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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, St. Paul Lutheran Church. The Sunday drive to church. I'm Pastor Wolfmuller and it is October 4th. Wow.
[00:00:06] I don't know if you guys noticed, it's October already. That happened fast.
[00:00:11] Anyhow, it is the 18th Sunday after Trinity for us today, and we're rejoicing in Jesus. This is such a great law gospel text. I mean, it's just first part law, second part gospel, where Jesus. It's Holy Tuesday. Well, talking about the gospel already, Holy Tuesday in Matthew 20, you. It's the last public day that Jesus is teaching. He's in the temple. They've asked him already about taxes and about. Remember the Sadducees came up and asked about the guy who was married to the lady that was married to seven different brothers and they all died, no kids. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? Then the lawyer comes up, last question to test him. What's the greatest commandment? And Jesus says, you know, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Love your neighbors yourself.
[00:01:00] All the law and the prophets hang on. These two command.
[00:01:04] And they're quiet. So then Jesus looks at them. All right, guys, I got a question for you. Whose son is the Messiah?
[00:01:12] And they say, David's, right? Second Samuel, chapter seven. The Lord promised David. That was the last promise. So we have the promise of the Messiah given to Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Judah, then no Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and then nothing for a couple hundred years until we get to David.
[00:01:38] Now that's the last promise. So they say, son of David. So then Jesus says, great, right? So how can David call him Lord? And he quotes Psalm 110, Psalm of David. The Lord said to my Lord, sit here at my right hand till I make your kingdom your footstool. Till I make your enemies your footstool.
[00:01:56] And there, that's the number three.
[00:02:01] Yep, the third most quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament, following after Psalm 118:22, the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, which follows after number one, Leviticus 19. Love your neighbors yourself. Jesus says, how can he be David's son and Lord? You're one or the other. You're either the descendant of David or the greater than David. You can't be bothered unless you have two natures.
[00:02:30] It's so I love man oh man. So that Jesus takes this law, conversation, answers it, completes it. Love your neighbors yourself. And then he gives them a gospel question, who am I? And they can't answer it. That's Psalm 110. This is one of my favorites, because it's solving a riddle. There's a riddle from the Old Testament. I like these biblical riddles. It's helpful for us to think about. There's this riddle from the Old Testament, which is, how can the Messiah be king and priest? Because the king comes from Judah and the priest comes from Levi. You can't be both.
[00:03:05] And Psalm 110 answers that riddle by saying he's a priest after the order of Melchizedek. But then it introduces this greater riddle of David's Son and David's Lord. And they can't answer it. Well, they refuse to answer it. I don't think they can. Maybe they could, but wouldn't because it would be conceding too much to who Jesus is.
[00:03:28] And so this is this beautiful text of Long Gospel. It's so fantastic. Well, and it's paired with all the others. So the entrance Psalm is Psalm 34. We start at verse 8 and go to verse 22. This is a psalm of David.
[00:03:45] It's interesting that we'll start right after verse seven. You might notice it, though, when you open your Bible.
[00:03:50] It's really a great St. Michael's Day verse. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers him.
[00:03:58] Now, I think once you get to, like verse 11 in the Psalm, come, O children, listen to me. I'll teach you the fear of the Lord.
[00:04:06] I'm thinking, man, this sounds an awful lot like Solomon. But we know where Solomon got it from his father David. And those verses 12 to 16 are quoted in First Peter, chapter 3. What man is there who desires life and loves many days that he may see good?
[00:04:22] Keep your tongue from evil, your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil. Do good, seek peace, and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth.
[00:04:41] This promise that comes from the law.
[00:04:44] It's good for us to remember that there's gospel promises and there's law promises.
[00:04:50] The gospel promises are unconditional. They're based on what Christ has done. The law promises are conditional, but they're there. They're still promises. And the Lord gives, for example, in the fourth commandment, honor your father and mother, that it may go well with you, and you'll live long in the days the Lord gives a promise to keeping that commandment.
[00:05:08] I think the real treasure of this psalm is in verse 18. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
[00:05:25] Many are the afflictions of the righteous. But the Lord delivers him out of them all, and then he keeps all his bones. Not one of them is broken.
[00:05:35] That's a promise that's applied to Jesus in John 19, so that when they didn't break the bones of Jesus on the cross, they were fulfilling this promise.
[00:05:46] And you realize that as the Psalm is giving these promises to the Christian, they're really describing Christ.
[00:05:54] Marvelous. The Old Testament lesson is Deuteronomy, chapter 10.
[00:05:59] Remember Deuteronomy, this fifth book of Moses. Deuteronomos means second law. And it's because as the children of Israel have wandered, escaped Egypt, 1446, gone to Mount Sinai 1445 BC received the law and the the old covenant, the Old Testament, and then wandered in the wilderness so that they can all die.
[00:06:27] And so it's 40 years later, 1406 BC and they're about to cross into the promised land.
[00:06:34] And Moses has to re preach all the stuff from the beginning to this next generation.
[00:06:43] They all died because remember Jacob and Caleb went over and said, well, everyone's humongous in the land, but we have the Lord on our side, no big deal. But the other 10 spies were like, nah, it's nuts over there. We can't go in there, we'll get obliterated. And the people were afraid. They listened to the 10 fearful spies and decided not to go in. So for their thanks, they get to wander and die in the wilderness. And then the next generation, those who were younger than military age when they came out of Egypt and who were born in the wilderness, wandering, all of those folks are the ones who get to go in. So Moses is preaching to them and he's renewing this covenant that the Lord made with his people at Mount Sinai.
