Jesus Truly Is the Son of God

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 St.

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Matthew, the 14th chapter, verses 22 through 33. Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of Him to the other side, while He dismissed the crowd.

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After He had dismissed them, He went up on a mountainside by Himself to pray, and when evening came,

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He was there alone. But the boat was already a considerable distance from the land, buffeted by the waves, because the wind was against it.

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During the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went out to them walking on the lake.

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When the disciples saw Him walking on the lake, they were terrified. It's a ghost, they said, and they cried out in fear.

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But Jesus immediately said to them, Take courage, it's I, don't be afraid.

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Lord, if it's you, Peter replied, tell me to come to you on the water. Come, He said.

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So then Peter got out of the boat, walked on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and began to sink and cried out,

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Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus reached out His hand and caught him.

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You of little faith, He said, why did you doubt? And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down.

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Then those who were in the boat worshipped Jesus, saying, Truly, you are the

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Son of God. This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus.

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All right, our gospel text this morning is one of the most abused passages in all of Scripture. And I mean that, literally.

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Over and again, people miss the point and miss the punchline of this text by focusing on Peter and how he got out of the boat and walked on the water.

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Then, by some strange method of narcissistic Bible twisting, they think that the application of this text in our lives means that Jesus is calling us out of some metaphorical boat so that we can walk on some metaphorical water during the metaphorical storms in our lives.

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Now, I hate to be so blunt, but this passage is not about you. Now that we got that out on the table,

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I feel a lot better. Yeah. The hard part's over, right?

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Yeah, actually, this text is about Jesus. And Jesus is not calling you out of any boat. He's not calling you to be a water walker.

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Now, to help me demonstrate this fact, let me ask you a few questions that might seem like they're trick questions, but they're really not.

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They're not trick questions. Okay, you ready? Here we go. In the movie Superman, who is the hero?

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Is it A, Lois Lane, or B, Superman? Superman, right.

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That's right. This wasn't a trick question, okay? This wasn't a trick question. Now, just to see if you kind of get in the rhythm of things here, in the

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Spider -Man movies, and I'm talking of the one with Kirsten Dunst, since I don't know about the remakes. I haven't seen those. But in the

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Spider -Man movies, who is the character who saves the day? Is it

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A, May Parker, or B, Spider -Man? Spider -Man.

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You guys are great students. Love this. You guys get A's today. Now, in this gospel passage that we just heard read, who saved the disciples from the storm after walking on the water all the way from the shoreline out to the boat?

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Was it A, Peter, or B, Jesus? Jesus. Jesus, right.

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In other words, Jesus is the hero of Matthew's gospel, and this particular text,

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Peter, is not. So let's kind of get that out on the table. So to talk about Peter walking on the water is to put the, well, as my old professor used to say, to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable.

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You're not getting the point here. So to think that because Peter walked on the water that somehow Jesus is calling you to be a water walker, well, that's actually kind of a narcissistic delusion.

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Notice that none of the other disciples ever walked on water. None of them. Nor were they even asked to do.

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Neither are you. That's right. None of the other disciples got out of the boat. Only Peter. And none of them were chastised.

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It's not like Jesus, when they got to the shore, said, And John, James, where were you guys, dudes?

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Come on. Now get out and start water walking. He didn't do that.

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And so the good news is Jesus isn't doing that to you either. It's not like Jesus is sitting there out on the water saying,

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Hello, I'm out here. Come walk out here with me. He's not doing that. Trust me. There are two things, however, if you take a close look at this text, there are two things in this text that they all, the disciples, did, which we also are called to do.

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There are two very specific things. Water walking ain't one of them. So now it's found these two things are found in the very last sentence of our pericope this morning.

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Here's what it says. Then those who were in the boat worshipped Jesus saying,

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Truly you are the son of God. Now, do you even know how explosive and mind -blowing that sentence is?

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You guys have seen those commercials where that cellular telephone guy is like interviewing little kids in kindergarten and talking about different things.

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And one of the little girls says something and it goes, right? Right. His mind was blown by what she said.

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It's so cute right here. But here's the thing. When you really understand what's going on in this text, here you've got a boat filled with practicing first century

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Jews and practicing first century Jews only worshipped one

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God. And it says that they worshipped Jesus saying, truly you are the son of God.

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If you understand what's going on here, it's like, Whoa, what was that?

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Yeah. Now remember the first commandment from the 10 commandments explicitly states you shall have no other gods before me.

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Right. Is this not? Does it sound like this? Right. Okay. And you remember when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness back in Lent, I preached on this, the text of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness from Matthew chapter four.

