When There Was No Lack

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, the 28th chapter.

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Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.

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And when they saw Him, they worshipped Him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them,

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All authority in heaven on earth has been given to Me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

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And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. This is the Gospel of the Lord.

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In the name of Jesus, Amen. It is Trinity Sunday. This is the day in which we ponder the mystery of the fact that the one true

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God exists in three eternal persons. And I must say this, that oftentimes when we consider the mystery of the

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Trinity, it hurts our brain and we think that, well, what we need to do is pull out our theological compasses and protractors and get out our calculus calculators.

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I don't know calculus by the way, I think math is evil. And somehow think of it in these terms.

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And the reality is this, we oftentimes say things to the effect of, we have no experience or understanding of what it means for there to be one

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God and three persons. It's outside of our realm. There's nothing like it that we can point to.

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The Holy Trinity is nothing like us. But rather than considering and focusing on the fact that God in His being is one

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God and three persons, we'll talk about that more in our Bible study today. I would have you think about it in these terms, that it is true that we are nothing like the

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Holy Trinity because as I read through scripture and as I consider like our

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Genesis text today, we are nothing like God at all. God is loving,

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He is kind, He is merciful. And I don't know if you've noticed, but the world seems to be lacking love and kindness right now.

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The whole world has erupted in violence, in hatred, in discord, and disunity.

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And it's very tragic and awful to watch and to see. In just the past few weeks, a man was murdered by a police officer.

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And that's really what it looks like to me that he was murdered by a police officer. But other people have decided that what they're going to do in calling for justice is to steal, to loot, and to murder themselves, which makes no sense.

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And there are calls right now to muster, who are you for and who are you against? And the reality is, is that I don't find myself for or against either side.

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I find myself for and against both sides in this matter, because what

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I'm looking for are people to be saying the same thing as the Word of God, that we overcome evil by doing good, calling for there to be love and for there to be reconciliation and forgiveness.

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And instead, all I'm hearing is wrath and murder. So consider it this way.

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We've come very far from our origins. I mean, we all know the stories of people who have been orphaned or who have been adopted, and they've oftentimes longed to know where they came from, who their parents were, what's their heritage, and things like this.

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But brothers and sisters, we have lost track of our real heritage. We have forgotten from whom we come.

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Because consider in our Genesis text, the last words of our Genesis text, it talks about the fact that these are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, generations talking about where they came from.

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And so oftentimes, as we consider, you know, again, the metaphor here of orphans, they want to know what their parents were like.

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Were they handsome? Were they tall? Were they thin? Were they hard workers? Were they aristocrats?

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Were they farmers? What were they? What's their heritage? What is all of that? We've forgotten our heritage altogether.

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And it's very sad and very tragic. Very tragic indeed.

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And so because of our fall into sin, we are now under the dominion of darkness.

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Satan seems to be in charge. In fact, Christ says to those who do not believe in him, they are of their father, the devil.

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But the reality is this, is that when we were created, we were never made to be like the devil.

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Now, it's not a secret. I talk about it from time to time. I like fairy tales.

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I know that sounds weird, right? But there's something deep and profound about the archetypes that they tap into.

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And one of my favorite fairy tales is the story of Cinderella, because it is Christian allegory of mankind's fall into sin and being tormented under the dominion of darkness and how the love of Christ, who is their king, right, he pursues his bride and finds her not at her best, but finds her at her lowest and humblest.

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And in the 2015 Disney rendition of Cinderella, which by the way is one of my all -time favorite movies, there's this wonderful time where at the very end, finally

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Cinderella gets to confront her wicked stepmother. And boy, that is exactly what she is.

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She is a wicked, cruel, mean stepmother. And she gets to confront her, because what happened is, is that we all know how the story goes, that at the ball, she danced with the prince, lost that glass slipper, and the prince was scouring the countryside searching for his love.

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And in the 2015 edition, what ends up happening is that they finally come to Cinderella's house and she's locked up in a tall tower, up in the attic somewhere she's locked up, and they can hear her singing.

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And so one of the men, under the instruction of the prince, is told to go and have that young girl put on the glass slipper.

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And the wicked stepmother says, you cannot have her try that on.

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I forbid it. I forbid it. And so the prince's man says, are you an empress?

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Are you a deity? Who are you to defy an order of your sovereign?

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And she says, I'm her mother. To which

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Cinderella finally stands up for herself and says, you are not my mother. And you have never been my mother.

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Cinderella is nothing like her wicked stepmother. So brothers and sisters, consider this.

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The mystery of the Trinity is great, indeed, but the

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Trinity is where we come from. How we came to be here.

