Ask A Pastor: December 2024

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Let's pray. Lord Jesus, again, as we open up your word, we ask you, Holy Spirit, to help us to rightly understand what is revealed there so that we may properly believe, confess, and do.

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We ask in Jesus' name, amen. All right, so this is going to be, we're gonna start off by providing a theological correction.

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Okay, last time, a question arose regarding does Christ have two wills?

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And unbeknownst to me, this was a debate in the seventh century, and I was not aware of this.

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Unfortunately, I was probably sleeping or something during my seminary class on this particular council, and so I very, yeah, right, during the debate,

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I was definitely asleep, but thankfully, one of our online members was aware of this and sent this information along.

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So this is gonna be a nice, wonderful theological corrective and I would note that when this debate first arose, historically, the pope got it wrong, just like your pastor.

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So I have something in common with popes, and that is I'm not infallible. Papal infallibility is demonstrably false.

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But here's just the summary of what was sent to me. At the Sixth Ecumenical Council, Constantinople, 780 to 781

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A .D., the issues of one will, otherwise known as monotheletism, and two wills, diotheletism, in Christ was addressed.

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The debate had been ongoing for several decades, and that makes sense to me, because in order to create a doctrine, you need clear passages, and on this one, it's just not as clear as you would like it to be.

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So the fact that there was a debate that went on that raged for several decades is kind of important. Decades triggered in part by a letter from Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople to Pope Honorius requesting guidance on the issue.

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Both Sergius and Honorius agreed that Christ has only one will. This caused an uproar in the

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Eastern Empire among the Orthodox theologians. They reiterated that since Christ is fully

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God and fully man, see the Chalcedonian definition, the Athanasian Creed, and the formula of Concord, the person of Christ in particular, paragraph eight, he must have two wills.

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If he does not have a human will, then he cannot be fully human, and our salvation is at risk.

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And I actually agree with this. This makes sense, okay? Hence the old Christological adage, that which is not assumed is not redeemed, and that the wills are not against one another.

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There is no internal conflict between them in Christ. The human will willingly submits to the divine will.

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And I think your clearest passage, if you were to quote one here, would be Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

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You know, let this cup pass from me. Yet not my will, but your will be done. I think that's probably where you're gonna have to focus, and that's gonna be the limit of your focus, but I willingly and wholeheartedly and humbly submit to the

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Sixth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in the seventh century on this one, and I think that there's some wisdom in what they said.

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And glad to know that myself, as well as popes, can err. Yeah, I have to get that edge in there.

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So all right, the next question, and this one is,

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I'm gonna say this is hard to read, but my heart goes out to whoever wrote this.

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Anonymous wrote, how should a Christian factor in things like pervasive pathological demand avoidance, otherwise known as PDA, executive dysfunction, autistic inertia, et cetera?

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Those are comorbidities of autism, and a lot of us autistic people have one or all of these, together with ADHD as well.

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It makes it impossible, or nearly so at times, to do simple tasks like taking out the garbage or doing the dishes.

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If we are autistic Christians, we pray, we ask for strength, energy, and drive to do what we need to do.

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We ask for help, but it still can feel like we aren't praying hard enough, or that we are trying to shirk our responsibility by blaming autism and those comorbidities for being lazy.

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We read one thing in the Bible when we read the Bible at all, because it seems like PDA likes to butt in on this as well, and our bodies and our brains seem to be rebelling against all we read and know to be true.

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So, how can we reconcile these comorbidities of autism with being a

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Christian in our Christian lives, when those dysfunctions seem to be an outright rebellion against the

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Lord's will? It's a great question, isn't it? So I'm gonna give the answer to the question this way.

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I think the person who is autistic and is on the spectrum and recognizes that there are names associated with these things actually has far more grace than the person who isn't autistic, because everything being described here is exactly what it means to have a sinful nature.

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The reality is this, is that I've never been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, nor have

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I ever been diagnosed with ADHD, but that doesn't change the fact that I struggle with the exact same things that this anonymous question asker struggles with.

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It's just that they have a clinical name for some of these disorders and some of the ways these things focus.

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So let's take a look, biblically, at how we would address such a thing. And this is why,

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I'm gonna be blunt, this is why I think the Nazarene church is very dangerous.

