A Loving Father Seeking His Lost Children

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 in 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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John, the 14th chapter. This is the

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Gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus, amen. Here again, the words of our

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Lord Jesus Christ from our Gospel text today. Verse 18 of chapter 14 of John's Gospel.

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Jesus says, I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me.

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Because I live, you also will live. And in that day you will know that I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you.

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Whoever has my commandments and keeps, guards them. That's what the Greek word says, tereo means to guard.

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Guards them. He it is who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.

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I will not leave you as orphans, orphans indeed. Some of the, well, how do

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I put this, some, well, there's only a few movies out there that are really good at depicting fathers who are on the rescue to save an errant or endangered son.

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I will note that Hollywood has this bad habit of depicting fathers as kind of being dumb doofuses, you know, who don't quite have their acts together.

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So it's kind of rare for Hollywood to portray good father figures. But I would point to a couple of movies.

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The first is a little bit silly, but it is nonetheless a good themed movie along the lines of a father seeking out a lost son, and that would be the movie

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Finding Nemo. Yeah, it's again, a little bit silly, but the whole theme there is that a son is lost and a father goes on a journey to rescue his son.

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It's a great picture of the love of a father. One that is my favorite, and oftentimes people don't think of this movie in these terms, is the original

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Karate Kid with Pat Morita, and Mr. Miyagi becomes a surrogate father for a young man who is in deep trouble, deep danger, who doesn't have a father himself.

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We don't know why Daniel -san, as he's named in the movie, why he does not have a father.

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But Pat Morita's character, Mr. Miyagi, fills in and becomes a father figure for this child who does not have a father, and in the process saves him from harm and danger by teaching him how to be able to defend himself.

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It's a great themed story, if you would. But I would argue that the Bible has the greatest story of a love of a father for his lost children.

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This is a major theme of Scripture. I don't know if you've noticed, but there are two different genealogies for Jesus listed in the

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Gospels, one in Luke and the other in the Gospel of Matthew. And one of those genealogies, working back through Jesus' lineage, through David, it always says, so -and -so begat so -and -so begat so -and -so.

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We all, you know, don't exactly enjoy reading those genealogies, but they're quite important.

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And one of them goes from Jesus all the way back to Adam. And so, you know,

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Adam begat so -and -so, but it says about Adam that Adam was the son of God, which is a strange thing to say.

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But remember this, we're not saying that humans are deity, we're not, we're not even close to gods. We are creatures, but we have a special creation.

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We were made in the image of God. And so, God as our Creator is our

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Father, but humanity, because of the treachery of the devil and the temptation in the

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Garden of Eden, has fallen into sin under the dominion of darkness.

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And in fact, Jesus says of those who do not believe Him that they are of their father, the devil.

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And what a terrible father the devil is. The devil, as far as fathers go, is as wicked as they get.

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He cares nothing about those who are under his thumb. He cares nothing about, he only cares about himself.

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And he's always sure to make sure that those people who are under his oppression, that they are treated as kindly as Stalin treated his people, you know, as despots treat the people under them.

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You kind of get the idea. But see, the scriptures are this amazing rescue story, because God the

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Father, in compassion for His fallen humanity, those created in His image,

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He sends His only begotten Son to save and to rescue us, to free us, to adopt us back into the family and to give us a hope.

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And so this is the good news, then, that we have to proclaim, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting men's trespasses against them.

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Not at all. You see, God made Jesus to be sin, who knew no sin, so that we can become the righteousness of God, so that we can be restored in a right relationship to God, our

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Heavenly Father. That relationship that we destroyed by our sin, by our rebellion.

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What a great and compassionate Heavenly Father we have. Now, into this context, then,

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I would like you to consider our first reading today. In our first reading, we hear of Paul's missionary work, and he's had to do a little bit of a change of plans.

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Let me explain. In the preceding portion of the book of Acts, prior to the portion we read for our first reading today, the

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Apostle Paul is on a missionary journey, and he's gone to the town of Thessalonica, and things started off just great.

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He went to the synagogue, proclaimed that Jesus is the promised Messiah of the Old Testament, and that He was crucified, died, buried, but He is risen from the dead, and Paul even makes it clear that he is an eyewitness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and so he is.

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And things started off very well that first Sabbath, but Sabbath number two, when everybody wanted to hear more about this, jealousy began to arise in some of the unbelieving

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Jews in that synagogue, and they began to revile Paul, and to stir up the crowd in the whole city of Thessalonica against him.

