DISTINCTLY LUTHERAN | Means of Grace | Ben Anderson

Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to Redeemer.

Happy Labor Day, happy State Fair Day, happy close of the cabin day.

I don't know, whatever is going on.

A lot is going on.

School has started.

We are in the full swing of things.

Hey, if we haven't met before, my name is Ben Anderson, and I'm one of the pastors here, and it's so great to spend a little time with you this morning.

So if you are a first-time guest with us, I want to extend a special welcome to you.

We are so glad you're here.

We're so glad that you took the risk to be with us, and we hope you have a great experience.

If there's anything that I can personally do to make that experience better, please, please, please let me know.

But this is one thing I do know, and I'm looking forward to next week.

September Fest.

This is a gathering for our community here as a church.

It's a gathering for our community as a whole, and it's a great time to invite a friend.

And so as you sat down, you probably saw one of those little yellow cards sitting around.

Please put that in your pocket.

Put two in your pocket and invite a friend or two because it's going to be a great opportunity.

I mean, come on, there's free food, free bouncy houses, free petting zoo.

There's just all sorts of stuff.

In fact, this week I found out there's even something a little bit more special coming up.

And so if you are a Timberwolves fan, here's what's going on.

We had somebody drop off two free tickets to go to a Timberwolves this year, Timberwolves game, to watch out the new look Timberwolves.

And so if you are a basketball fan, you know a basketball fan, if you show up, you will have a chance to win those tickets.

And so that's going to be another fun thing that we're going to have for you next week.

Well, today, we are going to close up shop on our latest sermon series called Distinctly Lutheran.

And this is a series where we've been looking at the Lutheran stream within our church that exists here at Redeemer.

And we've been doing a deep dive.

But even though it's a deep dive, it has been a quick dive.

Basically, over the course of four weeks, I have taken four seminary classes and distilled them into four 30-minute conversations, which means we are talking fast, we are moving fast, and there is a lot of scraps left on the table for you to digest later as you continue exploring these concepts.

In fact, I know we're moving fast because my wife, after one of the Sundays, said, you are talking way too fast.

And I actually thought in my mind, I wish my seminary professors spoke this fast.

I would have got through there a lot more quickly.

But I hope you're enjoying the series.

In fact, I know at least some of you are because I saw this great interaction this past week between uh a 20-something and a low 30-something.

And they were holding in their hand, this is no joke, a book of Concord, which is like a collection of all the core Lutheran teachings, and it is huge.

And they were just so excited to dive into this thing.

Now, one thing I didn't do is I didn't come over and tap them on the shoulder and just give them a warning that when I was 20-something, I did the exact same thing.

And now every weekend for the rest of my life, I have to stand up here in front of church, put myself on display, and hope it goes okay.

But I'm so excited for those of you who have enjoyed it and have been taking a deeper dive into really this beautiful distinctives of Lutheranism.

But for some of you, uh maybe you haven't enjoyed the series, but you have tolerated the series, I have some good news for you.

We are starting a new series up next week.

It's called Hear Me Out.

And it's uh it's really a series based off of some things I wish I saw more, which is a conversation between the generations.

Because oftentimes, this is what we do as people is we hang out with people who are like us.

They talk like us, they look like us, right?

They've had the same life experiences as us.

And oftentimes we gather those groups together in generations, right?

We hang out with people who are generationally the same to us.

And then sometimes what happens is we sit in our little hubs and we complain about the other generations.

The silent generation, they complain about the boomers.

And the boomers, well, they can't tolerate the Gen X crowd, and the Gen X, well, they're annoyed with the millennials, and the millennials, well, they can't do it with the Gen Z.

It's just kind of a mess sometimes.

But here's what's true if you are a follower of Christ, no matter which generation that you are in, you have the Holy Spirit living in you, and you have the Holy Spirit speaking through you.

Which means we have a lot to learn from each other.

So we're gonna look into some generational differences.

We're gonna look at how the values of each generation collide with scriptural truth.

And I think by the end, we're all gonna learn something from everyone, and maybe even have a deeper appreciation of the person sitting across from us.

But before we get to that, you have to wait a week.

We are going to finish out our latest series.

And I'm gonna put you to a test.

Now, you don't have to raise your hand, you can whisper it to the person with you, that's fine, or just think it in your head to see if you're right.

But in the first week, we we unpacked a section of scripture where Jesus is praying.

It's one of the longest prayers that we have recorded of his in the Bible.

And throughout that prayer, there was a theme.

