Repentance

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. The Holy Gospel according to Saint Mark chapter 11 verses 1 through 10.

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Now when they drew near to Jerusalem to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, go into the village in front of you and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied on which no one has ever sat.

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Untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, why are you doing this? Say, the

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Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately. And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street and they untied it.

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And some of those standing there said to them, what are you doing untying the colt? And they told them what the

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Lord Jesus had said and they let them go. And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it and he sat on it.

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And many spread their cloaks on the road and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields.

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And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the

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Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David. Hosanna in the highest.

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This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. Amen. Happy New Year.

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Hey, Pastor Roseborough, what has gotten into you? It's December 3rd, it's not

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Happy New Year. No, you'll notice that the colors here in the church have turned blue. Today is the first Sunday of Advent and it's the beginning of a brand new church year.

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Now, little bit of a note that we have the big high feast of Christmas just around the corner.

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Now, when I was growing up, these were tough days to get through. Very difficult, you know, because Thanksgiving occurred and then it was

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Christmas from like Thanksgiving day afternoon until Christmas afternoon when

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I was suffering from a food coma and enjoying all of the presents that I opened. But note this, that Advent historically is considered to be a penitential season.

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It's a lot like a mini Lent. I mean, think of it this way, there's a reason why our readings are not talking about the birth of Christ today and that has to do with the fact that this is a penitential season.

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This is a time for us to, before the feast of the revealing and the arriving of our great

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God and King in tiny little package form, right, which is just amazing if you think about it, that during this time we reflect on the

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Ten Commandments and look at our own lives and recognize our need for a

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Savior. You know, God didn't send us a politician, thank God, right?

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He sent us a Savior, which means we needed one of them. So the idea here is that repentance is a big part of this season and I will say this by way of just if you want to experience the full

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Advent thing, that fasting is also considered to be an important part of this season.

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You're the idea here is that you rather than eat a meal, you spend that time in prayer and reflection on your own life and reflecting on your life in light of the

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Ten Commandments. So a good way to fast would be to one day during the week say,

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I'm not going to have breakfast, I'm not going to have lunch, and funny enough your body can actually adjust to that.

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Don't eat or drink anything with sugars in it because you'll crash hard and then you break your fast at dinner.

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So the idea is you have dinner the night before but then you don't eat again until dinner. You can do that, all right?

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That's an easy way to do it. You know, you don't have to do the 40 days in the wilderness thing, which

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I have yet to do and not even going to try it. But fasting then is an important aspect of this and pull out your small catechism.

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Reflect and spend time in prayer on the Ten Commandments. Now, there's a lot of confusion regarding repentance out there.

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What is repentance? When we talk biblically, what repentance is?

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What exactly are we saying? Now, oftentimes people will say, well, repenting is cleaning up your life.

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Nope, that's not repenting. Cleaning up your life is not repenting. That's the fruit of repenting, but it's not repenting.

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And then somebody will say, well, repenting is really feeling sorry for your sins. And I would say, ah, now we're getting warmer.

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You remember when you were a kid and your parents would hide something? Or maybe it was just my parents. My dad would hide something of mine and say, you got to go find it,

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Chris. So I'd start wandering through the house and say, oh, you're cold. Oh, you're freezing.

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It's snowing outside. You're in the middle of a blizzard. So I'd change direction and say, oh, it's getting warmer.

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The sun is out. You're getting warmer. Oh, you're burning up. Oh, my goodness. It's the sun.

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You're flaming right now. And then you'd figure out where it was, right? So the idea is that being sorry for your sins.

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Oh, you're really warm. You're in the right ballpark. Now, if you haven't spent time ever looking at the documents that explain what it is that we believe and teach and confess as a church, you'll note that a few weeks ago we had a meeting to reevaluate and kind of redo our church's constitution in light of a changing world.

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And you'll note that our confessional documents include the Augsburg Confession. The Augsburg Confession is the succinct summary of what it is that we believe, teach, and confess.

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And Article 12 of the Augsburg Confession gives us a wonderful summary of what teaches regarding repentance.

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Let me read out a portion of it. Properly speaking, the Augsburg Confession says, true repentance is nothing else than to have contrition and sorrow or terror on account of sins.

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Now, that's not a full stop. There's a comma there, but that's part of it. So consider this. True repentance involves sorrow, contrition, and even terror on account of sin.

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And then there's an important conjunction, and the conjunction is the word and. And. Bless you.