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Let me remind you of one of the temptations. Here's what it says. Again, the devil took him, that's Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.

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All of this I will give to you. He said, if you bow down and worship me, remember that temptation, right?

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And Jesus said to him away from me, Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord, your

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God and serve him only. Jesus knew full well it would have been a blasphemous idolatrous sin and a breaking of the first commandment for him to worship the serpent.

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And in fact, Jesus was quoting the book of Deuteronomy there. Now to kind of give you another example of just how important this is, that we don't worship the wrong person or being in the book of Revelation.

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Towards the very end of the book. And remember, John is kind of seeing all these things. He's been whisked up to heaven and he's seeing things that he's conveying to us.

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All a lot of them shrouded in symbols. And in chapter 22, as we get towards the end of the book of Revelation, here's what

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John says. He says, I, John am the one who heard and saw these things.

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And when I had heard and seen them, I fell down and worshiped at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me.

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So he's up in heaven. The angel showing him these things and John's response is he's on his face going to worship the angel.

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Okay. What's the angel say? Don't do it. I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers, the prophets of all who keep the words of this book, worship

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God. Right? So this angel knows full well, he's not to receive worship.

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So we've got a little bit of a mind blowing problem here. Here, this text says Jesus is accepting worship, worship from his

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Jewish disciples. Now, one thing is clear from this fact, those who think that Jesus is the first century equivalent of a

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Jewish Eagle scout whose mission was in life was to help little old ladies walk across the sea of Galilee.

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Yeah, that's just flat out wrong. It's not going to work here, right? Jesus accepted worship from his disciples and this puts him in a category that requires careful attention.

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By accepting worship, Jesus is claiming to be the God of the Jews in human flesh.

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And here's the implications. He is either the very God of the old Testament or he's a deceiver.

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Um, yeah, there's kind of no two ways about it except for that. He is either the God, he's either God in human flesh or he's a dangerous, crazy cult leader.

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That's what we're talking about here. This is the scandal of it. Think about it. I mean, would you have a high regard for any human being that you knew that accepted worship from people?

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Yeah, no, I wouldn't. In fact, when they have news stories of people who accept worship or claim to be

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Jesus from other people, you can just chalk that up to that person's occult and the people who are following them are absolutely deluded.

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And I remember recently, in fact, a few years ago, um, MSNBC did a story about a guy down in Florida whose name was, uh,

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Jesus de Miranda. He claimed to be Jesus Christ. And they actually took a film crew in and filmed, uh, their worship services.

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And in their worship service, these people were worshiping this guy claiming to be

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Jesus. And, and he also claimed that he was also the antichrist at the same time, which is kind of a weird little mix.

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And so the people in his little cult, they ended up getting tattoos of six, six, six, and, you know, on different parts of their body and things like that.

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And you're thinking, how could people be so deluded? Well, last year, about a year ago, in fact, a year ago on August 9th, uh,

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Jesus Miranda went into the hospital in Sugarland, Texas, and he did not come out alive.

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He died and he's still dead. Okay. That's how that goes, by the way.

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Um, so we're kind of confronted with kind of a similar conundrum here. Understand this.

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If Jesus isn't who he claims to be, the one true God in human flesh, he is an absolute crazy lunatic deceiver, the likes of Jose de

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Jesus Miranda. That's what we're saying here. And so that's what's going on in this text. The disciples are saying, truly, you are the son of God and they're worshiping

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Jesus. Now you may be tempted to say, yeah, but his disciples were saying

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Jesus, they weren't saying that he was God. They were only saying that Jesus is the son of God, right?

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As if somehow that makes this a little bit easier, right? Well, no, actually it doesn't. Let me show you how overly familiar that title son of God is.

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Okay. We, we hear the term son of God, son of God, son of God, and we don't really consider the implications of it.

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If you want to follow along, I'm going to be in the gospel of John chapter five. We're going to take a look at this and I want to show you just what it means to claim that Jesus is the son of God.

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This is one of the more interesting stories of healing in the Bible, by the way, um, where the person who's healed doesn't actually seem to be too thrilled about the healing.

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And I'll explain that in a second. Okay. Here's what it says. Now, sometime later,

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John, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the sheep gate, a pool, which in Aramaic is called

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Bethesda, which is surrounded by five colored colonnades. Here a great number of disabled persons, people used to lie, the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.

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One who was there had been an invalid for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, do you want to get well?

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Sir, the invalid replied, I have no one to help me into the pool and the water is stirred.

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Well, I'm trying to get in. Someone else goes down ahead of me. All right. Now, to help you kind of understand what's going on here, let me do something a little bit interesting.