Do you guys remember the theme?

The theme was unity.

This is what the prayer looked like in John 17.

It says, My prayer is not for them alone.

I pray also for those who believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one.

Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

Now, this is Christ's prayer to his disciples.

That they would have unity.

And then the disciples after them would have unity.

And all the followers of Christ throughout the generations, that they would all have unity.

Now, why did Christ pray this prayer over them?

Because unity is rare.

Unity is special, unity is magnetic.

People notice when people are unified despite their differences.

You see, we we live in a world of division, don't we?

And we have political division, we have division among the sexes, we we have division over economic status, we have division over race, we divide over everything.

And if people look at the church and all they see is more division, it's really hard for them to look at us and think, oh, I wonder if that's if that's where I can find hope.

I was looking at the study recently.

It's from the Center of Study for Global Christianity, and this is wild.

They estimate that around the globe, there are now an estimated 400, sorry, 45,000 different denominations.

Not 45,000 churches, 45,000 different denominations of Christians who aren't just seeing, aren't have the capacity to see eye to eye on something, and so they split.

Now, why does this happen?

I think it comes down to something that I've started calling theological humility, right?

They have a lack of theological humility.

This is what I mean.

If you read the Bible, or if you think about Jesus and you assume that you have to answer every question that anyone might ever bring up, or that you know the answer to any question that anyone might bring up, or you need to be a part of a denomination that answers every question for anything that people might bring up, the only natural result is fracture.

Because every time that you start thinking something slightly different than what I'm thinking, well then we have to part our ways, and now we have 45,000 denominations in the world.

This is a natural result of that thinking.

But here's the problem is we are finite people.

We have finite minds who are trying to wrap our minds around an infinite God, which means of course we're not going to find full alignment in everything.

In fact, if I can answer every question with my finite mind about an infinite God, I have shrunk that God down to someone well exactly about my size, haven't I?

But what does the Bible teach us about God?

In Isaiah 55 it says this.

For my thoughts, this is God, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Here's a little takeaway for you.

And I think this will be so, so helpful as we explore this conversation today, as we explore Christianity in general, and it's this idea.

A little bit of humility goes a long way towards unity within the church.

You see, I think someday I know this, we're gonna be reunited with Christ, those who are followers of Christ.

And when that day happens, here's a few things I am certain are gonna take place almost instantly.

One is when we are sitting in front of the magnitude of God, we are going to realize so quickly how small we really are.

We're also gonna realize how wrong theologically that we got it.

Or granted, realize that we didn't have it all together, we didn't have it all figured out, that God was much bigger than we thought He was.

And we are going to realize how much time that we wasted squabbling over things that didn't matter.

Instead of pursuing people that mattered to God.

So today I want to give you a little helpful tool as we approach this idea of theological humility.

It comes from a Lutheran theologian.

His name is Rupertus Maldinius.

And if you're looking for a name for your child that's on the way, uh Rupertus sounds great.

I had one guy from the first service try to convince me that his middle name was Rupertus.

I'm not buying that at all.

But Rupertus had some great things to say, and this is a quote that I have etched into my brain.

It is so, so good.

In essentials, unity, in non-essentials, liberty, and in all things, charity.

He puts these things into three separate categories.

So let's take it first, take a look at the first one.

What are the essentials?

Well, we actually talked about this in the first week.

One of the things that we can begin to really grasp our hands around what are the essentials of the faith are the five solas.

We believe we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone, through, as revealed through Scripture alone, for God's glory alone.

And if we have these things in common, we can we can find unity with people that maybe we didn't know we could have unity with before.

But also when we have these things clearly on our mind, we know when sometimes, even though it's challenging or difficult, those are areas when we actually have to create disunity and we have to walk away.

Sometimes I call those things the die for principles of the faith.

I mean, these are the main and plain.

If someone violates those, we just can't find community with them at that point in time.

But how about the non-essentials?

I mean, how do we know what a non-essential is?

Well, here's a good rule of thumb.

If you're reading a bunch of books on a specific topic and you're reading from people who are Bible-believing, God fearing, followers of Christ, and then you read somebody else who is God fearing, Bible-believing, followers of Christ, and all of a sudden you realize that there's a bunch of people who fit that category that don't think the exact same way about whatever that topic is, guess what?

That's probably cluing you in that this is a non-essential.

And these exist within the church.

I mean, we have things like this all the time.

We all believe that God created the world.

But if you try to figure out exactly how that actually took place mechanically, people will divide over this stuff.