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The conjunction is the word and, and here's what it says. And yet at the same time, to believe the gospel, believe the absolution that namely sin has been forgiven and grace has been obtained through Christ, and that this faith will comfort hearts again and set it at rest.

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So repentance involves kind of two primary concepts, which seems like they're at odds with each other, but it makes perfect sense.

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Sorrow, contrition, maybe even terror because of your sin, and at the same time, having the courage to confidently believe that your sins are forgiven because of Christ.

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That's the two of them. So think of it this way. The Apostle Paul talks about those who have shipwrecked their faith, which is a real possibility.

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It could happen to any of us. Well, in order for an old, think of an old wooden ship, in order for an old wooden ship to stay upright and to make it so that the sails don't become the keel, right, you would have to have these rocks down in your hull called the ballast rocks, and they would have to be on both sides of the hull, so you got to balance the load.

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Ballast on the, you know, on the port side, ballast on the starboard side, you have to have both.

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So think of it this way. Repentance involves having a balance between contrition and sorrow and even terror because of our sins and confidence in the forgiveness of sins because of Christ.

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Put that ballast in your ship, and you are not likely for your faith to be shipwrecked.

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It'll stand upright. Kind of put tensions on both sides of it. Now, just so you think that the authors of the

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Augsburg Confession are not totally out to lunch, yeah, then they're not, you're going to go back with me into Isaiah chapter 64, and I want you to watch this interplay between sorrow, even terror of God, and confidence in His forgiveness and mercy.

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As we read this text on a cold reading, it might seem schizophrenic.

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It might seem like, Isaiah, I can't tell if you're having a good day or a bad day.

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Which is it with you? Well, as we read this, you're going to see that he's got rocks that he's putting on the one side for terror and on the other side for confidence and forgiveness.

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This is a picture, if you would, in a text of what real repentance looks like. And so it begins with the terror part.

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Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence as when fire kindles brushwood, and the fire causes water to boil, to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence.

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I don't know about you, but that sounds like a frightening and absolutely terrifying picture of God. God showing up and all of a sudden the mountains around Grand Forks.

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Wait a second, there's none of those. Well, imagine that there were. Yeah, the mountains trembling and quaking and being torn apart.

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Something awesome, ginormous, huge, powerful is on the move. The closest thing

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I can think of. Imagine yourself in Africa, in the deepest, darkest part of Africa on a safari. And ahead you hear the rumblings and the earth shaking.

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And you can see trees being torn in this direction and torn in that direction. You realize, ah, stampede of elephants.

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First move, get out of the way or you will be stampeded.

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Well, God is so much more awesome and terrifying than a stampede of elephants. And you'll note here that this presence of God is showing up and tearing apart everything in its path in order to make known

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His name among whom? His adversaries. So that the nations might tremble at your presence.

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Now, we all know that Scripture is very clear that each and every one of us, we were born dead and in trespasses and sins.

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And we were by nature objects of God's wrath. This is what Scripture says in Ephesians 2.

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And we were at enmity with God. We were

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God's enemies. We were His adversaries. Now, we who have been united with Christ in His death and His resurrection in the waters of baptism have had our sins forgiven.

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You're going to note that living the Christian life is a wee bit on the difficult side because we still have our sinful nature.

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And if your sinful nature is like mine, wink wink, nudge nudge, it is, your sinful nature doesn't want to do good.

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Your sinful nature is still probably upset at you that you got up early this morning and came to church. And the last thing it wants to do is listen to God's Word and come

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Monday it's going to try to convince you to put all that Jesus stuff aside and let's go do something fun.

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And by fun we mean sinful, right? This is how our sinful nature works. So each and every one of us understands that as Christians that we are simultaneously justified and declared righteous and that we have a new nature as a result of God's regenerative work through His Word in the waters of baptism.

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And at the same time, we still have old Adam to deal with. And old Adam is just awful.

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And so each and every one of us at the close of every day needs to pray that prayer that Jesus has taught us and pray these words, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

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Because there isn't a day that goes by that you do not sin against God and behave as one of His adversaries.

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And knowing this to be true and knowing how awesome and holy and mighty God is, the showing up of His presence, well, any sane person would tremble.

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That's the idea. We continue.

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When you did awesome things that we did not look for, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence, but then it turns from of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a

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God besides you who, listen, who acts for those who wait for Him.

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You meet Him who joyfully works righteousness, those who remember your ways.