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I'll tell a joke that kind of helps make the point. Okay. Let's, let's pretend for the sake of argument that there were three atheists sitting at the

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Starbucks over on Washington and Grand Forks, right? And they were discussing how God doesn't exist.

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And while they were discussing this around, you know, the table having coffee, Jesus walks up and Jesus touches one of them and he goes,

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Oh, wow. My back, I've been healed. I feel great. And the other one,

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Jesus comes and touches him and he goes, wait, my lungs have cleared up. My cough is gone. And so Jesus goes to touch the last atheist and he says, don't touch me.

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I'm on welfare. Okay. That's kind of what's going on in this text.

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This man, even though he's been an invalid, he knows perfectly well that God in his mercy has allowed a very interesting miracle to happen in this pool.

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And that is, is that God sends an angel. This is by the days, the days before penicillin, the days before hospitals and things like that.

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Right? So if you got sick or something like that, it oftentimes didn't go well for you. Well, this guy is some kind of an invalid.

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Maybe he's a, he's a paraplegic, not a quadriplegic, but maybe a paraplegic. But either way, he's hung out by this pool and managed to, not put in a hard day's work for 38 years.

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Right? He's got a kind of a good gig going on here. Right? And whenever, when God would send an angel, and as soon as the waters were stirred, first one in gets healed.

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This is truly what was happening here. This is what this text says. Okay. So it's funny that Jesus asked this guy, do you want to get well?

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Jesus can see right into the heart of people. Why? Because he's God. And so the guy gives this lame excuse. Well, sir,

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I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. And while I'm trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.

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So Jesus said to him, get up, pick up your mat, and walk. Now, watch this little turn of events.

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At once the man was cured. He picked up his mat and walked. The day in which this took place was a Sabbath. And so the

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Jews said to the man who had been healed, it's the Sabbath. It's the Sabbath. The law forbids you to carry your mat.

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Well, actually the law doesn't. The Pharisees' rules and their traditions forbade it.

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But not the Mosaic law. But he replied, the man who made me well said to me, pick up your mat and walk.

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Okay, already he's kind of shifting blame here. I'm just doing what I'm told. So they asked him, well, who is this fellow who told you to pick up your mat and walk?

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And so the man who was healed, well, he had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.

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And later, Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, see, you are well again.

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Now watch this. Stop sinning. Or something worse might happen to you. Okay.

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It's weird that Jesus has kind of taken a sharp approach with this guy, giving him a little bit of a warning, right?

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So, and here's the guy. He didn't notice. Watch this. He doesn't go, Jesus, thank you for healing me.

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Praise be. You're the son of God. That's not what he does. Here's what happens. So the man went away and told the

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Jews that it was Jesus who made him well. He went and ratted on Jesus. Can you believe that? Thanks.

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For nothing, right? So because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, here's the important part, the

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Jews persecuted him. Jesus said to them, my father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.

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Now, for this reason, the Jews tried all the harder to kill

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Jesus. Not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own father, making himself equal with God.

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Yeah, that's right. That title, son of God. It's a title of deity.

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When you confess that Jesus Christ is the son of God and you worship him, you are doing nothing less than confessing that Jesus is the

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God of the Old Testament in human flesh. And this is important because when you think about it, when man falls into sins, tempted by the devil, and well, disobeys

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God, we are all dead in Adam sin. Who does God send to rescue and to save us?

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He doesn't send some creature. Jesus himself steps off the very throne of heaven and comes down and is born in a barn for you.

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And for me, he goes from the highest of the highest to the lowest of the lows. And he does this all for you.

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What a great God and savior we have, right? So when we confess that Jesus is the son of God, we are confessing that Jesus is none other than God himself.

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So coming back to our text, the Jews of Jesus's day rightly understood that Jesus's claim to being the son of God was tantamount to saying that he was equal with God and they're right.

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So when we turn to our little boat story this morning in the sea of Galilee, we can, let's see if we can figure out what would cause the disciples to worship

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Jesus and confess that he truly is the son of God. Let's look a little closer at the story. Now let's remember that in last week's gospel text,

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Jesus fed 5 ,000 in the wilderness. This is just the men. This is not counting the women and children.

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He fed 5 ,000 men in the wilderness, which hearkened back to Israel's wilderness wanderings and God feeding them in the wilderness.

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Now, if you haven't already heard last week's sermon, visit Kongsvingerchurch .org and listen to it.

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The sermons are posted there. And I think it's important that you, if you haven't heard it, listen to it because this sermon and last week's sermon work together.