If you if you if you think about the end of the world, we all know that Christ will return, He's promised to return.

But if you try to figure out all the mechanics of what is that gonna look like, what will the government look like, what will the leadership look like, what's gonna take place before Jesus shows up, you're gonna run into hundreds of theories on these things.

Which means these things are not mission critical.

Right?

They're interesting.

We can talk about them.

These are fun things to sit down with a cup of coffee and chat with somebody about, but in the end, sometimes these things become a distraction versus the main thing.

But then there are other things that are in between.

Right?

It's not one thing, it's not like the solas, and it's not 10 plus or 100 plus things like the non-essentials.

It's these things that land in the center.

What do we do with those things?

Sometimes I like to call these things the defend category.

These are things that we we take a stance on, we want to wrestle with them, and oftentimes they lead us to our distinctive, specifically in our context, a Lutheran distinctive.

What do we hold on to, even though we know that other people might not believe and think the same thing?

And so today we're gonna dive into a couple of those topics.

We're gonna talk about baptism and communion today.

But as we do so, I'm gonna put in these principles from Rupertus into play, and we're gonna talk about charity and humility.

So, first of all, let's start with charity.

Here is the reality.

I'm gonna talk about these Lutheran distinctives today.

Some of these might be new to you.

Some of them might not be new to you, but you just haven't bought into them yet or been able to wrap your mind around them yet.

And I want you to know that is fine.

You still have a place at Redeemer, even if we don't have full alignment on these specific topics.

Now I think you're missing out, but you definitely have a place.

You have a seat.

You don't have to go anywhere.

And you have a seat and you have place in Christ's church in general.

But I do want to tell you that I am fully aware that when I sit in front of my King someday in Christ, that I am fully convinced that he will say, Well, at least on that topic, you got kind of close.

I mean, it's gonna be one of those things.

I think all of us will have that experience.

So we do approach these things with humility.

In fact, that humble spirit works perfectly within a Lutheran framework when we're talking about these specific topics.

Because we call baptism and communion a sacrament, which comes from a word that means mystery.

Which means with our finite minds, trying to understand an infinite God, we're not going to fully be able to wrap our minds around it.

But we don't believe it because we can understand it.

We believe it because this is what the Bible says.

So let's talk about what is a sacrament within a Lutheran church?

Well, it has to fit three categories.

The first one is it's something commanded by God.

I didn't think it up, you didn't think it up, God thought it up and he told us to do it.

The other piece is there has to be some sort of physical element to it, right?

Something that we can taste, touch, feel, experience, right?

It has to be a physical element.

And then there has to be a promise of grace that God is going to use it in a powerful way in our life and draw us closer to himself through it.

So let's start off.

We're going to talk about baptism.

So, what is baptism?

Depends on what type of church you go to.

We kind of divide over these things.

We debate over these things.

Right?

For some people, they would say baptism is an outward sign of an inward change in my heart.

For other people, they would say it's it's kind of like circumcision, but there's a parallel, and it's because there's circumcision, we we allow young people to do it, old people to do it, we're not really worried about ages.

But our hope is that somewhere along the way that they will come to faith.

That is what will seal their baptism.

For others, they would say that Christ is actually in work, working in the waters of baptism.

We call this being efficacious.

That God is doing something there that maybe we don't fully understand, but he is at work behind the scenes in the life of the recipient.

Now, people debate over these things, and we'll debate over these things for the rest of time, but we can still unify around Christ.

But here's where Luther landed on the subject.

He said it this way in the small catechism: Baptism is not just plain water, but it is the water included in God's command and combined with God's word.

So let's let's start with the command, right?

These are the three pieces of a sacrament.

Let's start with the command.

In Matthew 28, it says this.

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had it told them to go.

When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted.

Then Jesus came to them and said, All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, and surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.

Now, once again, this is not my idea.

Baptism is not your idea.

Baptism is God's idea.

Right?

So we have the command, but we also have a physical element, which is water.

Now, people debate over this too.

How much water is enough water?

So if we look into the original Greek, the word here is baptizo, which honestly is not helpful.

Because baptismo can mean all sorts of things.

It can mean to pour, to dip, to fully submerge, to plunge, right?

All these things.

It can mean to wash.

So it doesn't really help us out that much.

And as Lutherans, where we kind of landed on this is we are not worried about the amount of water.

I mean, you can pour, you can sprinkle, you can do full immersion.

It does not matter.