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When I was a Nazarene, in the

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Nazarene handbook that we had at the time, and so this is going way back into the 80s, there's a whole section in there that claims that Romans chapter seven is not the

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Apostle Paul describing himself as a Christian in the present tense, despite the fact that the verbs here are written in the present tense, but that this is a description of the

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Apostle Paul prior to his conversion to Christ. And I remember having this drilled into my head, and as a result of it,

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I never was able to understand the comfort that this passage offers to us, because I gotta tell you,

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I have a sinful nature, so do you, and the whole experience of being a

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Christian is awful in this regard. It feels like I am at war with myself.

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It legitimately feels like I'm at war with myself. And let me give you the short version of it before we do the long version, because I really want to give a pastoral kind of emphasis here.

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Hang on a second here, I might have to go to chapter five. So here's

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Paul's shorter version of this. Paul says in Galatians five, walk by the

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Spirit. Now, what does that mean? It means to walk by the power of the

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Holy Spirit. It is not a small matter that we have been given the

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Holy Spirit in the waters of baptism. It's a big deal. And when you read the church fathers on this, especially

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Augustine, Augustine's work called On the Letter in the Spirit I think is so helpful in this regard, because to walk in the

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Spirit is to humbly, daily pray, and to humbly, daily pray,

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Lord, to not lead me into sin, to deliver me from the evil one. Let your holy angel be with me that the wicked foe may have no power over me.

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These prayers sound familiar. So it says walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

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For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit. The desires of the Spirit are against the flesh.

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These are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things that you want to do. Yeah, is that not exactly what it feels like to be a

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Christian? I want to read God's word. No, I want to watch baseball. I want to pray.

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I want to help out at church. No, I want to go hunting. I want to sleep in.

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I don't want to support the church financially. I want something else, right?

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You get the idea. There's 10 ,000 different ways in which this manifests in our lives. And Paul is not talking about ADHD, nor is he talking about being on the autism spectrum.

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He's not talking about any of that. So he says this, what shall we say? We're in Romans 7, that the law is sin.

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It's really easy to get very annoyed with God's law because, let me give you an analogy.

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Have you all ever seen video of now what's called the

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King's Guard, but it used to be the Queen's Guard at Buckingham Palace? People would go to Buckingham Palace and there you have the military guys set up and they wear that weird black hat.

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There was a funny episode of I Love Lucy where she was trying to get that guy to crack a smile or whatever, right?

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But there's videos, there's whole videos on social media from that group that they post on social media of people coming up and trying to talk to these guys or touching the horse that the guy's on.

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You're not supposed to do any of that. And all these guys ever do is one, either nothing, just continue to look stern and austere, or you do something really wrong and they will yell in your face, right?

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None of these guys that I've ever seen that do this job, none of them ever look like anybody

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I would like to invite out to a pub in London and just chat and have a few beers with them, okay?

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I'd rather watch Mudbubble, you know? That doesn't seem like that. You have to kind of think of God's in those terms.

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God's law is that way. It's that austere, it's that serious. It never cracks a smile.

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It is always, always sitting there going, you messed up there, obey, you're a sinner, right?

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This is how the law acts. That's its job, okay?

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In no way ever is the law ever to supply you with any comfort or assurance of your salvation, period.

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Its job is to condemn and it does it very well, right? So Paul asks the question, so what shall we say?

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That the law is sin? No, by no means. If it had not been for the law,

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I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, you shall not covet.

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But sin, and watch how he's describing it here. Sin is being described here as a condition.

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So many people get this wrong in the church. They think that sin is something you do.

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That's the result of the condition of sin. You sin because you are a sinner.

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We think we are sinners because we sin. It's backwards, okay?

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So clearly I'm still semi -symptomatic regarding a head cold that I've been struggling with for five days now, right?

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That being the case, the symptoms of my head cold, nasal decongestion and headache and all this kind of stuff, those are the symptoms of the condition.

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The individual sins that you commit are the symptoms of the condition known as sin.

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You've tested positive for it, every single one of you. And here's the worst bit.

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It's fatal and it's eternally fatal. This is how serious the condition is.

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You will not survive. The wages of sin is death, okay? So watch how he's describing this.