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And nobody would concoct a deity like this. In fact, we always kind of imagine God as being kind of grumpy and angry and throwing lightning bolts at us when we're stepping out of line.

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But consider what the Scriptures reveal regarding the Trinity, the Father, the

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Son, and the Holy Spirit. They have unity together. They are one in being, and yet they are known by love.

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Love. And our text says today in Genesis that God, God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness.

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Note the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit said we want man to be a spitting image of us and who we are.

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You ever notice how babies oftentimes look like one parent or another, or oftentimes look like a combination of the two, and people will sit there and say, oh man, he's a spitting image of his mother, or he's a spitting image of his father.

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Brothers and sisters, consider our generation. When humanity was created by God, we were a spitting image of God.

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But man, have we fallen far and hard. So God said, let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

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So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him male and female.

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He created male and female. We were all created originally in the image of God, and that image has been shattered since our first parents ate of the fruit of which they were commanded not.

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But you're going to note here that when God created everything, he said to all the creatures, including us, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it.

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And to humans, he said, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over every living thing that moves on the earth.

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And behold, I have given you in God's original creation, there was no toil, there was no lack, there was none of that.

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Everything has been given to us. God gifted us with life. God gifted us with food.

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God let everything flow from his bountiful, merciful, loving, kind hand.

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And so have dominion, and he says, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of the earth, every tree with seed in its fruit, you shall have them for food, and to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life,

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I have given every green plant for food. And at the end of this all,

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God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was tov ma 'od, very good.

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So what's happened? What has gone wrong? How have we fallen so far from our heritage?

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You'll note that in our world today, narratives have this powerful way of creating chaos or meaning or action within our lives.

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And what is the predominant narrative that is being told to us over and over and over again?

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Well, we're all the product of random chance, that each and every one of us. Apparently, my great -grandparents,

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I didn't know this, they were apes. You know, that might explain a few things, but especially the odor.

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But aside from that, the idea here is that, and where did those apes come from? Well, as the story goes, there was just this primordial slime sitting in a puddle somewhere on planet earth, lightning struck it, and next thing you know, there were amoebas.

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And those all evolved into fish that walked out onto the land and then jumped onto the trees and became monkeys that became apes and then fell out of the trees naked.

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And there we are, you know, human beings. And so your life has no meaning.

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There is no God. Your life has no meaning. You're the product of random chance and evolutionary processes and all this nonsense, right?

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And by the way, that narrative regarding the meaninglessness of our life and our origins, which is a satanic narrative, a false lie, that is what brought us the science known as eugenics, which tells us all that there are different races on the earth, that there's the black race and the white race and there's no such thing as other races, not one.

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There's only the human race that was originally created in the image of God. And so you'll note these false narratives are now bearing fruit of destruction in our own lives.

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But how many times have we watched television, the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or even the evening news, and they trot on some scientist to tell us about, always to reinforce, oh yeah, the earth is bazillions of years old and all these things happen through evolutionary processes.

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And every time they tell that story, it tells us we are not special.

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We were not created in the image of God. And when you believe and buy into that, well, you only live once.

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So YOLO, live for yourself, man. Eat and drink for tomorrow we die.

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And so it reinforces the sinfulness, the bent in on ourselves, the selfishness of our own flesh and strips us of a true understanding of where it is that we have come from and what it is that Christ has accomplished.

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And so in our lives now, rancor seems to be all that is all the rage.

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But listen to what the Apostle John says regarding our

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Lord Jesus Christ and the love that the Trinity has for us. See, in 1

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John 3, it says these words, see what kind of love the

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Father has given to us so that we should be called the children of God.

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And so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know

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God. Beloved, we are God's children now. And what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears, we will be like him because we shall see him as he is.

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And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.

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Consider also what John writes later, and he says, Beloved, let us love one another.

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For love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows

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God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.

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And in this, the love of God was manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him.

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In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and he sent his son to be the propitiation, the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

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Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen

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God, and if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. So brothers and sisters, note then that the

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Trinity has been active, like tenaciously active in love to save us who have fallen from him and have departed from him so far that our world is not marked with anything that has to do with our creator.

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Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self -control.

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In fact, our world is marked not by love but by hatred. There is no peace. Peace has been taken from us violently recently, violently, and thus is the pattern of man.

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Look at our history. Read the history books. It's just filled with war after war after war after war.

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Might as well be a history of war, right? There is no joy.

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Joy is a tough thing to find. Peace, patience, kindness, you gotta be kidding me. That doesn't exist either.

