Pious Lutheran

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Everybody knows that pithy little saying is a joke, it’s a farce. Sure sticks and stones may break bones, but words actually have the power to hurt to a far more disastrous extent.  As a child if you break your arm or leg or a rib, these things heal, probably you’ll grow up and it’ll be just fine. But as a child if your parents constantly berate you and mistreat you, abuse you with words, you may never recover from that. A bully can beat a kid up with his fists or the bully can torture the kid with words, driving the child to suicide.  As adults, the stakes are even higher! We have a serious 8th commandment issue going on today, where anybody and everybody is encouraged to give false testimony against their neighbor, speak lies against them, betray them, slander them, hurt their reputation, and explain everything in the harshest way. The media will publish rumors and outright lies about people, ruinin...

Marriage is under assault. It’s not just so-called gay marriage which is the issue, that’s more or less a symptom of the underlying problem. The underlying problem is the disdain and the rejection of the institution of marriage as a whole. This really does matter, it’s an issue of utterly vital importance. It’s significant, because the earthly marriage of a husband to his wife, is a divine glimpse into the glory of the heavenly marriage of the Christ to His bride the church. That marriage matters to God is evident from this His first miracle Jesus performs upon earth. “ On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. ” Among all of the miracles Jesus performed, such as a casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead, the first miracle He did was to bless a marriage by turning water into wine. The celebration of marriage is so important that He would make sure there is an ab...

Where is your God? Where do you have to go to find and experience Him? Where do you look for Him? Do you search the golf course or the lake, the camp ground or the mountains? Do you find Him under the covers of your bed behind closed eyes or in your place of work where you can make a lot of money? I know many say that they can experience God in these different places, and in fact that’s their prefered location to be with God.  But you don’t need to go out and look for God; He’s not lost. God is right where He should be. Jesus is exactly where He promises to be: in His Father’s house.  The problem is not that God is lost, the problem is that we very quickly forget where He is and promises to be. The problem is not with God, the problem is with us. Joseph and Mary, the parents of Jesus, had this same problem when Jesus was but twelve years of age.  They lost their Kid. Not just any kid, not just any little boy, but they lost the Messiah, the Christ, they lost the Son...

“ Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” ” Isn’t it interesting how God chose to work among the magi of the Gentiles? Here are these unbelievers, these Gentiles from eastern lands, probably Persia, they’ve seen a star in the sky revealed to them by the Lord so that they might come to Israel to worship the Christ Child.  God worked a great extraordinary miracle for these men, revealing a bright light in the sky to lead them to the Messiah. But what’s most fascinating is that God didn’t lead these magi directly to Jesus through supernatural means. Instead, the star led them into Jerusalem in Israel, led them to king Herod.  Once they arrived in Jerusalem, the extraordinary star left them for a while, and they relied upon the ordinary. “ When Herod the king heard this,...