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And in fact, I made a point last week to point out the fact that the punchline from today's text actually works with last week's text.

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The two work together. So in our text this morning, if we pay close attention, we see that Jesus is demonstrating divine sovereignty over nature itself.

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Remember our Old Testament text where God is kind of chastising Job, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?

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Okay. Well, kind of the point is, is that while no man was there, God didn't need our help to set the heavens and the earth in order and to create them.

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Okay. So Jesus here is demonstrating divine sovereignty over nature, which is kind of a fancy way of saying that Jesus is doing things with nature that only

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God can do. And he's doing so in ways that an astute student of the Old Testament would immediately recognize.

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Let me read to you another passage from Job. This is found in Job chapter nine.

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I'm going to read verses one through 12 and pay attention to how Job confesses

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God's sovereignty over nature itself. Here's what it says. Job answered and he said, truly

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I know that it is so, but how can a man be in a right before God? If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand times.

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God is wise in heart and mighty in strength. Who has hardened himself against him and succeeded?

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He who removes mountains and they did not, and they did not know it when he overturns them in his anger, who shakes the earth out of its place and its pillars tremble, who commands the sun and it does not rise, who seals up the stars, who alone stretched out the heavens.

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And here's the important part. Listen to this and trampled the waves of the sea. I'll come back to that, but let me keep reading.

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Who made the bear and Orion and Pleiades and the chamber of the south, who does great things beyond searching out and marvelous things beyond number.

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Behold, he passes by me and I see him not. He moves on and I do not perceive him. Behold, he snatches away.

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Who can turn him back? Who will say to him, what are you doing? Yeah. Now in that verse where it says that God trampled the waves, the translation is a little bit weak and it's only because English, it doesn't have quite the same equivalent.

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The Hebrew verb there, darach, means to tread or to march forth or to walk upon.

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One of the things that Job talks about here is that God treads upon, walks upon the waves of the sea.

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And remember, these Jewish boys in this boat, they're good Bible students. They've been to synagogue all their life.

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They know full well that God and his sovereignty marches on, treads on the waves of the sea.

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And what did Jesus do? That's exactly what he did, right? So this is part of what's going on in their mind, probably knowing their

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Bible. Let me show you another passage. Psalms chapter 65, Psalm 65 verses one through eight.

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Here's what it says. Praise is due to you, oh God in Zion and to you shall vows be performed.

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Oh, you who hear prayer, to you shall all flesh come. When iniquities prevail against me, you atone for our transgressions.

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Blessed is the one you choose and bring near to dwell in your courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house and the holiness of your temple.

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By awesome deeds, you answer us with righteousness. Oh God of our salvation, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.

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The one who by his strength established the mountains being girded with might who stills the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples so that those who dwell at the ends of the earth are in awe at your signs.

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You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy. So here again, we have the

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Psalms proclaiming the divinity and sovereignty of God over creation itself, even to the point where God is capable of stilling the roaring seas and the roaring of their waves.

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And this is exactly what Jesus did. He was the one who treaded out and walked on the sea of Galilee.

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And then when he got into the boat, the sea became glassy and calm, right?

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So the disciples recognized exactly who it is who got into the boat, who else, but God could tread on the waves of the sea or still the roaring of the seas and the waves.

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No one else, but God himself could do such things. And that is precisely who Jesus is. And in our text this morning, the disciples all raised a strict monotheist,

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Jewish monotheists who only worship one God. They worship Jesus and they confess that he is truly the son of God.

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Now you may be tempted right about now to say, that's it.

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That's your point. You just want me to confess that Jesus is God or the son of God.

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Well, I want to be like Peter and I want to walk on the water. Well, did you see how that went for Peter?

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Yeah, he took his eyes off of, he took his eyes off of Christ. Peter doubted and he sank, he sank into the sea and ended up crying out,

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Lord save me. So let's be real. Yeah. In that way, you and I are a lot like Peter.

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Our faith is weak. We have doubts about Jesus and like Peter, we need to be saved. But the thing that all of us need to be saved from is the soon to be revealed wrath of God.

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When the season, this current season of God's mercy and grace runs out on the day that Jesus returns in glory to judge both the living and the dead, all of us are going to need salvation.

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Okay. And this is what our epistle text says this morning. Let me remind you. What is it? But what does it say?

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The word is near you. It's in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith, the faith in Christ that we proclaim.

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Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved for with the heart.

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One believes in is justified and with the mouth one confesses and is saved for the scripture says, everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame for there is no distinction between the

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Jew and the Greek for the same. Lord is Lord of all bestowing his riches on all who call on him for everyone who calls on the name of the

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Lord will be saved. What comforting words of assurance that our salvation comes by grace through faith and it does not depend upon our righteousness, our good works or our obedience to the law.

