Rescue: Justified
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Titus 3:4-7
What is Justification?
Justification is one of those old Bible words and most of us read over, but only have a vague idea of what it means. The word comes from the Roman law courts and means the be declared not guilty, to be acquitted. If two people come before the court with a dispute, the one who the court agrees with is the one who is justified. This justification says nothing about the person’s character or morals, but that just in that specific case the court has sided with them.
Another closely related word in the New Testament is the word righteousness. Again, it is a standing in the law courts. The person’s case that prevails in court is said to be righteous in the case before the court.
As is often the case, words take on additional nuances when used by the biblical writers; especially because they are writing from a Hebrew perspective. To be just or righteous in a biblical sense is to be in right standing with God; to be a member in good standing in the covenant.
It is wonderful to know that when we place our trust in God and the work God did in and through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God declares us “not guilty” of all our past sins! We are freed from the burden and guilt of those behaviors and are acquitted. That is true freedom indeed.
But we are also placed in a new relationship with God and in that relationship, we have benefits and responsibilities. The benefits are numerous: forgiveness, continued grace and the presence of the Holy Spirit, to name just a few.
But we also have responsibilities, namely to live in a way that demonstrates our new relationship. Just before the verses I cited above, Paul tells Titus some of those responsibilities: we are to submit to the authorities over us, do good works, avoid quarrels and evil speaking, and be gracious toward everyone.
Why are we to do these things? He goes on to say that because we used to be different people with different motivation, God has done something very real in our lives and now everything has changed.
As we gather for worship this Sunday, let’s celebrate our justification, our rescue and determine to live as justified people.
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Alan Cassady serves as Senior Pastor at Navarre UMC, and has been at the church since 2011. When he's not preaching and teaching, he enjoys sci-fi movies and FSU Football. Read more about Alan here.
Rescue: Citizens
He brought this Good News of peace to you Gentiles who were far away from him, and peace to the Jews who were near. Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us.
So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family. Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord. Through him you Gentiles are also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by his Spirit.
Ephesians 2:17-22, NLT
Immigrants and Refugees
Something that's been on our minds a lot recently and in the news even more is refugees and immigrants. We talk about illegal immigrants, keeping them out or letting them in, legal immigrants and helping them stay in our country and then refugees and how much time is appropriate to spend making them wait to get to safety while vetting them.
Something that an immigrant and refugee has in common is they are a stranger and a foreigner in someone else's country. That's a feeling that most of us really don't appreciate. Sure, many of us have traveled to another country before, or gone on a cruise, but we've never had to leave our country because of poverty, our lives, or the safety of our families.
The Jews were Refugees
This was a feeling that the Jewish people knew well, and still know today. When I was in seminary, I took a course on other religions. In that course, we watched a series of videos that took us into a Hasidism Jewish community in Europe. What stroke me about one of the videos was a man who was a butcher. He was from a long line of butchers.
He said that his father told him (I'm paraphrasing), "We're butchers, because in the case that we become displaced again and have to leave this place, we will know that we will always be able to feed our families in the ways that God calls us according to our laws. It's not a glorious job, but it's honorable."
It struck me because it's been so long since the Jews were persecuted in a way that they had to leave their homes, yet they still carried this with them generation after generation. This is something that we, as American Christians, will never understand.
Equal in God's eyes
The first century Gentiles were often treated as second class Christians by the Jewish Christians, so Paul writes that we are all equal in God's eyes. This Sunday we will be looking more into the idea of what it means to be a Citizen of Heaven and be a part of God's family and household.
Blessings,
Faith
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Faith Parry serves as our Associate Pastor, and has been at the church since 2015. When she's not preaching and teaching, she enjoys documentaries and TV. Read more about Faith here.
What if God didn't create the world in 7 days?
Wait a minute - Hear me out.
At the risk of my reputation, your trust, potentially even my job (or future employers who do extensive internet searches and stumble upon this blog), I want to ask you what would you do if you suddenly learned that God didn’t create the world in seven 24 hour days? Would you leave the church? Would you give up on Christianity altogether? Would comets suddenly plummet to the earth and wipe out all creation?
Maybe I should back up and ask something smaller. How would you feel if I told you that Isaiah might have actually been written by three different people over decades? Most of you probably don’t care because, honestly, who’s taken the time to really read all 66 chapters of Isaiah carefully enough to tell the subtle differences that experts fight over. It’s just a fun fact that there’s an actual debate on whether it was written by one person or three, but it has very little impact on most of our faiths. But there might be some of you who can’t believe that it’s possible, that if God used three different people then we’d have three different books and God wouldn’t have allowed us to believe a lie for centuries. I had a pastor once say from the pulpit that if you believed that Isaiah wasn’t written by one person you might as well not believe the rest of the Bible either. The awkward part was this happened a week or two after I had talked to the youth about this subject.
So back to creation. What if God didn’t create everything in seven days? Some of you probably jumped to the conclusion that I meant that God didn’t create anything, that I’m just talking about random chance or evolution without a God. There are actually at least 5 theories for a God centered creation. The one where God created everything in seven 24 hour days is called young earth. This says that the earth is between 6,000-10,000 years old and they came up with this age by going through all the genealogies in the Bible. We also have the Old Earth theory where most of what science (the what and when) says is true, but the acting force (the who and the why) behind everything was, and is, God. They say vastly different things about creation and how we should interact with science.
