# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_2016_S92
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

who names us at the font: as a child of God who is
named by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When I
was a young man, my mother would always say to me
as I went off with my friends, “Don’t forget who you
belong to!” She did not mean herself and my father.
She meant my heavenly Father. When we know who
our God is, then we know who we are. What joy there
is in that knowledge, a knowledge delivered to us by
the Word of God!
III
The joyous fellowship that we have with God through
the Word of His chosen apostles is a matter for wonderment! He seeks fellowship with sinners like us! I
had the joy of sharing our holy faith with a Kurdish
man who was suspicious of Islam and had questions
about Christianity. He asked good questions about the
faith of Christ. I had such joy to say that Jesus is our
way to the Father. “Christianity is not a path, at least
not in the way in which a road map charts a path. No,
Christianity’s way is a person: Christ Himself. Christianity is not a way of living. No, it is a life that is Christ’s
own life. He is your life, and you are hidden in Him,

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U P O N T H I S R O C K • Sermon

as St. Paul says (Col. 3:4). Christianity is not a truth.
No, it is the truth in the flesh of God’s own Son.” This
Kurdish man heard these words with tears in his eyes.
He said wonderingly, “Is this your God?” What joy we
share with those who hear of Christ’s enfleshment of
Mary and His suffering and death for the sins of the
world! Jesus finds His joy in us that He might be our
joy. His joy is not mere feeling or experience. His very
joy is made complete only in His suffering and death
because it is the joy He has in another. This is the joy
He has in us, whom He has redeemed.
IV
We have joy in Him even when death takes one of
our loved ones. When his daughter Magdalena died,
Martin Luther said, “I am joyful in spirit but I am sad
according to the flesh. The flesh doesn’t take kindly
to this. . . . She is surely at peace and she is well off
there, very well off, and yet to grieve so much!” (AE
54:432). Our blessed dead are very well off indeed in
the full fellowship of the Church in heaven. They have
fullness of joy. In that sharing, our joy is made complete because we have joy in Jesus.

“Joy in Jesus”