The Lord be with you!

Christ is Risen!
He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!

Let us prepare our hearts for study in God’s Word, using this Sunday’s Collect of the Day, which helps us with the bigger picture of this week’s theme.

Let us pray:
O God, through the humiliation of Your Son You raised up the fallen world. Grant to Your faithful people, rescued from the peril of everlasting death, perpetual gladness and eternal joys; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Acts 2:14a, 36-41
The promise is for you and for your children, says Peter in his Pentecost sermon. The call to faith is for everyone, regardless of age, race, or location. Everyone whom the Lord calls is to repent and be baptized, but it remains true that it is the Lord who gives the gifts, not the believer who does something to earn them as a payment or a reward. What cuts us to the heart today? How do we get an adequate picture of where we need to repent? Our repentance journey begins with meditation on the Ten Commandments in our Catechism. What brings us around to the assurance of our forgiveness is the comfort that remains ever true for us in the remembrance of our baptism—whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved.

1 Peter 1:17-25
The Collect prayer we just prayed made the statement that God raised up the fallen world through Jesus’ humiliation. The epistle reading from First Peter helps put more details on that wide-sweeping theme. Jesus’ time of humiliation can be misinterpreted as only a teaching example of how we are to humble ourselves. While we should learn that lesson in our lives, the main reason why Jesus came is not to teach us more life-tips, but to offer up His life as a precious ransom price—more precious than gold or silver. You’ll hear something very similar in Dr. Martin Luther’s Catechism explanation of the Creed‘s Second Article.

Luke 24:13-35
The disciples were defeated and beaten as they walked from Jerusalem out to the country town of Emmaus. They ironically knew everything we confessed in the Creed, from the life of Jesus, His miracles, down to His sacrificial death and they even mentioned that they heard reports of His resurrection. Yet with all this information they have in their heads, they remained “foolish and slow of heart to believe” as Jesus said. So too we can have all the facts in our head, but we would still despair of our own inabilities if we fail to see Christ and His accomplishment of our forgiveness as the true Key to understanding the entire Bible.

“We had hoped that He would be the One to redeem Israel…” Great irony. Those Emmaus walkers had “social distanced” themselves from the true promise of redemption! Their hope had been placed in a different kind of redeeming, and not in the suffering and death of the Messiah that had already paid the full price for our forgiveness. They were hoping in a salvation that was something other than forgiveness. We thought we were too spiritually mature to fall into that kind of temptation, until we ran into a momentary inconvenience or time of trial, then all bets were off! We are constantly hoping in other things besides what our heavenly Father knows that we need. But Jesus continually comes to us with His precious blood-bought gifts and we can be certain that we have been redeemed as a new people of God, the Church!

Reflect on Hymn 464:
The three sad days have quickly sped,
He rises glorious from the dead,
All glory to our risen Head! Alleluia!

Lord, by the stripes which wounded Thee,
From death’s dread sting Thy servants free
That we may live and sing to Thee. Alleluia!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Please feel free to leave a message, a question, a thought, a prayer request.
I’d love to hear what you think.

Christ is Risen!
He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia.

God bless you!

Pr. Stirdivant