Class Devotion

      Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Today was a good day, but a long one.  I preached at church today (I plan to post that sermon manuscript tomorrow).  It went well and people seemed to really like my Reformation sermon.  I also taught adult Bible study on Philippians 3 which led to some very good discussions. Then a member of the church invited Pastor, the other seminary student, and myself out to his house for dinner.  He is a widower of three years now.  His wife died from ALS.  So while she was sick, three of her friends would come over every Sunday to cook a meal for them and help with some of the house work.  Now that his wife has passed away, her friends still come over two Sundays a month and cook lunch for him.  So these ladies cooked lunch for us and it was delicious.  Then Don showed us all around his place and finally his shop.  Don used to fly glider planes and then took up the hobby of flying remote control airplanes.  He has built several of these planes and is currently working on building an actual size glider.  He also has a model A and a model T that he has restored.  Between the old cars, the model planes, and the glider he is building his show was full but extremely awesome.  I was so jealous of his tools and shop and the other student is into planes so he had a great time showing us around and we thoroughly enjoyed it.  However, we didn't leave his place until 4 and then with the drive home it was almost five before we got back from church.  So a good day, but again a long day.
        This evening I helped my friend put together baby furniture for their nursery and hung out with some guys in the dorm.  Overall a good day.
       I am going to post a devotion I gave in class the other day.  The class is an elective on the Holy Spirit.   We have to do a devotion in class for a specific group and the point is obviously to be on some work, point, or focus of the Spirit.  It was supposed to be a ten minute devotion but I got so excited about it I wrote a full fifteen to eighteen minute sermon.  So I am going to post the whole thing on here, but when I actually gave it in class I cut it down on the fly and shortened it up to ten and a half minutes.  The guys really liked it and I am hoping the professor liked it as well.  It is intended for a men's club so I apologize if you ladies do not feel included but the one lady we have in our class told me she still liked it a lot.  Hope you enjoy it too.

Group that my devotion is addressed to: A Men’s Club group that meets one evening a month to have a Bible study, discuss the group’s business, and end with a meal together. The group is made up of about 20 guys ranging in age from early twenties to late eighties. Their careers range from blue collar to white collar work.

         Tonight I want to talk about something I think all of us men have in common. Now I am going to be making some broad generalizations so I apologize in advance if you feel like I am not including you in these or you think I am way off base with my perceptions, but I am speaking from my limited 25 years of life’s experience. I think all of us men have a sense of pride about us. Now I don’t want you to jump to the conclusion that I am saying you are full of sinful pride because this is not what I said. I am not talking about being arrogant or egotistical, that kind of pride as in breaking the first commandment to make yourself God. No, am talking about a sense of pride, which I think is not a sinful thing at all. Actually I think this is a good quality of us men, maybe even a great one. We have this sense of pride in the fact that we want to be the best we can be. We want to be the best employee or boss, we want to do the best job we can so that people know we are the type of person who can and will get the job done and done right. And this sense of pride carries over into so many aspects of our lives. As good husbands, we want to provide for our families best we can, as a friend or brother we want to be loyal and trustworthy, as a citizen we want to be respected by being respectful to others. Now I know we are not all perfect at this all the time, but we have this sense of pride about us and how we live our lives. We want to be dependable, trustworthy, and responsible. We want people to be able to count on us and know we won’t let them down. Not a bad thing is it? And I truly think this comes into play in every one of relationships with people. We never want to hurt someone, let someone down, or even worse have someone give up on us.
       A short personal example of this would be when I was in middle school; I had this football coach who was a real hard nose kind of guy. He yelled at us for every little mistake. He made us run more than I had ever run before and he made sure we did everything perfectly. However, he told us very early on in the year that if he yells at us, not to take it personally. If he is yelling at you it is because he knows you can be better than what you are showing. He told us if you make an obvious mistake and he doesn’t yell; that’s when you need to be worried. When he stops yelling, that is when he has decided you can’t be any better – that is when he has given up on you. I was the starting center for the team and one day in practice I made a horrible, just plain stupid mistake. I knew it, the rest of the line knew it, everyone knew it. However, when I looked over at our coach, he just calmly told us to do it again. I went into internal panic mode. I thought for sure he had given up on me, that he had just come to expect mistakes from me because he didn’t think I could be any better than that. I really thought he was done with me. It was a horrible feeling. It was a horrible feeling because I honestly thought I had let him down, and my mind told me the worst thing I could hear; he had given up on me. This is not a pleasant thing for us men and our sense of pride.
      Now who would you guys say is the manliest man in the Bible, besides Jesus of course? (Ask and let them respond). Now there are a lot of answers to this because there are a lot of manly men in the Bible we can look up to, but for me my mind always goes to King David. He killed Goliath with a stone as a child. He lived life on the run with a band of soldiers hiding from King Saul. And yet, this manly man of a shepherd, a soldier, and a king gives us so much of his thoughts, feelings, and emotions in the psalms. We get a deeper look into the make of this manly man by reading the psalms he wrote. And the psalm I want to look at specifically today is psalm 51. David writes this after the whole Bathsheba incident. After he has committed adultery, murder, and an innocent child dies because of his sin, he writes this psalm of confession.

