LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1992, Page 81

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LIFELIGHT BIBLE STUDY 81

of digits. For the ancients, however, something of the per-
son himself or herself was involved when you used his or
her name. We've got the backwash of that yet, praying
always in the name of Jesus. That’s more than sounding
brass or tinkling symbol, more than poetry, not just polite
and pious talk. When we pray in the name of Jesus we
pray in the framework of all that that name stands for,
forgiveness and adoption and a Father who loves'us and
- because He loves us He listens. “In the name of Jesus,”
Peter says.
And Matthew editorializes: “Jesus, for He shall save His
people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). Benjamin Franklin
insists that “God helps those who help themselves.” We
cannot sit around waiting for God to do for us what He
expects us to do for ourselves. Benjamin Franklin is right,
though it is worth the mention that his sentence doesn’t
cover every category. God does not invariably, inevitably,
and in every case help those who help themselves, partic-
ularly when they are helping themselves to something that
does not belong to them. Then, too, God’s help takes on its
own shape and employs its own vehicles. Actually those
early Christians were gradually becoming aware of an op-
posite truth, far greater: God helps those who cannot help
themselves. That truth is very close to the heart of the
Christian religion and you simply cannot fathom what
Christianity is all about unless you are aware that Ged
sent His Son into this world to help us most at that point
where we can help ourselves least.
“Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins.”
That is the message in the name Jesus, that through Him
we are delivered from our sins, something it is beyond us
to accomplish for ourselves. The trouble is, we are not ace
customed to worrying a great deal about our ains. This
news doesn’t seem half so good to us as it did to that angel
choir that kept singing about it over the plains of Beth-
lehem or Simon Peter who insisted on referring to it in the
middle of this miracle on a poor cripple in the temple gate
call “Beautiful.”
Imagine that you are lying in a hospital waiting to die.
You've been told you suffer from an incurable disease, ter-
minal, fatal. You are disconsolate, counting the hours. Sud-
denly your doctor bursts through the door and announces,
“We have just found a cure for what ails you.” That would
be good news, wouldn’t it, the kind that puts you on the
phone with relatives and brings tears to your eyes? Or
suppose you're drifting on a piece of flotsam in an angry
sea, too long unfound by searchers, on the brink of giving
up and letting go. Suddenly there is a light, aship, a rescue.
That light, that ship, they are good news, worth working
up an angel choir to sing about, woudn’t you say? The
doctor who finds the cure, the captain who pulls his ship
up alongside, these are saviors. They do for you what you
cannot do for yourself. “Jesus, for He shall save His people
from their sins”; He does for you what you cannot do for
yourself.
But now suppose you are not feeling ill, never felt better,
could lick the whole Chinese army and the Dallas Cowboys
with one hand tied behind your back. Now the doctor comes
to tell you they have found a cure for a dreadful disease,
“You put your arm around his shoulder and tell him, “Doc-

tor, you are a fine and caring gentleman. I love your en-
. 1
1
'

thusiasm. At the moment I am feeling fine. But I want you
to know that if ever I feel poorly, I'll certainly drop by or
give you a ring.” Instead of clinging by your fingertips to
floating flotsam on an open sea, you're lolling at the pool-
side of a luxury hotel in the Bahamas. You don’t care where
a captain steers his ship or points his light into the night.
You see, it’s a question of whether you need a Savior or if,
perhaps, you can handle things yourself. And the answer
to that question depends on whether or not you take sin
seriously.

_ The Bible, about which there has been considerable con-
Versation in our church over the years, of which we stoutly
claim every three years in meeting duly assembled that it
is the last and final word on things spiritual and a lot of
other things as well, the Bible takes sin seriously. You
malign a brother or a sister, you are disrespectful of au- -
thority, you run down someone's reputation, you minimize
his effectiveness, for that matter you take a dollar and a
quarter from the schoo! milk fund, these are sins. You’re
not supposed to take them lightly. Moreover Jesus has
turned the idea of sin inward making it a matter of the
heart and of the mind so that you can sin leaning on the
fender of your car cleaning your fingernails, resenting
someone's station in life, envying his good fortune, or fail-
ing to defend him or to put the best construction on ev-
erything. The Bible takes that seriously.

Let me try to tell you why. I hold in my hand a drinking
cup, a cup like any other cup, five and dime. I drop it and
it breaks. That’s of no great consequence. But if the cup I
hold is a matchless piece of china, perfect in texture, trans-
lucent i in luster, the work of a master, irreplaceable, and
I ‘drop it, it makes you want to cry. Human souls are not

* manufactured by Du Pont or marketed by Woolworth. If

God took a casual attitude over against what he has made,
regarded it as cheap, the image in which He made it, then -
it wouldn’t matter much when you and I shatter that im-
age. But if we were made perfect in texture, translucent

” in luster, the work of a master, irreplaceable, then it makes

you want to cry to think what we have done to that.

And it makes you want to sing to think “Jesus... for
He shall save His people from their sins.” He does for us
what we cannot do for ourselves.

St. Paul, in the letter he wrote to the people in Philippi,
insiats that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

. and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
We would add with Peter, “In the name of Jesus... walk.”
“let us ever walk with Jesus.”
i

| Bible Study 3

Argument for Merey
thets 3:17)

' «Now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance”
(Acts 3:17). Sound familiar? Peter, like the others, didn’t
cut much of a figure in the events that make up the Friday
which we call Good, and I suppose he lived to the end of
his life with the shame ‘of his cowardice on that day when
Christ was crucified. For all of that he must have elbowed
his way, albeit anonymously, to the edges of that Golgotha
crowd, close enough at least to have overheard Christ’s
first words from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they