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So what did Paul have to do in order to save his own skin? Slink away by night.

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And so where does he end up next? He ends up in the city called Berea. And if you've ever heard of Bereans, Bereans are held up as people who do the right thing, because although the

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Apostle Paul was truly sent by Jesus Christ, he is an apostle of Jesus Christ, he doesn't expect special treatment, and so it says the

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Bereans were of a more noble character than the Thessalonians, because when they heard what Paul had to say, they checked to see if what he said was true, searching the scriptures.

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And so you'll note that if the Apostle Paul doesn't get a pass, and it's always good to check to see who, you know, that somebody's, what they're preaching to you is really the word of God, I don't even get a pass.

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You have to check everybody, check to see if what they're saying is true, according to scriptures.

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Well, when the Thessalonians heard that Paul had gone to Berea, they figured out where he had skedaddled to, they stirred up trouble for him in the city of Berea as well, and so the brothers sent

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Paul off a little farther down the road. They sent him off to Athens. And so this is where our

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Gospel text picks up, and I would like to kind of frame it in this way. Paul is about ready to become provoked in his spirit because of the sheer number of idols that is in the city of Athens.

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Now I know full well that the day that we live in, the time that we live in, there are people who have coexist bumper stickers on their vehicles, you know, it usually, it's right next to the hug a tree bumper sticker, you kind of get the idea.

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There's a certain belief out there that we Christians, we Christians, we are arrogant.

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We are unloving, we are unkind. Why? Well, we believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation, and that there is salvation in no one else except for through him, and so what do we do when somebody is devout and religious, but they're not

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Christian? Answer, we invoke the first commandment, you will have no other gods before me.

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And we call people who are in other religions to repent and to be forgiven.

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And this is not unkindness, this is the means by which God the

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Father is making his appeal to his errant children so that they can be brought home.

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This is how Jesus the Good Shepherd goes looking for his lost sheep. This is not unloving, this is the ultimate love.

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And so you'll note, God the Father works through means. God the Father sent the

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Son, the Son sent the Apostles, the Apostles preach the Gospel, God now sends pastors and preachers and evangelists.

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On all of them, the Scripture says that God is making his appeal through them. For what?

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So that they can be forgiven, pardoned, and have life rather than receive the reward of their wickedness.

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They can instead be forgiven and have eternal life as a gift. So you'll note that in today's day and age,

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Acts 17 is going to be quite scandalous, quite scandalous because here you have a

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Christian telling people, believing in false religions, false deities, that their religion is futile.

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But this is not unloving, this is kind. So we pick up now, the

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Apostle Paul is in the city of Athens, and it says, while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols.

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I kind of like to think of it this way, I've had the privilege, the opportunity to travel to some cities in the

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United States as well as other parts of the world, and one of the things my wife and I like to do if we're in another part of the world is we take one of those bus tours, you know, like a bus tour of Washington, D .C.

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or a bus tour of London or a bus tour of Sydney. We've done a couple of bus tours. So I like to think of it this way, there's

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Paul in Athens and he's taking a bus tour to see the sites, to see the monuments. But note there, there were no buses at the time, so that's just an anachronistic idea.

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But you get the thing of what's going on. He's somehow touring the city, the ancient city of Athens, up on the hill, up on...

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He can see the Acropolis, you know, he can see the Areopagus, the beautiful city.

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We've all seen photographs of the city of Athens. And at that time, the temple on the top was not in the condition that it is now.

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It wasn't in ruins. So there's Paul. His spirit is provoked in him because he saw that the city was full of idols.

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There's a statue of Zeus, Athena, Venus, Mars, Hermes.

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Name the deities, they're all there. If you know anything about how ancient paganism worked and how the ancient

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Greco -Roman pantheon of deities worked, they were deities for just about everything. Deities to help your crops grow, deities to help you with love and romance, deities to help you at work.

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There were deities even if you had mold and fungus growing in the walls of your house, you can go and there was a deity to take care of even that.

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It's strange if you think about it. So what does Paul do? Although he's kind of on furlough, well,

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Paul does the most loving thing of all. Paul then provoked within his spirit, he then goes and seeks out the synagogue.

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And he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons. And also in the marketplace, he finds the

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Agora in Athens and he plops himself down, hangs a shingle and starts to talk to everybody who will listen, who happened to be there in the marketplace, telling them about Jesus, the forgiveness of sins and how

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Christ was crucified and that he had risen from the dead. And if you know anything about ancient

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Athens, well, then you know that philosophy is a big deal in the ancient world in the city of Athens.