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Sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

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So God's law then, hang on a second here, I wanna see something here. God's law, when it screams at us, you shall not covet, our sinful nature responds and goes, hmm, coveting sounds like a good idea.

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It is not a coincidence that in the most legalistic churches, that the thing that their legalistic pastors rail against the hardest from the pulpit, that's always going to be the thing they're struggling with.

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Okay, y 'all remember that fellow? What was his name? He was a

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Pentecostal preacher. And he was one of those hellfire morality preachers. And he was always railing against the sex trade and prostitution and all this kind of stuff.

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Jimmy Swagger. And as soon as he got off work, he'd get in his car and go trolling for hookers, right?

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And then he got caught in a police sting or something like that. This is how this works.

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You want to make a whole bunch of people into hypocrites? And I mean, gross hypocrites.

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Just preach the law with no gospel. Just preach straight up, 200 proof, ever clear law, okay?

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It'll burn going down, it'll burn coming out, it's gonna burn you all the different ways, right?

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Sorry, I may or may not know that from experience, okay? But the point is, is that you're gonna make hypocrites of every single one of those people.

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Without gospel, the law legitimately excites our sinful nature, okay?

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I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said you shall not covet. Sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

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For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I once was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.

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The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, again, the condition, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.

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So the law, it is holy. The commandment is holy.

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It is righteous and good. The problem is not God's law. The problem is me. The problem is you. So did that which is good then bring death to me?

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Well, by no means. It was sin producing death in me through what is good in order that sin might be shown to be sin and through the commandment might become sinful beyond all measure.

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Now here's the part that a lot of people are uncomfortable with, but this gets to the heart of the question regarding autism, okay?

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The person who's on the spectrum has really good awareness of how this process works within them, okay?

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So this person who asked me the question, these things come up and then I can see these symptoms of my

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ADHD and my autism, all rebelling against the good things that I know

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I'm supposed to do. Note they're almost describing themselves as two different people. Right?

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So how did this happen? It was sin producing death in me through what is good in order that sin might be shown to be sin.

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So the person who is aware of this sits there and goes, I'm in trouble because I hear

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God's holy law. My sinful nature goes nuts and now

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I'm worse off, not better than I was before. And the sin just gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, okay?

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You want your sin to get out of control, just listen to the law. And here's what's gonna happen. Under law preaching, nobody is ever allowed to confess their sins.

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You spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and money creating a holiness facade.

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And it's like, it's not even fiber board, okay? It's not even made of anything substantive.

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I mean, a good rainstorm will just tear this whole thing down, right? But that's what happens, right?

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But the idea here is that God's law is designed to make you feel, and this is the part of it, that you are completely wretched, that you are sinful beyond measure.

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I don't have a little bit of a sin problem. I'm not barely a sinner and neither are you, okay?

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I am sinful beyond measure and so are you, and that's the point. When you get to the point where you,

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I kind of existentially figured this out, you are gonna completely despair of any effort whatsoever on your part to save yourself because that ain't gonna happen, okay?

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Move over Adolf Hitler, I'm on the scene. That's how it feels, okay?

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For we know that the law is spiritual, but I'm of the flesh, I'm sold under sin, and then all of this in present tense.

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I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want. I do the very thing

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I hate. Now, if I do not do what I want, I agree with the law that it's good, so now it is no longer

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I who do it, but here's this, it is no longer I who do it, it's sin that dwells within me. So when you come back to the question, okay, we read one thing in the

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Bible, and our bodies and our brains seem to be rebelling against all we read and know to be true.

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That's not an autism thing, that's a Christian thing. The Apostle Paul, long before anybody was ever diagnosed with autism, this was his description of the

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Christian life. So note this, you're in great company.

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You're in the company of the Apostle Paul and Peter and everybody here at Kongsvinger, okay?

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So I know it is no longer I who do it, it's sin that dwells in me. I know that nothing good dwells in me, and that's the point of the law.

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If you still think that there's something good in you, that there's some diamond that you just need to dig out and polish up that you can offer to God, you are deluded.

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There is nothing good that dwells in you that is in your flesh. The Holy Spirit obviously is the exception, but that's kind of the point that he's making.

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So I have the desire to do what's right, and why? Because we've been regenerated. We are new creations in Christ.