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Huh. So you'll note all of a sudden we've got this presence of God, mountains being torn apart, and then rather than us continuing to quake and to tremble, we are admonished to remember how the

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Lord works righteousness, and there is a hint of joy which kind of comes out of nowhere.

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What is Isaiah doing? Well, now he's putting rocks on the other side of the ship, the part where we are confident in God's mercy and grace and His rewarding of our good works and things of that nature.

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Behold, you were angry and we sinned. In our sins we have been a long time.

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Shall we be saved? What a question. In our sins, we have been in our sins a long time.

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Shall we be saved? I'm almost 50. I've been in my sins for almost 50 years.

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Some of you are a wee bit older than that, and I don't know if you've noticed, but the cumulative effect of continuing to live in this lifetime is an accumulation of more sin upon more sin upon more sin.

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In fact, it's rather awful to take a look behind and see the wake of destruction of my own sin in my own life and on other people and even on myself, and then this asks the question, shall we be saved?

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We shall. We shall, but not because we are righteous. So the text continues, and this is where we've got to be really diligent to pay attention to this text.

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We have all become like one who is unclean, and all of our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.

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We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind take us away.

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There is no one who calls upon your name who rouses himself to take hold of you, for you have hidden your face from us and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.

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So after getting a little glimpse of hope, a wee bit of gospel, now it comes full circle again, more rocks on the other side of the ship as it relates to God's law, and this is an important text.

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Do you think that you're going to be able to stand in the presence of this mighty and holy God, who when he shows up that the mountains quake and hold up your good works and say, see

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God, you need to let me into heaven? That's not going to work, and this text explains why.

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All of our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment, the text says.

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Notice it doesn't say our sins are like a polluted garment.

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It says all of our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment, and to be clear, this the visual in the

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Hebrew is blunt and strong and quite gross. Polluted garment, the only polite way

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I can say it is it's a used female sanitary napkin.

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That's the description of all of our righteous deeds. So holding those up to God and saying

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God let me into heaven, that ain't going to work. You're going to notice because each and every one of our righteous deeds is polluted by sin that not only will our sin send us to hell, our very best deeds, our greatest good works are still polluted with enough sin that we could be sent to hell by our good works.

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Have you considered that? Wow. And then it goes on, we all fade like a leaf, our iniquities like the wind take us away, there's no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you.

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This is a perfect cross -reference to what we read on Reformation Sunday from Romans chapter 3 that there is none righteous, no not one, no one who seeks

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God. This text is a perfect cross -reference and it's a description of us.

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And the last part of verse 7 says, and you have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.

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This kind of gets into that biblical theme where sin itself is a punishment for sin.

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An ever -increasing sin is punishment for sin itself. So what are we going to do?

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I mean, search the ten commandments. The ten commandments are not going to tell you how to get out of this.

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I mean, review the commandments with me. You will have no other gods. First commandment, we should fear and love

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God and trust Him above all things. That we do not take

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God's name in vain or take, remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. How are we doing so far?

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And not to mention the second table of the law with honoring your father and your mother, not committing murder, not stealing, not committing adultery, not bearing false witness against your neighbor or coveting anything that your neighbor owns or belongs to your neighbor.

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How are we doing? Add the law to this situation and it becomes clear that each and every one of us would be justified to have sorrow in our hearts, contrition, even terror on account of our sins.

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And that's the working of the law. But that's only half of repentance. That's only one part of it.

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Now look at the last portion of our Old Testament text. But now,

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O Yahweh, you are our Father.

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Now the rocks are going all to the other side. When we pray, Our Father who art in heaven, you can almost hear the devil saying, who do you think you are praying such a prayer?

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Didn't Jesus say to those who opposed him, who didn't believe in him, you are of your father the devil and your desire is to do your father's will.

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But notice scripture teaches those who are forgiven, those who have confidence in the mercy of God, who believe that Christ has bled and died for their sins, that we are redeemed and adopted into the family of God and that we can confidently go before him and say,

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Our Father. You can only say that if we are saved 100 percent by grace through faith.

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Years ago I used to talk about the fact that God is the one who adopts us. He's the one who chooses to adopt us, not the other way around.

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And years ago, before Trump was president, I would talk about it in these terms. Could you imagine sending a letter to Donald Trump before he was president and saying,

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Dear Mr. Trump, you are loaded, you are rich, you seem like you have a very healthy family, so I have decided that you are going to be my father, here are the adoption papers, just announcing to let you know.

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Do you think I would be invited to the Trump family Christmas? No, that's not how adoption works, right?

