Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost
GODSBREATH
Theme: The Bible is not “God was breathing” but “God IS breathing.”
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ!
Amen. In today’s Epistle, St. Paul tells you about this Bible that you read and
hear proclaimed in your midst: “All Scripture is breathed out by God,” he says.
Dear Christian friends,
“What is this Holy Bible that I see in your church and in your home?
How would you describe this book to me?” If asked such questions, many of our
fellow Christians in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod would happily answer,
“The Bible is the inspired, authoritative Word of God.” Perhaps if you yourself
were asked to describe what God’s Bible is, you also would use those same
words: inspired and authoritative.
You would not be wrong, of course. We dearly believe—we have built our
congregations and our families and our own lives upon the belief—that God’s
Bible is truly God’s; that the writers of our Old and New Testaments wrote by
divine inspiration “as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter
1:21); that the Bible is the sole authority by which we preach and teach as we
do; that “all Scripture is,” as you heard Paul say in today’s Epistle,
“breathed out by God.”
You are not wrong to say and believe that the Holy Bible is God’s
inspired and authoritative Word. You DO open yourself up to terrible temptation
and serious danger if inspiration and authority are the ONLY things you believe
concerning God’s Bible. Many of your fellow Christians in the Lutheran
Church-Missouri Synod have already fallen into that temptation and into that
danger, and today they live spiritually impoverished lives because of it! Who
knows? Perhaps my sons and your daughters being lured into the same direction.
Give them something more than the inspiration and the authority of God’s Holy
Bible!
Left by themselves, inspiration and authority might give you the
mistaken impression that God’s Bible is primarily a source of information for
you—authoritative information, to be sure; divinely inspired information,
absolutely—but information nonetheless. Think of the pitfalls and disasters
that await you when you think of God’s Bible primarily as your source of
information:
· You will conclude, as many of your fellow Christians have already
concluded, that you only need the information. Once you have learned your
information in Confirmation, there is no longer any need for worship or Bible
Study. You have the information that Jesus loves you and forgives you, so why
bother with anything else? This is why you can find many people all around you
who tell you they are Christian and say that they have Jesus in their heart,
but whose lives give no impression at all that they are part of “the holy
Christian church, the communion of saints.” Many people in hell have a thorough
grasp of the information in God’s Bible. Some of those people might even have
been on the membership roles of a Missouri Synod congregation when they died.
· If you think of God’s Bible as primarily information, you will begin to
think of worship as primarily an information seminar. But if God’s Bible is
primarily information, and if you hear basically the same information each week
as you pray the liturgy, worship will become drudgery to you. Worship will
visiting an Alzheimer’s patient with whom you repeatedly have the same
conversation. You will begin to think, “We all know we need to be here in order
to get our information from God, but can’t we get it in a less repetitive way?
Can’t we make worship more interesting?”
· If you think of God’s Bible as primarily information, you will very
likely underestimate the seriousness of your sin and of the death that is
lurking inside of you. What would you think of the doctor who tells you that
you will be cured of your headaches if you read about migraine medication? A
migraine cannot be cured with information. You need a pill, a drug, a medicine
to cure your migraine for you. In the same way, the disease of your sin will
not be treated and cured by the mere information—the authority and the
inspiration—of God’s Word. If the disease of your sin is to be treated and
overcome, God’s Word (the Bible) must be a medication, a power, a force, a
miracle that acts upon you. Stated another way, if your sin is to be rightly
treated you must take the pill, and not read just information about the pill.
To what can we compare the inspiration and authority of God’s Bible?
The inspiration and authority of God’s Bible are like two people sitting
together in the back of a taxi. They may be reputable, handsome and
hardworking. No matter how good those two people are as they sit together in
the back of the taxi, they will go nowhere unless the cabbie gets in and drives
his taxicab.
In the same way, the inspiration and authority of God’s Bible are good
and faithful teachings that we must hold and believe and confess. By
themselves, inspiration and authority go nowhere. They need a cabbie, and the
cabbie is the POWER of God’s Word.
“What is this Holy Bible that I see in your church and in your home?
How would you describe this book to me?”
· You would not be wrong if you answered such questions by saying that
the Bible is the inspired and authoritative Word of God. But maybe those would
not be the best terms for you to use as your “lead card,” so to speak, or your
first answer. The words inspired and authorititative will likely lead you to a
conversation about information.
· Rather than starting with the words “inspired” or “authoritative,”
point to today’s Epistle and tell people that the Bible is God’s breath upon
you. “All Scripture is breathed out by God,” Paul says.
o Tell people that God’s Bible is not merely “God was breathing upon His
apostles and prophets of Old,” but the Bible is “God IS breathing upon you and
me and everyone who hears and reads these Words.”
o Tell people that, when the God’s Bible pass into their eyes or into
their ears, a miracle inevitably takes place. The deaf begin hearing (Isaiah
35:5); the blind begin seeing (Psalm 19:18); debtors get released from
unimaginably enormous debts (Matthew 18:27); poor people get fed (Matthew 5:6);
weak knees get strengthened (Hebrews 12:12); weariness is given rest (Isaiah
50:4, Matthew 11:28); prisoners are set free (Luke 4:18).
o At every reading and every hearing of the Words of His Bible, God is
breathing life into you and into your loved ones in a manner very much like the
way He first breathed life into Adam our first father. “Then the LORD God…
breathed into [the man’s] nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a
living creature” (Genesis 2:7). Every letter on every page nothing less than a
whiff of life-giving air that you breathe in while your God exhales forgiveness
and life for you.
Think of the comforts and the joys that await you when you think of
God’s Bible, not primarily as your source of authority or information, but as
God’s exhaling of the very air you breathe for eternal life:
· The information becomes medication, and it becomes impossible for any
of God’s Words in His Bible to become “old hat” for you. God’s Bible becomes
less about what you able to learn and more about what you hear right then and
there.
· When you believe God’s Bible is His here-and-now exhaling of life for
you, worship stops being your obligation and it becomes your desire.
o If your daily reading of God’s Bible, either individually or with your
family, can be compared to a pill that soothes your headaches, then Sunday
worship is nothing less than a full-relaxation treatment in a health spa.
o If your daily reading of God’s Bible can be compared to a puff of air
breathed into your lungs, then the liturgy you pray here with your fellow
Christians is the full oxygen mask.
· “All Scripture is breathed out by God.” When you believe God’s Bible
is God breathing upon you, as Paul says in today’s Epistle, your place in this
congregation becomes more than a matter seeing your name written on a
membership role and more than a matter of thinking that the pastor will be
obliged to bury you when you die. When you believe God’s Bible is God breathing
upon you, you become a living part of a living body which finds its life solely
in the LORD God, Who “breathed into [the man’s] nostrils the breath of life,
and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7).
___________________________________________________________________
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