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I have the desire to do what's right, I don't have the ability to carry it out. I do not do what the good

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I want. The evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Does this not sound like the daily grind of being a

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Christian? Now, if I do what I do not want, again, watch what he says, it is no longer

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I who do it, but it's sin that dwells within me. It's the condition itself that's the problem.

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So I find it to be a law that when I wanna do right, evil lies close at hand.

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For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law, waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

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Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Y 'all know the answer to that question, right?

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It's Christ, and that's the point. So, one of the things

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I've seen in my lifetime is people who struggle with PTSD.

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Or the complex versions of it. In the complex versions of PTSD, you can legitimately have like an alternate personality.

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And it's very common when people have that severe form of PTSD, and they switch personalities.

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It's like watching, flipping off a switch, and them going from being one person to being another person.

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That you give a different name altogether to the person that shows up when that person is dysregulated and having a

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PTSD episode. Completely different person, you get a different name, okay? It is similar to that.

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And the idea then is that this sinful flesh of yours, this alternate personality that you were before Christ made you alive in Him, that's still breathing, that you daily have to struggle against, that thing is going into the ground, and it will not rise again.

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When we all rise at the resurrection, we will rise with sinless bodies, with sinless wills, and we will always do nothing except for good.

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There will be no desires for evil. There will be no slack prayers.

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And there was another thing in here when they said, I feel like we aren't praying hard enough.

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None of us do. How does one define the standard enough?

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Do I pray enough? No, I don't. Do I pray hard enough?

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No, I don't. Do I pray long enough? No, I don't. Do I pray as, just put anything you want in there.

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I am not holy enough. I am not smart enough. I don't pray enough. I'm not pious enough.

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I don't read my Bible enough. And neither do you.

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That's the point of having a sinful nature, is the law makes you realize that you are sinful beyond measure and there's only one hope.

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Who will deliver me from this body of death? I know a guy. I know a guy. I preached about him this morning, and I'm not talking about the

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Dodgers, right? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So now I myself,

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I serve the law of God with my mind. With my flesh, I serve the law of sin. And in chapter eight, he goes into greater detail than walking by the power of the

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Spirit. It is only through the Holy Spirit that we're able to have the fruit produced in us called the fruit of the

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Spirit. You can't produce that in yourself. God, the Holy Spirit has to produce it, which means you humbly, daily, literally get up and you go,

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God, I don't have what it takes, but I want to do good today.

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And I can also say, I don't want to do good today. Please give me the strength to do good today.

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And then at the end of the day, you pray, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

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And you'll note here that Lutherans do not offer you five or three or two easy steps on how you can become less sinful this week.

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Because as soon as the preaching here goes that direction, y 'all are heading for the weeds, right?

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So what do we do? We start off every Sunday the same way. I confess that I am by nature sinful and unclean.

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I've sinned against you in thought, word, and deed by what I've done and by what I've left undone. I've not loved you with my whole heart, not loved my neighbor as myself, right?

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In this regard, let me show you an even more potent confession of sins, one that legitimately tears me up like every time

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I hear it. And it's the confession of sins that goes along with individual confession and absolution.

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Individual confession and absolution begins with these words. Pastor, please hear my confession. Pronounce forgiveness in order to fulfill

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God's will. And here's this one, listen to this. I, a poor sinner,

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I plead guilty before God of all sins. I have lived as if God did not matter and as if I mattered most.

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My Lord's name I have not honored as I should. My worship and my prayers have faltered.

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I have not let His love have its way with me and so my love for others has failed.

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There are those whom I've hurt, those whom I've failed to help, and my thoughts and my desires have been soiled with sin.

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This was not written by somebody who is autistic. This is a confession that every

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Christian can confess, right? And what I love about individual confession and absolution is this, is this confession is damning.

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It's absolutely damning. Guilty before God of all sins, lived as if God didn't matter, as if I mattered the most.

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I haven't honored God's name. My worship and prayers have faltered. I've not let God's way and love have

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His way with me. My love for others, I've failed. I've hurt people, I've failed to help them.

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My thoughts and desires are soiled with sin. That's, what this should end with, what this should end with is the pastor saying, well, sit quietly and wait for Jesus to show up because you are in deep trouble now, but it doesn't.

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It ends with words like this. May God be merciful to you and strengthen your faith.

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Do you believe that the forgiveness I speak is not my forgiveness, but God's? Let it be done for you as you believe.

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In the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all of your sins. This damning confession ends with eternal life and forgiveness and pardon for everything.

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And the reason why you are a poor sinner and you have to plead guilty of all of these things is because you have a sinful nature.

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You inherited this from Adam. You've tested positive for the disease known as sin. So for my anonymous question asker,

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I pray, I pray for you. I know that your struggle is real and the difficulty that you have to go through on a day -to -day basis, having a diagnosis as complex as that with all of the other comorbidities that go along with it.

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Note this, that you have names that are clinical for what scripture just describes as the result of our fall into sin.

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And so you are in good company. Every child descended directly from Adam shares all of these core morbidities with you, whether they have the clinical name for it or not.

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I think comorbidity is a good way of talking about it. These are the comorbidities of sin.

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And we all share this with you. But let us look forward to the day when we will cast off this mortal body and we will be resurrected with a body just like Christ's.

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And we will inherit a world without end and a world without sin and a world without death and a world without suffering.

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And Satan is burning in the fires of hell. Then and only then will this struggle be done.

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Until then, arm her up. It's another day ahead.

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So, yeah, Don. Do you know when Confession of Absolution started to disappear from the

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Protestant Church? Good question. The question was, when did individual

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Confession of Absolution start to fall away from the

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Protestant Church? I would note that very early on in the Reformation, the stream of the

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Reformation that went down the same path as John Calvin, they got rid of the absolution and Confession of Absolution.

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R .C. Sproul, the late R .C. Sproul, actually lamented this development. So I would note that that branch of the

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Reformation very early wandered away from it. Lutherans struggled with it.

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There are times when they embraced it and other times when they fought against it.

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And then starting with Lutheran pietism, it really fell out of favor. And the reason being is this, is that the pietists can't stand the absoluteness of the absolution.

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You can't say their sins are forgiven. Can you see into their heart? How do you know they're saved, right?

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And so the absolution itself was so radically offensive to the pietists because pietism, pietism, the gasoline of it, is uncertainty.

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And that uncertainty is driven by a misuse of God's law and a putting away of the gospel.

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So that being the case, that's the reason why. And then I would note that, so with the confessional churches, as opposed to the

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Haugean churches in this area, if you go back 100 years, you wouldn't have even been allowed to have the

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Lord's Supper on a Sunday if you hadn't showed up on Saturday for private absolution. That's how much in practice it was.

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It was unthinkable that you would have the Lord's Supper on a Sunday if you hadn't shown up for private absolution on Saturday.

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So, and so the current status that we have is not the historic one.

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But I would note here, I have no intention of setting up Saturday private confession hours to hear everyone's confession so that you can have the

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Lord's Supper on Sunday. I have no intention of bringing that back. So, mm -hmm, yeah.

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I can tell you this as somebody who has availed myself of private absolution and as somebody who's administered it many times.

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It's powerful. Sin thrives in the dark. It legitimately, it's like mushrooms, okay?

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Mushrooms grow in darkness and in poop, okay? And sin is just like that.

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And when you take, when somebody opens up the curtains and confesses to another human being, a person who has the authority to forgive sins and says, here, let the light shine.

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Here's the crap. And they hear that it's forgiven.

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Because the thing is, is that when, always and again, the way Satan operates and the way we think, if anybody knew what was really going on, oh, you're not going to heaven.

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You're gonna go to hell. They're gonna excommunicate you. You know, all this kind of stuff, right? No, that's not how this works.

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The people who are excommunicated are the impenitent to confess is at its core penitence.

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To cry out to God, please have mercy on me, a sinner, is the very definition of repentance.

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And so what we fear is God's wrath, God's judgment. We fear coming into the light.

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Don't fear it as a Christian. Bring your sins to light in private absolution if they have that kind of strength over you, because you're not going to leave condemned.

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You're going to leave forgiven. And we all need that at times, every single one of us.

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So, all right, I've gone too long on one question, but alas, I thought it was necessary.

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All right, peace to you, Lord willing. We will see you on the 12th Sunday of Christmas, which is my baptismal birthday.