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So going around in public and saying, Yeah, Trump's my dad, people would be saying,

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You are a loony, loony, loony, loony, loony, loony. He lost his mind, right? Well, here's the thing.

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The same works for God. Can you sit there and say, God, I've sent you the adoption papers, you're now my dad? That's not how that works.

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You see, God has adopted us. Christ has forgiven us. Christ has reconciled us to the

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Father, and now we can call God our Father. He's the one who's chosen.

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So the opposite end of that illustration would be if Trump sent you a letter and said, You know, out of all the people in the

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United States, I've decided that I'm going to adopt you and then bring you into the family.

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And by the way, I've written you into the will as well. People go, Right? It depends on if you're

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Republican or Democrat now, but you kind of get the idea. You get the idea. So the good news, the gospel tells us that Christ has bled and died for us, redeemed us from slavery, and brought us into the house not only as free, but brought us into the house, and God has said,

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Not only are you an ex -slave, I'm adopting you. You're my child, and you are not to refer to me as master.

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You call me dad. That's the picture here. That's the gospel.

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But now, oh, Yahweh, you are our Father. We are the clay.

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You are our potter. And this is not talking about creation now. This is talking about how in Christ, those who are redeemed and forgiven and have trust in God, how they are

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God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works. So we are the clay.

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You are the potter. We are the work of your hand. So be not so terribly angry, oh,

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Yahweh, and remember not our iniquity forever. Behold, please look, we are all your people.

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It would be like this. So on the day of judgment, God decides to show up in that way that makes everybody freak out.

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Mountains tremble and all this kind of stuff, and then God looks at you. You can see breath coming out of his nostrils.

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What about you? And you're saying, Dad, would you knock it off? You're scaring everybody.

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All right. All right. That's the idea. What about you? Ah, you're my

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Father. You've forgiven me. You've redeemed me. And that's really kind of the point of our epistle text.

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And this is where we'll end our meditation today. If you'll turn back with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 1, and watch these amazing words, these amazing words written to the

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Christians at the church in Corinth and also written to us for our instruction in our edification.

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Grace to you and peace from God our

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Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Notice who the peace is coming from.

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It's not coming from Paul. Paul's only delivering a message. Grace to you and peace from God.

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God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And there's that adoption talk again.

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So Paul says, I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given to you in Christ Jesus.

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You see, if Paul were writing to the church at Kongsvinger in Oslo, Minnesota, 1st

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Kongsvingerians chapter 1, he would thank God for the grace of God that has been given to you in Christ Jesus.

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And he is. And we also should give thanks to God for the grace of God that has been given to us in Christ Jesus, so that in every way you were enriched in Him, in all speech and knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. And listen to this, He is the one who will sustain you to the end.

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Christ is in the business of sustaining those whom He has bled and died for.

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And He is sustaining you today with His word, with the absolution, in just a few minutes, the very body and blood of Christ broken and shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins.

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It's through these means that He sustains us and will sustain us to the end.

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Sustain us as guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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You sit there and you go, but I'm not guiltless. Are you higher in office than Christ?

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Do you have the authority to overturn His word?

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If Jesus says to you, you are forgiven, do you have the ability to speak up and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but Jesus doesn't know what

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He's talking about. There is nobody higher than Christ, and He has declared you forgiven, and He has said to you, you are guiltless.

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And you can sit there and grumble and complain about how guilty you are until the cows come home. It doesn't matter, because all of your sins are bled for and died for.

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So get used to it. You are righteous, you are holy, you are forgiven, and Christ is sustaining you guiltless, guiltless on the day when

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He returns. And the reason for this is not because you're so great, the text goes on, because God is faithful.

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This is the faithfulness of God that forgives us and sustains us in our guiltlessness.

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God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our

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Lord. So repentance involves contrition, sorrow, or even terror on account of sins.

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These are good feelings to experience, because God the Holy Spirit is the one who works those feelings in you through His law.

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And repentance at the same time is also that bold confidence to believe that because Christ has bled and died for you, that you are forgiven, reconciled to the

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Father, adopted into His family, and considered His children, and can boldly pray to Him, our

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Father. These are the themes of a penitential season.

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May we again apply ourselves to God's Word in this penitential season, and remember our sin and God's great mercy.

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Happy New Year, you who are guiltless in Christ. God is faithful. He has forgiven you.

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In the name of Jesus. Amen. 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, 159 -50 -470th

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Ave., NW, Oslo, MN, 56744. And again, that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 159 -50 -470th

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

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