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It's all given as a gift. Call on Jesus, the son of God and you will be saved for truly he is the son of God.

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Now let me kind of do this by way of postscript. You ever see one of those movies where that's based upon true events, right?

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And then at the end of the movies, while the credits are rolling, you know, this is the end of the movie. Then the music is playing.

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The credits are rolling. They kind of say, they show you what happened to the different people in the story, right?

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You know, you've seen the movie about the miracle on ice, the 1980 hockey team, you know,

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US Olympic hockey team. They do this. You know, it's a great story. They win against the Russians. The credits start rolling and then they show you where are these people now?

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So let's do this. The credits are rolling. We know it's all about Jesus, right? Well, what happened to Peter?

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What happened to him? So let me tell you where he went from there. It's kind of a sad story actually.

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So you remember Peter, he went on to deny Jesus three times, said he would be willing to die for Christ.

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He went on to deny Jesus, wept bitterly, and then Jesus mercifully forgave him and restored him.

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Even though Jesus didn't need to do that because Peter's betrayal was ever much as a bit of a betrayal as Judas's was.

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Because Jesus himself said, if you deny me before men, I will deny you before the father. Jesus had every right to basically say to Peter, I'm done with you.

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But he didn't. He forgave him. He restored him and he sent him out.

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And if Peter were here this morning, you know who Peter would be telling us about? Jesus. That's who he was obsessed with talking about, right?

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Peter and his wife, they were eventually martyred for preaching that Christ was truly the son of God.

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That's what happened to him. The wicked emperor Nero had them both crucified.

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And what's fascinating is that one of the church fathers records for us how that went down.

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Yeah, he and his wife's death in it, he never took his eyes, the eyes of his faith off of Jesus.

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Nero and his wickedness decided that it would be quite exquisite if Peter would have to see that his wife had to be crucified first.

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She went before him. And the church fathers record that, here's what it says.

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They say accordingly that when Peter saw his own wife led out to die, he knows that she's going to be crucified.

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He rejoiced. He rejoiced because of her summons and her return home and called to her very encouragingly and comfortingly addressing her by name and said to her, remember the

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Lord, remember his kindness. Who of us could do such a thing, right?

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But he had his eyes on Christ. That day, the storm of losing his wife blew and raged, but Peter did not take his eyes off of Jesus.

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In fact, focus the eyes of his wife, even in the face of her death on Jesus. Now, the next day,

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Peter was led to what was called the circus of Nero. Now, if you don't know what a circus was, it's not where they have animals and three rings and lions and elephants and things like that in the old

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Roman empire. And that day, a circus was a place where they would have chariot races. You've heard of the circus

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Maximus, the place where the big fire of Rome started, right? Well, Nero had one erected in his honor.

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It was called the circus of Nero and in the infield in the center of it is where Peter was crucified.

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Now, if you've ever seen photographs of St. Peter's square in Rome, the prominent feature of that square is that there is a big

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Egyptian obelisk in the center of the square. You've seen it. The obelisk is like that Egyptian thing that looks just like the

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Washington monument in Washington, D .C. There's an obelisk there. And that obelisk was present at Peter's crucifixion.

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It was in the center of the circus of Nero. So, Peter was led to be crucified in the circus of Nero.

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And here's the funny thing. As he approached the cross in which he was going to die, he kind of threw a little bit of a fit.

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He did not consider himself worthy to die in the same manner as his Lord. And he registered his strong feelings and complaint.

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So, the Romans obliged and they decided to solve the problem by crucifying Peter upside down, which ended up resulting in him taking a few days to die.

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And while he was suffering in agony on the cross upside down, Nero, the Emperor Nero, actually held chariot races in the circus of Nero.

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And he himself participated. So, there's Peter upside down, crucified, dying, and the

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Emperor Nero participating in sport while all this is going on. Gives you an idea of just how sick everything is, right?

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But keep this in mind. Peter never again took his eyes off of Jesus.

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And now, Peter again sees Jesus face to face. And our text this morning tells us that you will too.

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I will see Jesus. You will see Jesus. So, like Peter, rather than saying we walk on water, we're not water walkers.

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Instead, we share the same ground with Peter when we cry out, Lord, save me. Save me from my sin.

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Save me from the evil that's within me. Oh, Lord, save me. And our gospel text, as well as our epistle text, make it clear.

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All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. Jesus, save us.

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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, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, Minnesota, 56744. And again, that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, Minnesota, 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.