, what we prioritize, how we live, as well as how and what we give – time and talents, as well as treasure. (Or, at least it should.)

Paul says we should have the same love. This is a specific kind of love called agapé. It is a selfless love that desires God’s best for others. So, what is God’s best? In 1 John, the apostle writes, “This is love: Not that we loved God, but that He loved us and gave His Son as a propitiation (that is, an atoning sacrifice) for our sins.” A few weeks ago, I preached on Psalm 37, which says, “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” God’s best is reconciliation to Him through Jesus. God’s best is what Romans calls justification: being made right with God through Jesus’ death and resurrection. God’s best is finding people who are dead in their trespasses and sins, and making them alive in Christ.

When Paul says he wants us to have the same love, this is the love he is talking about. It’s Jesus’ love received by you. It’s also Jesus’ love delivered through you to others.

Paul also says he wants the Philippians – and us – to be in full accord and of one mind. Literally, this says that we should be unified in spirit.

When I was in high school we used to do this chant at the basketball games, “We’ve got spirit, yes, we do! We’ve got spirit, how about you?” We were saying that we had enthusiasm for our team. We were committed to our school. We invested ourselves in who won our lost, because our itendity was wrapped up with what it meant to be a Manistee Chippewa … or Hudson Explorer … or Stow Bulldog … or your school and mascot.

To be unified in spirit is to confess, “I am a Christian! My life is rooted in the Cross. My hope is in Jesus who was crucified and raised for me.” It also means that we seek to display the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control… because we know these things were what we were created and redeemed for!

Being unified in spirit is also to say, “I am a member of my congregation.” Christians don’t walk alone. We gather. So we gather here at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church. We love this place because this is where we receive Jesus’ gifts. We love these people because we have fellowship in Jesus and the hope we have because He died and rose for us. We love our doctrine – the teaching of God’s Word – because we recognize that things like the Small Catechism help us understand God’s Word more fully and deeply. We love our mission: Gathering People to Christ, Building Believers in Christ, Serving the World as Christ.

Let’s be of the same mind. The kingdom has come and we live in God’s grace. Have the same love, because the love of God in Christ Jesus is yours! Be united in Spirit, gladly confessing, “I am a Christian, and I love my church.”

So, this is what I am asking of you today. I want you to spend some time thinking about how we can be of one mind as we support the work of the church. Some of this deals with time and volunteering. But to be completely upfront with you, for right now, we’re mostly thinking about the financial side of support. Please take some time to pray about what you give to support the ministry here. Please pledge. Your pledge is confidential, and the way we use that information is to help us plan our budget for next year. It helps us be intentional as we consider our work for the kingdom of heaven.

Giving is important because it is part of the unity we have as we act together and sacrifice together to help make sure that the message of Jesus’ salvation is proclaimed to our generation and beyond. Amen.

611 - October 25, 2026 - The Seventh Commandment

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:08:45 +0000

611 – The Seventh Commandment

October 25, 2026

Opening Prayer – Small Catechism p. 109

Homework Follow-Up

Daily Prayers?

Memory Work?

I want you to learn some important information about the Christian faith, but, more importantly, I want you to live like a Christian.

Genesis Luke 19:1-10– Bible p. 1643-4

Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus. Why was that difficult for him? What did he do to see Jesus?

What was Zacchaeus’s job?

How did people feel about Jesus visiting Zacchaeus? Why? (See the note for 19:5-9 on p. 1644)

Why did Jesus go to Zacchaeus’s house?

The Small Catechism

Turn to p.14 to read the 7^th Commandment and its explanation.

Underline the words money and possessions.

Circle the word dishonest. What does that mean?

Underline the words help, improve, and protect.

Why are earthly goods like money and possessions important?

What are some ways that people steal from others? (See points A, B, and C on p. 106)

Some types of stealing we might not think of … (Question 80)

How can we can help, improve, and protect our neighbor’s possessions?

Why does God give us earthly possessions? What are they for? (See Question 82)

Homework

Read Luther’s Small Catechism – p. 110-114.

Ask your parents the following questions:

Has anyone ever stolen from you? What happened? How did you feel about it?

What do your parents do for a living? How did they start doing that work?

What are some ways you can help and improve the home you live in (which belongs to your parents/grandparents)?

How do you (or can you) use your possessions to help others?

611 - October 18, 2026 - The Sixth Commandment

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:06:35 +0000

611 – The Sixth Commandment

October 18, 2026

Opening Prayer – Small Catechism p. 104

Genesis 2:15-24– Bible p. 9-10

This is the account of the first marriage.

In the reading, what was not “good”?

What did God decide to do?

What does the word “helper” mean?

How does the man respond?

What does v. 24 teach us about marriage?

What is important about the idea that we are created male and female?

The Small Catechism

Turn to p.14 to read the 6^th Commandment and its explanation.

Do you notice anything different about this explanation compared to the others?

Turn to page 93, and define “marriage.”

Turn to page 94, and define “adultery.”

Why is sexual sin such a big deal?

For our bodies –

For our hearts –

For our souls –

Some complicated issues living in a sinful world:

Pornography

Gender Identity

Divorce

Homosexuality

Homework

Read Luther’s Small Catechism – p. 105-109.

Ask your parents the following questions:

How did your parents/grandparents meet?

How did they know they wanted to get married?

What was their wedding day like? Ask to see pictures.

When they think about you getting married when you are grown up, what do they hope your future husband/wife will be like?

611 - October 11, 2026 - The Fifth Commandment

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:04:33 +0000

611 – The Fifth Commandment

October 11, 2026

Opening Prayer – Small Catechism p. 92

Luke 10:25-37 – Bible p. 1628

Important Context:

What is a Levite?

Who were the Samaritans?

Read the parable.

Who was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by robbers?

What did he do?

As Christians, we look after our neighbors so that they may enjoy the life God has given them.

How can you be a neighbor to your classmates?

The Small Catechism

Turn to p.14 to read the 5^th Commandment and its explanation.

Underline the words murder, hurt, harm, help, and support.

Turn to page 85, and read question 60.

Define the word murder.

What are some ways that people harm their neighbors?

What are some ways that people look after the physical well-being of their neighbor?

Read question 61 on p. 88. What do we need to remember about our neighbor in regard to the 5^th Commandment?

Some complicated issues living in a sinful world:

Abortion

Suicide

War

Self-Defense

Homework

Read Luther’s Small Catechism – p. 93-104. As we look at the Sixth Commandment we will deal with issues regarding sex and marriage. Parents, you may wish to look over this section of the Catechism with your child.

Ask your parents the following questions:

How have you helped someone with their physical needs?

How can we love people who are cruel to us?

Have you ever had a neighbor who was hard to love? What did you do? Was that the right thing to do, or could you have handled the situation better? If so, how?

611 - September 27, 2026 - The Third Commandment

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Tritten) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:02:01 +0000

611 – The Third Commandment

September 27, 2026

Opening Prayer – Small Catechism p. 80

Questions from Your Reading

What is a Sabbath day? (Turn to p. 397 to look it up.)

Which day of the week is the seventh day?

Why do we worship on Sunday?

Why is it important/vital for Christians to gather for worship?

Luke 10:38-42 – Bible p. 1628-9

Who are the main three people in the reading?

What was the “right choice” that Jesus supported?

What does this teach us about the main thing when we go to church?

The Small Catechism

Turn to p.13 to read the 3^rd Commandment and its explanation.

Draw a rectangle around the words “Sabbath day.”

Underline the words fear and love. (If you haven’t already done so.)

Circle the words despise and sacred. Make a note in your catechism of what those words mean.

What would it look like to “gladly hear and learn” God’s Word?

A Word About Sermon Notes

“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”

Lutherans Are Liturgical Christians

We use a liturgy –

What are the parts of a worship service?

What are some good reasons for using a liturgical service?

We also follow the Church Year and its seasons. (See the diagram below, or on p. 378.)

Lutherans like to call the Sunday Communion service the ____________ Service

Homework

Read Luther’s Small Catechism – p. 81-84.

Ask your parents the following questions:

Why do you feel it is important to go to church on Sunday?

What is your favorite (or a favorite) hymn? Why do you like it?

What is worship service during the year do you find the most meaningful? Why?

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.