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And so the philosophers show up on the scene, Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, they began to converse with Paul and some of them said, what does this babbler wish to say?

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The things he was saying didn't make any sense to them. Others said, well, he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities.

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They're trying to figure out how to understand what this fellow is talking about. And the reason why they were saying that is because he was preaching

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Jesus and he was preaching the resurrection, God the Father calling his errant lost children back to himself.

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And so because he was preaching Jesus, they took hold of him, brought him to the

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Areopagus, and this is right in the shadow of the Acropolis there in the city of Athens, it's right in the shadow of it.

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It's a place you can actually visit on Google Earth if you haven't done it already. I always like to travel places that I can't necessarily afford via Google Earth or other people's vacation photos.

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It's a good way to travel, by the way, and you can go and you can check it out. But so there he is, and he's at the

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Areopagus, and so they ask him, may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?

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And so they're interested in this new teaching, and there's a reason why they're interested in this new teaching.

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And so it says, for you bring some strange things to our ear, we wish to know therefore what these things mean.

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And the reason for this is because the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there, they would spend their time in nothing except for telling or hearing something new.

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And so think of it this way, we're not all that much different than the Athenians. This is the days before television and things like this, but how many of you like watching the same series over and over again on Netflix?

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Nobody likes to do that. So everyone's looking forward to the next season of Stranger Things or whatever your favorite series is on Netflix, and we always look forward to when new series has come out because we like to watch something new.

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And that's kind of how the Athenians were at the same time too. So Paul then, standing in the midst of the

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Areopagus, he said these words, men of Athens, and note he doesn't take the hate route, okay?

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He says, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. He's seeking for some common ground, and you'll note that the

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Apostle Paul didn't go the way of Westboro Baptist, you know, where he put together a big sign and was standing outside of the actual ring of the

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Areopagus, maybe just on the periphery with a big sign that says God hates Epicureans, you know, or Stoics will burn in hell or something.

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He doesn't do that. No, instead he's making his appeal to them because God himself wishes, desires, wills for their repentance and their forgiveness.

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Even they are his children, even though they are completely lost in pagan idolatry.

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And they are blind and under the dominion of darkness. They don't even realize how far gone they are.

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So Paul says, men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious, for as I passed along,

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I observed the objects of your worship, I found an altar with this inscription, to the unknown

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God. Isn't that interesting? So here you've got these polytheists worshiping multiple deities, and just to hedge their bets to make sure there wasn't one or two that they had forgotten about, they set up an altar to an unknown deity in honor of that deity.

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And so you know, the Apostle Paul doesn't say, Jesus is a lot like Zeus, or Jesus is a lot like Mars. No, he doesn't do that.

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He reveals to them the unknown deity that they may or may not have properly recognized existed, but at least gave the option for that deity to reveal himself.

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So here's what Paul then says. So what therefore you worship is unknown.

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This I now proclaim to you, the God who made the world and everything in it. And note here how

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Paul goes, I mean, you can hear the same words, the same themes of our creeds, the

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Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, all things visible and invisible.

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You kind of get the idea here. So now he's going to reveal the unknown God and reveal that this

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God is the only God, that he's the one who has made everything in the world, in the universe, in the heavens above, in the earth beneath.

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He says, being the Lord of heaven and earth, he does not live in temples made by man.

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And you'll note, although he seeks some common ground in order to communicate with them, he never compromises the truth and makes it very clear that their whole religious system, based upon man serving gods via the temples that they've made and God supposedly living in those temples, this is not how it works,

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Paul says. God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself, and listen to the verb, he gives.

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God our Heavenly Father gives. He gave mankind life.

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He gave mankind breath. He gave us all everything that we have.

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There's nothing that you have that has not come from the hand of God, whether you believe in him or not.

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And the sad part is we receive all these things from the hand of God, and because of our fall into sin, we don't even recognize that God is the giver of these gifts.

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And note, he made from one man every nation. Here Paul affirms the

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Genesis account of Adam and Eve. He made all mankind from one man to live on the face of the earth, and he determined allotted periods, the boundaries of their dwelling place, and that they should seek

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God in the hope that they might feel their way toward him, find him. And then

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Paul tells us these comforting words. He's not actually far from each one of us, for in God we live and we move and we have our being.