In his best-selling book, Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell made the comparison of this situation to a brick tower and a trampoline. Trampoline springs can be taken off, looked at, flexed, and put back without causing the whole system to fall apart. But if you have a bricks stacked on top of bricks and pull one out, the whole thing can come crashing down. Me believing God created the entire universe in 168 hours or over the course of 4 billion years doesn’t change who God is. The fact that the Sun wasn’t really the thing that stopped moving in Joshua 10:13 doesn’t mean that the whole Bible is wrong. It means that the way that the author who wrote Joshua used terms and ideas that he understood to talk about what he saw God do. It doesn’t change who God is or what he did, only our understanding of what He did and who He is. If God didn’t create the world in seven days, he would still be God, he would still be the maker of heaven and earth, he would still be the hope and savior of the world.
Be blessed.
-Nathan
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here.
Rescue: Redeemed
Say therefore to the Israelites, ‘I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians.
Exodus 6:6–7
I will find you...
We love stories of redemption. Whether a Disney animated film or an action adventure like Taken, we love to see people make real changes or helpless people rescued. Redemption makes movies and books intriguing. It also fills us with the hope that we could be redeemed as well.
That is what the gospel is all about - redemption. And it all started with the Exodus, Some 400 years before that event God told Abraham,
Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions (Genesis 15:13–14).
In the book of Exodus, we read how God kept the promise he made to Abraham and brought the people out of slavery and made them his very own people. But the redemption did not end there.
The people God brought out had not existed as a nation for 400 years; they did not even know the God who redeemed them, except by way of stories they had heard about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For their redemption to be complete, they would have to know this God for themselves, see God’s power, know God’s care, and hear God’s voice.
God brought the people to Mt. Sinai to meet and experience God’s presence. They saw God in the thick darkness and lighting. The felt God in the earthquake. They heard God in the thunder and the words Moses gave them.
God had delivered them as an act of sheer grace – a promise kept. Now, they would demonstrate their gratefulness and love to God through worship and obedience. In those ways, they would become God’s people and Yahweh would be their God.
That is what redemption is all about. It is not only about being set free from something; it is about being set free for something, namely God. God redeemed us because of his great love for us. And, God redeemed us so we could cooperate with God in the redemption and rescue of the world.
Blessings!
-Alan
Alan Cassady serves as Senior Pastor at Navarre UMC, and has been at the church since 2011. When he's not preaching and teaching, he enjoys sci-fi movies and FSU Football. Read more about Alan here.
Being Holy Spirit People
““If you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive him, because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you. No, I will not abandon you as orphans—I will come to you. Soon the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Since I live, you also will live. When I am raised to life again, you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”
Aren't we Holy Spirit People?
I'm not sure when it happened, but I think the Methodists have drifted from being Holy Spirit people. Before you stop reading, give me 5 minutes to make my case. Years ago, the Methodists were driven in every decision by the Holy Spirit. They were known in worship as being charismatic. We identified ourselves as equally honoring all three persons of the Trinity.
But somewhere along the way, our culture shifted. We started focusing on praying only in the name of Jesus and stopped talking to our children about the Holy Spirit. We have even dumbed-down the process of salvation to the phrase "Ask Jesus into your Heart." We have told people that their sinful life is ok because we are all sinners.
No, don't get me wrong. God loves us where we are in this moment. That's the incredible thing about Grace. But what's even more incredible is that he doesn't leave us where we are. He doesn't want us to be sinners, saved, that still act like sinners. He wants change.
The only way we can change our life is through the power of the Holy Sprit. The Holy Spirit which dwells within us gives us the power to commune with God. The Holy Spirit gives us the power to overcome Satan's temptations. The Holy Spirit gives us the ability to love others with a holy love.
What about Jesus?
You might be wondering right now where Jesus comes into this? The reason I think we've left the Holy Spirit out so much is because we don't want to think about the complicated nature of the Trinity. Jesus made it possible for God's Spirit (the Holy Spirit) to dwell within us. In the Old Testament, the Sprit is seen as a cloud. Because of Jesus' death and resurrection, the Spirit now lives within us allowing us to commune directly with God. Jesus sits in heaven with the Father petitioning on our behalf.
There are some passages that make it sound that the Holy Spirit is Christ's Spirit, but according to our Trinitarian Theology, each person of the Trinity is unique and also God. That means, The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. Yet, all three are God. They act independently of each other and play their own roles.
How do we talk about it?
The first step to understanding the Holy Spirit is to not be afraid to talk about him (or her, whatever you prefer). You can ask the Holy Spirit to give you strength when you feel you are being temped. We should also talk about this with our children. Just because we adults have a hard time understanding the Trinity doesn't mean we should keep it from our kids. The sooner they start to hear about it, the sooner they will grasp it.
The Holy Spirit is the way God gives us power over sin in our life. We can use that power to live a holy life according to God's will. That's something children can understand.
Blessings,
Faith
Faith Parry serves as our Associate Pastor, and has been at the church since 2015. When she's not preaching and teaching, she enjoys documentaries and TV. Read more about Faith here.