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Rarely at all. But here's the thing. I'm not talking about them out there. I'm talking about us, because isn't it true that we all are always looking out for number one?

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And consider this, because you're looking out for number one, and that guy's looking out for number one, I'm looking out for number one.

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Love is a rare commodity among us. Because of our fall into sin.

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But see, God doesn't have us, doesn't love us in the abstract. The Holy Trinity, God the

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Father sends the Son who willingly lays down His life so that He, we can be pardoned, so that we can be forgiven.

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You see, what God has done is He has sent the Son and the Holy Spirit now is sent out to proclaim the good news, and this is the way in which

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God is seeking out His lost children. You and me.

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It is not an accident that the first member of the Holy Trinity is

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God the Father. So, if you had an awful dad, and even if you had a good one, your good dad had awful times, because your dad is a sinner.

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If you had an awful dad or you'd had no dad at all, know this, that because the great love of the

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Trinity He has for you, He is your Father. You came from Him.

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You are a spitting image of Him. But you have been twisted by sin, your own sin, by the temptations of the world and the

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But God, in His great love for you, has sought you out, and He has sent

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His Son to bleed and to die for all of your transgressions, so that now you can again be called a child of God.

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We who are in Christ have been richly, gratuitously forgiven of all of our sins, and we are now again

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God's children. And what we will become, we do not know what that will be. It hasn't yet arrived.

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And so you'll note that God still is seeking out His children. And this is the greater mystery, if you ask me.

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I'm okay with this idea that there's one God and three persons. Never seen how that works. I don't really care.

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I mean, you know, I don't even know how my truck works, okay? No one can explain to me how the mechanics of a diesel engine work on a

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Ford F -250. I don't get it, okay? But the reality is, I'm okay with that. But the thing

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I cannot live without is love. And if you think about your own life, if it's like mine, in your own life there has been a famine of love.

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It is like the secret ingredient that has been kept from me and kept from you. The devil knows that God is love, and that is the thing he seeks to suck out of the world and make sure that none of us are able to experience it in any kind of meaningful way.

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And if we do, it's only for a fleeting moment. But God is love.

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And so know this. It was because of the love of God the Father, the Son, the

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Holy Spirit, that they have sent the Son to bleed and to die for us so that we can come back to Him.

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So that we can have a hope of eternal life in a world where there is no sin, where there is no hatred, where there is no discord, where there is only peace and kindness and love, love for each other, love for God face -to -face, once again reunited with our true

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Father. And I cannot think of a greater story than that. And so it's into this then we understand that the

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Great Commission is given now to the Church because we have good news to proclaim to the world.

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And Jesus says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And what a great person for that to happen to.

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Could you imagine if all authority in heaven and earth had been given to me? Or to Eric Pedersen?

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Oh my goodness, that would be just awful, right? I would yield all authority terribly.

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But all authority in heaven and earth has been given to our kind, merciful Savior, Jesus Christ.

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In that context, consider what Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, talking about Jesus, how he performed mighty works.

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Listen, from our Acts text, Men of Israel, hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know.

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Think for a second, when Jesus performed mighty works and signs and wonders, what they were, he found lepers and he touched them and he healed them.

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Widows who had lost their sons, he raised them from the dead and gave them back to their moms.

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A little girl who was 12 years old, who died, Jesus raised her back to life and gave her to her grieving parents.

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When you consider the mighty works of Christ, every single one of them was a miracle done that demonstrates the love that he has for his fallen creation, for his fallen creatures.

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And the greatest miracle of them all was that he, on a

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Friday afternoon, took your sins upon himself and he died in your place.

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He suffered the wrath of God so that you would never have to suffer it. He was scourged, he was beaten, he suffered and was separated from the

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Father because what was his cry of dereliction? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was forsaken so that you would not be.

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He died so that you could live. Every sign, miracle that Jesus performed was done and demonstrated what?

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That God is love. So brothers and sisters, consider the mighty love of the

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Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who has so tenaciously demonstrated his great love for you by sending the

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Son to die in your place. And let us repent of all the ways in which we have become like our wicked stepdad, the devil.

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All the ways in which we have aped and mimicked his awful, evil behavior.

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And let us remember who we are, where we came from, and let us again repent and trust in the great mercy and kindness of the

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Trinity so that we can be forgiven and have a hope. And there is a day coming.

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There's a day coming when Jesus returns in glory to judge the living and the dead. And for us, it is going to be the greatest family reunion of all time.

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And all of this he gives as a gift. In the name of Jesus.

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If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 And again that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 We thank you for your support.

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All of our teaching messages may be freely distributed as long as you do not edit or change the content of the message.