[READ Psalm 51:1-12]

      We hear David’s begging, pleading, graveling for God’s mercy in these verses. We hear his deep confession that he has been sinful from conception and has continued to live that sinful life style. He asks God to completely change him, give him a whole new heart. But verse 11 is where I really want us to pay attention. Even though he knows he has been sinful since conception, even though he knows he has really messed up and committed an awful, heinous sin, he begs God not to leave him, not to give up on him. I thought I felt bad when I was questioning if my football coach had given up on me, can you imagine how David felt questioning if God had given up on him. Take not your Holy Spirit from me! What a powerful statement! We hear very often the different psalmists asking God not to turn His face from His people, not to hide His presence from them, but here David asks God specifically not to take His Holy Spirit from him. We know David did indeed have the Spirit of God with him from 1 Samuel 16:13 where the Spirit of God departs from Saul and is given to David as Samuel anoints him. David is asking God not to take that Spirit from him. Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever felt that you had done something so awful, so heinous, so wrong that God might give up on you? Or maybe it’s not one major sin, but just so many little sins all added up together that God might give up on you? God would just say enough with you, turn His presence from you and even worse take His Holy Spirit from you?
      As men who do not want to let people down, this is the ultimate let down, this is the extreme low for us, the bottom of the barrel of complete helplessness and hopelessness to think God has given up on us, He has taken His Spirit from us. And to make matters even worse, we can’t fix that. You see as men, we also like to fix things. Our sense of pride tells us even when we do let someone down, there is something we can do to make it up to them, we can actively do the right thing to make up for the wrong thing. If we let our spouse down, we can get her a gift, apologize, make intentional effort to show her we have learned, we can do something to fix it and hope she will count on us again. But if God has given up on us, what can we do to fix that? What could we possibly do to make up for being a wretched sinner our entire lives from conception to show God we are worth not giving up on? The answer is nothing! We can do nothing ourselves to fix our relationship with God. And that leaves us truly and utterly helpless and hopeless. This is the horrible feeling David is feeling, that God has given up on him and there is nothing he can do about it. This is the horrible feeling we may feel at some point in our lives. Maybe you already have felt this way, maybe you feel this way right now, or maybe it won’t be for a while yet until you feel this way, but sooner or later I think it is a safe bet to say we will find ourselves at some point under this extreme despair. So what can you do when you feel this way, when you find yourself as hopeless or helpless as David does?
     We do exactly what David did, we beg, we plead, we gravel for God’s mercy confessing all the horrible sins we have done, confessing that we have been sinful since conception and through our entire life, and we place all hope that He will grant us His mercy, that He will forgive us. We place the only hope we could possibly have in that situation that because He sent His Son to die for us, to forgive us of all of those sins, that He will not give up on us, that He will not take His Holy Spirit from us. We know we have His Holy Spirit in us and with us because we have been baptized. We trust He will not take that Holy Spirit from us because He has redeemed us through the death and resurrection of Jesus. But how can we really be sure? How can we know God hasn’t given up on us, how can we know He hasn’t taken His Holy Spirit from us? Because of the words St. Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians chapter 12. (Read 1 Corinthians 12:1-3). We have full assurance God has not given up on us, that He has not taken His Holy Spirit from us because it is by the power of the Spirit alone that we can say “Jesus Christ is Lord”. Can you say Jesus Christ is Lord? Say it with me, “Jesus Christ is Lord”. Do you believe it? YES! Then you know the Holy Spirit is still in you and still with you. You know God has not given up on you, but instead has forgiven you of all your sins through the redemption in Jesus Christ who truly is Lord. And actually it is by the power of the Spirit alone that we come pleading and begging for God’s mercy in the first place. Without His presence still being with us, we would not feel guilty of sins or scared that God has given up on us. It is the presence of the Spirit in us that keeps us in the faith that keeps us coming back to begging for God’s mercy, and it is the Spirit in us that allows us to know God has forgiven us.
      You see it was only a couple plays later in that same practice that I made another mistake and my coach lit into me and yelled good and loud at me, and I secretly wanted to smile. I wanted to smile because I knew he hadn’t given up on me. The same way, when we can say Jesus Christ is Lord and truly believe it, we know God has not given up on us, He has not taken His Holy Spirit from us.
      Then, with this assurance that God has not given up on you, He has not taken His Spirit from you, you can now use that sense of pride to live every day knowing that the Holy Spirit is with you, assuring you that you are forgiven and not forgotten by God. So I challenge you with this, how are you going to use this sense of pride that comes from knowing God has forgiven you and given you your salvation, to live a life that shows the Holy Spirit is still with you and God has not given up on you?

Let us pray,
Dear Heavenly Father,
      Thank you so much for never giving up on us. We know we are sinful beings, we have been sinful since conception, and yet instead of giving up on us, instead of taking Your Holy Spirit from us, You allow Your Spirit to bring us to our knees, to plead for Your mercy. And through the forgiveness of sins that comes from Your Son’s death and resurrection, You do give us Your mercy, You forgive us, You create in us new hearts and renew our spirits, you wash us to be white as snow. We beg of you that You would always keep Your Spirit with us and that through the power of Your Spirit, we may live our lives in a way that shows Your love, grace and mercy to others. In the name of Your Holy Spirit who is with us but also lives and reigns with You and Your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen.