View Full Transcript
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning. St. Paul Lutheran Church, Sunday drive to church for who?
[00:00:04] 16th Sunday after Trinity, September 20th, year of our Lord, 2026.
[00:00:10] So, interesting stuff today. It's. Oh, of course, the most beautiful of all texts, which I suppose every week has, but the raising of the widow's son at Nain, the funeral's going out, Jesus says nuh.
[00:00:24] But a couple of really interesting things this morning.
[00:00:28] It's the only time that I think that we have a continuous reading of the Old Testament lessons.
[00:00:35] Last week and this week from First Kings, chapter 17.
[00:00:39] We'll talk about it. Let's. Let's. Let's do the prayer. This is the collect.
[00:00:45] This. It sounds Irish.
[00:00:47] I think it's older than that.
[00:00:49] All these collects come from, like, Gregory the great in 450 or something. Let's pray.
[00:00:55] O Lord, we pray that your grace may always go before and follow after us, that we may continually be given to all good works through Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
[00:01:13] Amen.
[00:01:17] I think I'm gonna. I'm gonna look this one up.
[00:01:19] Okay. I can't find. Am I. Where did these collects come from? Book? Is it church? I have to look it up in the morning.
[00:01:26] We have Psalm 30. It's a beautiful colic, though. Go before and follow after.
[00:01:32] So the Lord is our Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end, the source and the goal. Absolutely tremendous.
[00:01:41] The psalm is Psalm 30.
[00:01:44] This is a beautiful psalm of.
[00:01:47] Well, it's a song that David wrote for the dedication of the temple. It's one of the bad things in our hymnal. I wonder if in the next hymnal we should adjust this, that. You know, those superscripts, the little title things that you see in your. In your Bible, where it says a Psalm of David or a Psalm of Asaph, that's there in the original Hebrew. But we take that out for the psalms in the hymnal, and we add the Gloria be to the Father.
[00:02:19] What you're missing in Psalm 30, then, is that it says a psalm of David, a song at the dedication of the temple.
[00:02:27] And that sets the context of the psalm, but also makes you really think. I mean, David wasn't there at the dedication of the temple. It happened after he died. Remember, it was Solomon who did it. But David made provision for it, and he stored up all the money and wood and supplies and everything, and he kind of set Solomon up for success on that project and even wrote this psalm to be used at that time.
[00:02:52] But when you look at the psalm. And you think about it as a dedicatory psalm.
[00:02:58] It doesn't have that feel to it. For example, first of all, there's a lot of prayer and it's very individual. It's not we extol you, O Lord, but I extol you, O Lord, you've drawn me up and there's a lot of back and forth.
[00:03:13] Sing praises to the Lord. Verse 4. His anger's for a moment. Verse 5. Weeping tarries for the night. Verse 5. Joy comes in the morning.
[00:03:22] Verse 5. I said I'll never be moved. Verse 6. You hid your face. Verse 7. That's the worst part. You hid your face. I was dismayed, I cried to you.
[00:03:30] And then hear, O Lord, you turned for me my mourning into dancing. Verse 11. You've loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness.
[00:03:39] It's this very back and forth dynamic prayer of the Christian with the Lord.
[00:03:47] And, and it's marvelous to see how the Lord does these things. He changes, for example, our mourning into dancing and our sackcloth into gladness.
[00:03:57] And that's, I think, why this psalm fits so well with a Sunday, because we have this woman, this widow, with her son at his funeral, which ends in not being a funeral.
[00:04:10] It's amazing if we have the old Testament lesson 1 Kings 17 picking up where we left off last week.
[00:04:18] Again, I don't know of any time that we do that now. We'll remember that we talk about the one year lectionary as the historic one year lectionary. But remember that the lessons that are handed down to us are the Epistle and the Gospel.
[00:04:33] The Old Testament lesson appointed for the historic one year lectionaries were lost. They must have been there because we still have them for all the major feasts like Good Friday and Ash Wednesday and all the other non Sunday feasts. The readings are actually an Old Testament, not a Gospel.
[00:04:51] So the Old Testament was there, but it was just lost somewhere in the Middle Ages. And so the, the appointment of the Old Testament comes later.
[00:05:02] In fact, I think the list that we have was probably put together for our hymnal. So it's not that old. So we have these two lessons back to back from 1 Kings 17 and the widow who is over there in Zarephath in Sidon, hometown of Jezebel, Pastor Smith preached last week. I couldn't believe that when he told us about that, that this woman is this faithful Christian in Jezebel's hometown.
[00:05:37] And remember she says, what are you doing? I'm just collecting some sticks to make a little tortilla. Then we're going to die.
[00:05:43] Well, Elijah said no. He gave her the promise, provide for me, and the Lord will see to it that your oil and your flour never run out. It happened.
[00:05:55] But then the sun gets sick. That's where we pick up in verse 17 and dies.
[00:06:02] And he was so sick that there's no breath in him.
[00:06:05] And she says to Elijah, what have you against me, O man of God? You've come to bring my sin to remembrance and cause the death of my son.
[00:06:14] There's some guilty conscience business going on there. You can hear it in what she says.
[00:06:20] She thinks that Elijah's visit is a visit of wrath and that her son's death is punishment for her sin.
[00:06:28] Wow.
[00:06:31] But Elijah says he takes the boy and he goes into the. And he lays him on his bed and he cries out to the Lord. And he stretches himself over on the child three times and he prays.
[00:06:43] And the Lord listens to the voice of Elijah. And the life of the child came into him again, and he revived.
[00:06:50] And the woman says to Elijah, now I know you're a man of God. The word of the Lord is in your.
[00:06:54] In your mouth is truth. It's interesting, I think, that there's one raising of the dead with Elijah, two with Elisha, one with Peter, two with Paul.
[00:07:07] And so the resurrections that are the resuscitations accomplished by Peter and Paul are a reflection of.
[00:07:17] Of Elijah and Elisha. One than two.
[00:07:21] That's the double portion of the Spirit.
[00:07:24] And that's how Paul is.
[00:07:26] Luke is pointing out to us that the things that Paul's accomplishing are a doubling of Peter. It's a. It's a double portion of the spirit.
[00:07:37] Jesus has, I think, four, three or four. I should know that.
[00:07:44] Three, of course, three.
[00:07:47] Who would have said for this widow's son, Jairus, daughter and Lazarus, of course, I knew that all the time.
[00:08:00] Here's an interesting thing to note.
[00:08:02] The difference between the raising of this widow's daughter in Zarephath and the raising of the widow's daughter at Nain.
[00:08:14] And here's the biggest difference. Jesus doesn't pray.
[00:08:19] So with Elijah, it's obvious that God is the one doing the raising in Nain. It's obvious that Jesus is the one doing the raising.
[00:08:29] God is the one doing the raising, and Jesus is God.
[00:08:34] And when it happens. This is Luke 7.
[00:08:37] When it happens, here comes the funeral procession. And Jesus says, don't weep. And he touches the child.
[00:08:42] Young man, I say to you, rise up and fear seizes them and they glorify God. And they say a great prophet has arisen. And they say God has visited his people.
[00:08:59] That's it.
[00:09:00] God has visited his people.
[00:09:03] The Epistle lesson. Let's spend a little, because I think I'll preach about the Gospel. Let's spend a little time thinking about. This is Ephesians 3.
[00:09:11] There's these two passages where Paul talks about his prayers in Ephesians, Ephesians 1 and Ephesians 3, that Ephesians 1 is his prayer of thanksgiving and that the Spirit would open the eyes of their heart.
[00:09:27] And this prayer is very similar in a lot of ways. It has a lot of parallel things, but it says a few other things.
[00:09:33] So this is starting in verse 13.
[00:09:36] So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.
[00:09:43] For this reason I bow my knees before the Father from Whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
[00:10:22] Wow.
[00:10:23] Okay. All right, here's your homework. You got to pray this prayer for yourself and your family, for me, for your pastors, for your church brothers and sisters this week. Here's the prayer. That according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being. Okay, so it's a prayer for strength with power. So the Lord is going to give you power that strengthens you, that is, through His Spirit in your inner being.
[00:10:52] So we all have our outer being, which I guess does and speaks, but then we got the inner being, which thinks and feels, remembers and wants and all that kind of inner being stuff. And so this is where the Spirit's at work to strengthen us.
[00:11:06] Now, I don't know if you. If you need it, you're like, ah, look, I got all the strength I need.
[00:11:11] I never get worn down or whatever.
[00:11:14] No.
[00:11:15] Well, I suppose if that's you, I don't know what you're doing. But still, you should probably pray this prayer so that we need strength in our inner being, and that strength is through the Spirit. And look at what it says. So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through Faith.
[00:11:34] So not only is the Spirit working with his power, but also Christ is in us.
[00:11:41] Now, there's. I'll bet you there's a hundred passages that talk about how we are in Christ. Beautiful passages.
[00:11:47] There's one passage, this one, that talks about how Christ is in our hearts so that through faith, that faith which grabs ahold of the promise of God and grabs ahold of the words of the Spirit and grabs ahold of the Spirit himself, it also grabs ahold of Christ so that our hearts are wrapped around Christ. He lives in our hearts by faith and that we're rooted and grounded in love, so that faith is holding onto Christ and love is keeping us rooted and grounded. And the Spirit has given us strength.
[00:12:20] And then you think, okay, now what is it for?
[00:12:23] What do we need that strength to do?
[00:12:26] To hold on to our faith in the midst of trials, to love our neighbor as ourself and to go about selflessly living in this life to make known the love of God in all of the world, to perform great works.
[00:12:42] Here is why you need strength.
[00:12:44] Here is the task he's going to tell you. Paul's going to tell you the task that we have to do. We must do it. But it is too hard for us to do on our own. We can't do it with our own strength. So he has to give it to us that you may have strength. This is verse 18. Being rooted and grounded in love, that you may have strength to comprehend with all the saints the breadth and length and height and depth and know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
[00:13:17] Now, it's an amazing thing. Would you see what it says? You have to know something that surpasses knowledge. And the thing that surpasses knowledge is the height, length, breadth, width, depth, size of God's love in Christ, of Christ's love for you.
[00:13:33] And the hard thing, the hard thing in life, the thing that you got to struggle over is knowing that.
[00:13:45] That.
[00:13:46] Dear saints, this is amazing.
[00:13:51] I don't think of it like this. I don't think, man, you know, the hardest thing I've got to do every day, every week, all my life, the hardest thing I've got to do is try to comprehend how much God loves me.
[00:14:02] But that's what Paul says.
[00:14:04] That's it. That's the hard thing. Because you can't.
[00:14:08] We don't have that capacity to do it.
[00:14:13] We're spiritually weak and small.
[00:14:17] And the love is so profound that you just can't get your head around it or your heart or your Anything. I mean, you need the spirit and Christ himself helping you to do this most difficult thing.
[00:14:32] I saw some guy the other day, he had a heart, he had a tattoo on it, said, do hard things.
[00:14:37] And I don't know what hard things he meant by that. Waking up at 5, taking ice baths, running 50 miles.
[00:14:45] That's hard things.
[00:14:47] Being with people in the midst of suffering, doing difficult jobs, thinking, trying to create beauty in the midst of this ugly world, being a friend, raising children, putting in the hours.
[00:15:04] There's a lot of hard stuff.
[00:15:06] But Paul is saying, here is the most difficult and most important thing of all. Difficult and important that you would know the love of God. And here's what happens. Knowing the love of God.
[00:15:19] The result is you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
[00:15:26] Oh, my.
[00:15:28] I don't even know how to start with this one. It's a technical term that Paul's using here, the pleroma.
[00:15:35] It's. The Gnostics would talk about how there was all these gods and had these emanations of God, and that was the pleroma.
[00:15:45] But Paul's saying, you're not being brought into this pagan Greek mystery religion. You're being brought into Christ. And the fullness of God is the love of Christ.
[00:16:00] So the Spirit is at work in you. Okay, so let's just set the table here.
[00:16:05] You, you're listening to me. You're a Christian, you're driving to church, you are called by God, and you're given a lot of difficult things to do.
[00:16:15] But at the top of that list of difficult things to do, the Lord Jesus says, it is on you. It is your job, your responsibility to comprehend my love, which surpasses knowledge.
[00:16:35] And to do that, I'm going to dwell in your heart.
[00:16:40] And to help you do that, I'm going to send you the Spirit and the power of the Spirit.
[00:16:50] And he prays. That's what he's praying for, for the Ephesians. And that's your homework now, to pray that for me. I'll pray it for you.
[00:16:57] That the Lord would send His Spirit, he'd dwell in our hearts so that we might begin to comprehend his incomprehensible knowledge and be filled with God's fullness.
[00:17:07] Let me read it to you, the whole text. I'll just read it without stopping if I can.
[00:17:13] For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit. In your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth.
[00:17:45] And to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
[00:17:53] Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Now, to him who is able to do far more abundantly than we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.
[00:18:09] Amen.
[00:18:11] Amen. Amen.
[00:18:14] It's great.
[00:18:16] Okay. The hymn of the day. I did a little work on this because the will of God is always best said. Who could write this, except for Gerhard. This is how he'd always talk. I mean, only an old theologian could write it. But it turns out that this hymn is written by Albrecht von Proussen, Albrecht of Prussia, who was the king of Prussia. He was like the king of the Teutonic order, that military Catholic order.
[00:18:42] He becomes Lutheran. This guy makes all of Prussia Lutheran, becomes a hero of the Reformation.
[00:18:51] And then his wife, who apparently he.
[00:18:56] He really loved Catherine. Or I looked it up. I bet there's some real great story here. She died and he wrote this hymn.
[00:19:06] It's so sturdy. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that the old theologians would say, and we're. I am slow to say, it's so bold, but here it is. The will of God is always best and shall be done forever. And they who trust in him are blessed. He'll forsake them never. He helps indeed, in time of need he chastens with forbearing. They who depend on God their friend, shall not be left despairing.
[00:19:31] The whole thing. I'll read to you the whole hymn. God is my comfort and my trust, My hope and life abiding.
[00:19:38] And to his counsel, wise and just, I yield in him, confiding the very hairs his word declares upon my head. He numbers by night and day. God is my stay. He never sleeps nor slumbers.
[00:19:52] Lord, this I ask. O, hear my plea, Deny me not this favor. When Satan sorely troubles me, then do not let me waver.
[00:20:00] O, guard me well, my fear dispel. Fulfill your faithful saying. All who believe by grace receive an answer to their praying.
[00:20:09] When life's brief course on earth is run and I this world am leaving, Grant me to say your will be done. Your faithful word believing.
[00:20:18] My dearest friend, I now commend my soul into your keeping from sin and hell and death as well by you. The victory reaping this confidence in the midst of suffering and sorrow. Wow, Albert. All right, all right. That's Sunday. Drive to church. We'll see you soon. God's peace be with you.