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And then he quotes one of their own poets who says that we are indeed God's offspring.

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And by creation we are. By our fall into sin, we are the spawn of Satan.

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But in our original creation, we truly are God's offspring. He is our kind, loving, heavenly father and creator.

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So then Paul then says, being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone or an image formed by the art and the imagination of man.

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You see, the times of ignorance God has overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, to change their minds, to recognize that they are guilty of idolatry, of worshipping things that are not

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God's, of even worshipping themselves and their own ideas, calling them to repent, to say to God, you were right,

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I am wrong, to cry out for God, for mercy and forgiveness. And then, nope,

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Paul says, because God has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness, and indeed he will, he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and that man is

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Jesus Christ, the one who bled and died for your sins and mine. And of this then he is given assurance.

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He is given assurance by raising Jesus from the dead. And so here we see in Acts a beautiful picture, the great theme of scripture of how we are the offspring of God, by creation.

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We are not deity at all, nor will we ever be deity. But God is our Heavenly Father, he is our

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Creator, and he has had mercy on us. So then here again, what Peter says, you see,

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Christ suffered once for sins, for your sins, for my sins. He is the righteous one, so the righteous suffered for the unrighteous, so that he might bring us to God.

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You see, God was not content to let us just go off to hell. God instead has intervened in the most amazing way, even, even sacrificing his most precious

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Son in order that we might be restored sons and daughters of God.

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And so being put to death in the flesh, God made him alive in the Spirit. And then you'll note then, here in this text from our epistle, oh man, these are some scandalous words coming up here, because you'll note that in the confessions, we confess something strange and something that people have not considered for a long time, because so many people have deviated from historic

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Christianity. And so you remember the words, these words in our confessions, that Christ descended into hell.

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Here in 1 Peter 3, we find out why he descended into hell.

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It wasn't to suffer for sins, no, Christ did that on the cross. Instead we learn that the reason why

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Jesus descended into hell was to preach and to proclaim to the spirits in Sheol his victory, that he had won, to basically say,

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I'm vindicated for those people who did not believe. But that's not scandalous enough, because those of you who haven't been to confessional

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Lutheran churches, oh, this next part is going to rattle your cages, I can tell you that. We might end up having to do some study on this during the

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Bible study hour, but listen to what happens next. So Jesus went to the spirits in prison and proclaimed to them, because they formerly did not obey, when

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God's patience awaited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is eight persons, were brought safely through water.

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And so what Peter is doing here, he's invoking the worldwide flood, and yes, it was worldwide, it was a global flood.

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The flood of the time of Noah, where only eight human beings survived, only eight.

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And so he is pointing to a water salvation, and the flood itself is a type and shadow of all things of baptism.

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And so consider these words then. So he went to preach to the spirits that were in prison in Sheol, and those people who refused to believe and to obey, while God patiently waited during the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, and baptism, which is an anti -type to the flood.

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And that's what corresponds means there in the Greek, it's an anti -type to the flood. Baptism now saves you.

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And in our confessions, what do we confess? We believe in one baptism, and listen to the words, for the forgiveness of sins.

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That's what baptism is for. And so you'll note, we might want to pay attention because the idolatry of Athens still exists today.

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And the idolatry of Athens exists today in many places that claim to be Christian churches, by their denial of what

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Scripture says, and their creation of a different Jesus who does different things than the biblical

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Jesus. And it's all a way of ensnaring us. But remember what the confession says. He descended into hell, we believe in one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and if you are baptized for the forgiveness of your sins and your sins are truly forgiven, then is it any wonder that Peter says in 1

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Peter 3, 21, that baptism now saves you. It does so, not as a removal of dirt from the body, we call that a bath, my wife requires me to take a bath at least once a year, whether I need to or not, but it's not a bath.

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But instead is an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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So who has gone into heaven and is sitting at the right hand of God with angels and authorities and powers having been subjected to him.

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So this sixth Sunday of Easter, consider again the great love of God our

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Father. Consider again the great danger of idolatry, of making a god after your own imagination, after your own heart, after what you think is reasonable or unreasonable.

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And again, repent of your sins, your idolatry, your unbelief, and believe in the

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God who is, the one who sent his son to bleed and die so that you can be forgiven of all of your sins, including your idolatries, your false doctrines, including your false beliefs, your false prophecies, your false whatevers.

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And note that he is there to forgive you and believe in the God who is, who was, and who is to come.

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In the name of Jesus, Amen. 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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