[00:07:27] And in chapter 10 is in some way sort of peak, Deuteronomy.
[00:07:32] And it's related to our text because it has this command to love Now, Israel, what does the Lord God, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I'm commanding you today for your good.
[00:07:53] And then there's a little bit of gospel.
[00:07:56] You got to pay close attention. But the Lord's mercy is going to shine through. When you get things like, yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them. You above all people not because you're big, not because you're strong, not because you're good, not because you're worthy. It all is his choice. And in fact he chooses that which is weak and lowly, that which is not to be, that which is so. The Lord has his mercy and compassionate eyes set on his people.
[00:08:36] The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, the awesome, the awesome God who's not partial and takes no bribe and so forth.
[00:08:47] He is your praise. He is your God who has done for you great and terrifying things that your eyes have seen.
[00:08:54] So it's not just that your fathers and mothers have seen these things a generation ago when you came out of Egypt, but you've seen these things too. Particularly, you've seen the Lord provide for you every day with his manna.
[00:09:06] You've seen the Lord keep your shoes from getting any holes in them as you've wandered through the wilderness for 40 years.
[00:09:14] You know that the Lord is good, so follow them and trust in them. It's great.
[00:09:23] And they did, you know, they got to go into the promised land. They had some trouble and so they never did all the work that they were supposed to do when they were conquering it, but they got to go. In the epistle lesson is from First Corinthians 1:1, and following a couple of things to think about with 1 Corinthians, and this is maybe a fun exercise for the Sunday drive to Chur, is you, you know the problems in Corinth.
[00:09:53] What are some big ones. They, they were. Some were doubting the resurrection, that, that people won't be raised from the dead, that Jesus wasn't raised from the dead.
[00:10:04] They have all these spiritual gifts, but they're exercised completely chaotically so that the church service has four or five people speaking in tongues at the same time and they don't know what the other one's saying.
[00:10:18] They were getting drunk at the Lord's supper.
[00:10:22] The rich were sitting up front and getting the Lord's supper. And so the poor were sitting at back and they weren't even getting anything.
[00:10:31] They had women standing up to preach. Not only. There were some prophetesses seemingly called by God that should have been preaching, but in a disorderly way.
[00:10:43] So they were sort of lording it over their husbands and their families or their fathers that they were called prophetesses.
[00:10:51] There was a guy in Corinth who was boasting about how he was sleeping with his mother in law. That's best construction and boasting about this in the Grace of God. And there's other sexual immorality that's happening. I mean, it's a mess.
[00:11:11] You. So, okay, knowing this situation, and it's come to Paul.
[00:11:14] Hey, he's over in Ephesus teaching. Here's what's going on in Corinth.
[00:11:20] Imagine what the first part of the letter would be writing to this circumstance, to this situation.
[00:11:30] What are you guys doing? Paul to Corinth. What in the world's happening over there, Guys?
[00:11:36] Hey.
[00:11:37] But that's not how he starts his letter.
[00:11:40] This is amazing.
[00:11:43] Paul called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes to the church of God that's in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.
[00:12:02] Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:12:06] All right, so far, so good. Here's the letter beginning properly.
[00:12:11] I give thanks to my God always for you, because of the grace of God that was given to you in Christ Jesus.
[00:12:20] Paul has this.
[00:12:22] He's committed to thanks.
[00:12:24] I mean, even in circumstances where it does not seem like thanks is the first thing that you should do. It's what he's gonna do. It's an amazing thing. I give thanks to my God for always, for you.
[00:12:38] And even it goes on to say in that every way you're enriched in him, in all speech and knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you're not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:12:58] God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, so that God is at work, faithfully at work, keeping his promises even in the midst of all this chaos.
[00:13:12] This is so amazing to me, Paul.
[00:13:16] You cannot get Paul down.
[00:13:19] I thank my God for you all the time. All the time.
[00:13:25] Now, Paul knows, I think his thankfulness is a recognition that it is the work of God, the Holy Spirit, that anybody is even in church and there to receive his letter.
[00:13:39] He'll have a lot of rebuke and a lot of correction and a lot of teaching to do in this epistle.
[00:13:44] But he starts with thanksgiving. He almost always does. The two exceptions are, first Timothy, two, Timothy one of the Timothy's and Galatians, where he just launches into them because he's afraid they've lost the gospel.
[00:13:59] But he always begins with thanksgiving, and he is our example in this, that we would begin our days, our conversations, our work, that we would begin with. Thanks to God.
[00:14:17] May God grant it. All right.
[00:14:20] Started late today. So this is our Sunday morning Sunday drive to church. God bless you. We'll see you soon. Exciting morning this morning. We had our fourth, fifth annual Young Adult Conference, and a lot of those young adults are going to be joining us for church and Sunday school this morning. So that'll be really great. Make sure to greet the visitors that are there.
[00:14:41] Bible class continues on the Gospel of Matthew, rejoicing in the Lord Jesus and his works and words there as well. So see you soon. God's peace be with you. It.