NURTURING YOUR FAITH: PART FOUR Made to Praise

We are God’s offspring (see Acts 17:29). No historian can track definitively the derivation of the nickname for people from Indiana, namely, Hoosiers. One fable is that the name comes from the rural practice of attempting to determine one’s family association with the question: “Who’s yer daddy?”

“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). And that good news gives us reason to say: I am a child of God, reconciled to rejoice and made to praise.

Introduction

God, the Divine Being, the Father of all creation, has uniquely imprinted on human beings His very nature. We are signed with the nature of God, or more playfully, we are given His “sign-nature.” Though ruined by sin, all people yet possess the promise of the image of God. This includes an inborn knowledge of what’s right and what’s wrong. Even non-believers have a sense of morality or a conscience which appropriately accuses or excuses them and us from our sin (see Romans 2:14-15). Though this image within us is clouded and corrupted by sin, and only restored by Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, all people possess a sense of some divine destiny. They are “meant for more.” (To learn more, check out Dr. Nunes’ book, Meant for More: In, With, and Under the Ordinary.) Meant to be in the community called the church, we are certainly meant to be more than the broken reflections of the image of God that we are. God has placed eternity into human hearts (see Ecclesiastes 3:11). This sense of eternity, however, too often gets misapplied or misdirected. As Martin Luther suggests, everyone has some sort of God, because a god is “anything on which your heart relies and depends” (Large Catechism, First Commandment, p. 4).

Reflect

• What assurances do you have knowing that you are a child of God?

• Think of seeing Jesus face to face. What might the very fact that you can imagine this mean about your connection to God by faith?

Progression

Read Romans 5:1-11.

St. Paul is a master of the rhetorical and the logical use of “progression.” He uses this technique to lead the reader to spiritual truths which, if separated from one another, would be difficult to digest. For example, Paul suggests that “we rejoice in our sufferings” (verse 3). At face value, this seems counterintuitive. But wait! People of faith have a deeper recognition “that suffering produces character,” and not only that, “character produces hope.” But there’s more, “hope does not put us to shame,” and here’s why, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (verses 3-5). Upon considering that sequence, exuberant doxology makes sense. Since God is working out His divine plan, even in our nightmarish pain, even through our shadowy valleys of death, even in our dying and our crying, through tears and fears, we offer God our highest alleluias.

A similar move is executed by Paul a few verses later. Even in the heart of our worst antagonism toward God, we are “reconciled to God by the death of His Son” (verse 10). Here’s that same verb again that makes us otherwise (katallage) than we are: enemies made friends of God by God’s initiating grace. Wait, there’s more: “much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life” (verse 10). Christ is risen and we, too, shall rise to life.

A deceased friend, theologian, and Christian leader, Jack Preus put it like this (I enjoy thinking that what he wrote about faintly by faith in this life is something he now vividly sees, something breathtakingly beyond description): “At best, our lives in this present age are only a faint image of the life to come. … ‘Where, O death, is your victory?’” (1 Corinthians 15:55a). Life has overcome death. Therefore, death is no longer the doorway into the unknown, much less into nothing. Rather, death is our portal into life, life eternal with Christ in heavenly bliss and happiness in the presence of Him who is life” (Just Words, p. 54).

The sequence moves us from death to life, from enmity to reconciliation, from outside exclusion to inside inclusion, from being God-haters to being made friends of God (amicus Dei). This is because Jesus loved us to death and was raised to life to overcome the deaths we must die. Again, counterintuitive. But the momentum of that reconciliatory sequence impels us (see 2 Corinthians 5:14). “More than that, we also rejoice in God” (Romans 5:11a).

The progression continues from justification to sanctification, which is the terrain of rejoicing. Our praise of God flows from what the Spirit has poured into our hearts. We move from death and resurrection to the power of Pentecost and continued on next page … the rebirth of the Spirit. Martin Luther once complained that some Christians cannot move beyond the cycle of Good Friday and Easter to Pentecost.

