New Year’s Day Worship
Living by Faith = Living by the Grace of God

January 1, 2016


GOSPEL LESSON: Luke 12:22–34 [Seek first the kingdom of God]
And he said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith! And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.
“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Living by Faith = Living by the Grace of God

Jesus told his disciples, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” That is our problem as being the flock of God. We do fear. That was how we lived in 2015, will it be the same in 2016? We are anxious. We do worry. We do panic. Jesus calls this a faith problem. “O you of little faith!” he says. Think of it like this. It is a matter of which country you hold citizenship in. Are you a citizen of heaven or only a citizen of this world? To you have faith in God or in your national government? Is God your King or is someone else ruling your life? When you are worried about what to eat or what to wear or where to live or that thieves might break in your home, then look to your local city government and the local police. Those are the things everyone in the world seeks after.

Jesus said, “And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.” God knows what you need. And so, when we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” it is like a thank you prayer. “Thank you Lord for giving us our daily bread.” And when we can pray that, we are no longer worried about the things of this world. At that point we are seeking the Kingdom of God and his righteousness: “Thy Kingdom come. … For Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory. Amen.”

That is living by faith. Of course we will have problems. There are times when we will wonder how God is going to get us through our problem of 2016. Then we await the miracle of God working in our lives. We await God’s mercy. We live by his mercy.

We can live by faith because God is faithful to us. We can be faithful to God because God is faithful to us. God has made promises and he has kept them and he will keep them again. The Bible is the record of God’s promises and how he kept them. He kept his promise to Abraham: as many descendents as the stars in the sky and the Promised Land for them to live. He kept his promise to King David: one of his descendents, Jesus, was born as the Savior. Jesus kept the promise that he would die for our sin and rise on the third day. The promised Holy Spirit came on Pentecost. And so we know that Jesus will be faithful to his promise. He will come again and take us to heaven. These are the promises of God.

We have made the promise to be faithful to God. In our Baptism we made that promise, in our Confirmation we confirmed that promise, when we pray to God and each time in the Sacrament of the Altar we renew that promise, which is the New Covenant Promise in Christ’s Blood. And in the Sacraments, Christ renews his promise to us, the promise to be faithful.

That is what it means to live by faith. It means to live in the faithfulness of God’s promise to us. And so we can take a journey by faith, like Abraham. It means we can stand up for faith, even if like Daniel and his friends we find that we are standing in a den of lions or a fiery furnace. The Year 2016 might be like that! But at the same time, living by faith means we are, like Jesus said, as free as the birds of the air and as lovely as the lilies of the field.

Amen.

The Year 2016 is the Year of the Monkey

1 Kings 10:22 (= 2 Chronicles 9:21)

“For the king (Solomon) had merchant ships at sea with the fleet of Hiram. Once every three years the merchant ships came bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and monkeys.”

Michael Nearhood, Pastor
Okinawa Lutheran Church


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