“They may be fine Easter preachers, but they are very poor Pentecost preachers. … Christ did not earn only gratia, ‘grace’ for us, but also donum, ‘the gift of the Holy Spirit,’ so that we might have not only forgiveness of, but also cessation of, sin” (Luther’s Works, 41:114). Even our new life in the resurrected Christ comes to us as a pure gift of God.

Reflect

• What kind of person am I? Consider a reason to rejoice related to the following:

» The First Article of the Creed (I am a person God made.)

» The Second Article of the Creed (I am a sinner saved by God in Jesus Christ.)

» The Third Article of the Creed (I am a saint filled with the Holy Spirit.)

Blend Some Ideas

Because “God has made me and … given me my body and soul, eyes, ears and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still preserves them, and because God has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil” (Small Catechism, Second Article, p. 355). Therefore,

• I am a person who “prays, praises, and gives thanks” (Small Catechism, Second Commandment, p. 344).

• I will “make a joyful noise to the Lord” (Psalm 100:1a).

• I am a person in whom the Spirit has stirred Himself, and I overflow in praise with “heartfelt trust in God” (Large Catechism, First Commandment, p. 47).

Part of this eternal praise and everlasting happiness includes, as Preus puts it, “rejoicing in God’s diversity.”

And not only does God make us, He remakes us for new life in each day. Sometimes we can be overwhelmed by the social trends, the culture wars, the endless cycle of scandal-mongering and editorializing and opinionating that poses as news. Even though these feel like the most dismally “gray and latter days,” the hymnwriter reminds us that hope is not done; our identity is founded on solid ground; we are called to rejoice as those “whose life is praise” (Lutheran Service Book, 834).

“This is the day that the LORD has made; let us

Reflect

rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24). The verbs which describe what God has made offer at least two Hebrew ways to think about “making.” The first, found in Genesis, describes God making everything out of nothing. The second—found here in Psalm 118—describes God making something more out of something that already exists. The first is creatively fresh. The second is as fresh but with reconciliatory power. The first gets life going; the second gets life back on track. The first describes God making what we call day; the second describes God taking that day that already exists and making something special of it. Therefore, every day is packed with potential. Every moment is loaded with promise. Every age and stage of life can be filled with praise—not because things are perfectly good, but because the goodness of God remakes our lives with courage to face every new day as new creations in Christ. Every relationship can be recreated. We don’t give up on anybody! No one too far down, not to be lifted up. No one too far lost, not to be found. No one too far out, not to be brought in. God persistently, consistently, insistently sends us grace. “There was never a time when God was not creating” (Philo of Alexander). As Luther puts it in the Small Catechism: “I believe that God has created me together with all that exists” (First Article, p. 2).

• Consider the two Hebrew ways to think about “making.” How does that change your perspective on a familiar verse like Psalm 118:24?

• In what ways does “making something out of what already exists” help us look at our relationships differently?

Welcome Home

Watch the video at lhm.org/studies from Rev. Dr. John Nunes on this topic and then come back here to finish the study below.

REFLECT

• Read Psalm 148 again. How does beauty in worship, in architecture, or in church artwork shape our identity?

• How does it draw us to the One who is the Source of all beauty?

Conclusion

God made humans to be the crown of creation, as bearers of the divine identity. Humankind rebelled, fell away from God, and has become enemies of God and His holy will. Through Word and Sacraments, the Holy Spirit breaks us out of sin’s bondage by joining us by faith to the death and the resurrection of Christ Jesus. We have a new identity. We have a new hope. We have a real reason to rejoice. Even in our sufferings, we give thanks and praise to the Triune God (see Romans 5:3). When children of God raise their praise to their Father, it is like an hors d’oeuvres, an appetizing foretaste of the feast of victory. God has redemptively re-defined our identity not only for this life—albeit short and sometimes brutal—but for a glorious eternity. We are made to praise God.

Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the universe; You are the Source of all that is good, true, and beautiful.

Amidst the uncertainty of life, You fill our hearts with faith, our minds with peace, and our days with blessings innumerable. We praise You for Your greatness, Your kindness, Your acceptance of us. Please receive the works of our hands offered to Your honor and glory. In Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.