We just want to follow the command and we want to use the water and we want God to be at work in it.

Which brings us to our final piece.

We expect God to be at work in baptism.

This is what 1 Peter says.

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.

He was put to death in the body, but made alive in the spirit.

After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits, to those who were disobedient long ago when God patiently waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.

In it only a few people, eight and all, were saved through water.

And this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also.

Not the removal of dirt from the body, but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God.

It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven, is at God's right hand, with angels, authorities, and powers in submission to Him.

Now, if you grew up in a denomination like I grew up, this is an incredibly challenging section of Scripture.

In fact, oftentimes when I was younger, if I would have read this scripture in 1 Peter, I would have done one of two things.

I would have either just skipped over it, or I would have used a lot of effort to explain it away.

But this is not the Lutheran way.

See, in a simple Lutheran understanding, as we read Scripture, we really put two key role rules into place that I want you to hold on to.

And one is we're gonna start from the posture that this is a literal statement, right?

He says what he means and he means what he says, unless it's obvious that he's not.

I mean, unless that it's clear that it's an allegory or hyperbole or story of some nature.

And whenever we run into something like this that challenges us, what we're gonna do beyond that, if it's not clear, is we're going to make sure it's clear by interpreting scripture in light of scripture.

So I'm gonna find other pieces of scripture that are maybe maybe more main and plain, and I'll attach these two together to get a fuller picture of what's going on here.

So in these words, what we do is we take God at his word, that he's doing something in here, that he's using baptism to draw us to himself.

Now, this is how it works.

We can get baptized and teach, or we can teach and get baptized.

And this is what I mean.

In scripture, you see this.

You have people who are that they hear the gospel, it's proclaimed to them, and they opt into baptism.

But also in the book of Acts, we see the inversion of that, or at least the strong implication of that.

In the book of Acts, it says that whole households were being baptized.

Well, in that day, who was a household?

Young and old, multi-generational families living together.

And when a household got baptized, what it wasn't saying is just a couple, you know, dinks in there, 40 years old, no kids, and it's like the whole family is there, right?

We're talking whole households participating in this.

Additionally, think about the Great Commission.

When Jesus gives this commandment to baptize, what is the word that he uses?

He says, all.

It's inclusive language.

He doesn't say some, he doesn't put qualifiers on, he just says all.

And even beyond that, think about the culture in this day.

Many of these people were Jewish people, and what did the Jewish people know?

When you had a son at eight days old, what did you do?

You circumcised him.

You brought him into the covenant.

He hadn't made a proclamation of faith.

They brought him into the covenant, expectant of what God was going to do in his life.

In fact, the Apostle Paul ties these two ideas together in Colossians 2.

It says this.

In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands.

Your whole self, ruled by the flesh, was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.

So what do we do?

We teach and baptize, and we baptize and we teach.

But this does come with a warning in Scripture.

I want to take you to Mark 16, 16.

This is so important.

It says, Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.

And here's the key part but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

See, in the end, it does come down to faith.

Do I trust Christ's work on the cross?

Do I have a personal relationship with him?

Am I a follower of Christ?

And if that is the case, you can rest in your baptism.

You can light that candle, you can celebrate what Christ has done, and you can rest in that.

But even though there's security in baptism, baptism is not a safety net.

This is what I mean.

If you get baptized as a child, or baptized at any point in time, and then spend the rest of your life rejecting God, pushing against God, not wanting anything to do with God, it's not like you're gonna get to heaven and he's gonna say, Well, I have no idea who you are, but your parents baptized in your little kid.

Or you're at camp that one time.

No, he's gonna say, I have no idea who you are, because you've rejected your baptism.

You pushed against the God who pursues you.

We're gonna move on to communion here.

Now, once again, we are going to approach this topic with theological humility as well, which means even though I'm thoroughly convinced of this in my study of scripture, and this is what I believe you might not, and that's fine.

You still have a place here, you still have a place in the family of God, uh, but I do think you're missing out.

So let's look at the four main understandings of communion within the Lutheran church, or sorry, within the Christian church.

For some people, Christ is fully present in the bread and the wine, but the physical elements don't change.

So it actually turns into Christ's body and blood, but physically you you can't see the difference.

For others, Christ is present in with and under.

This is the Lutheran stance, by the way, if you're remembering from your small catechism or confirmation, in with and under, Christ is there in with and under, but the physical elements don't change.

And then for others, it's a spiritual concept.

Like Christ is present as we're taking communion, he's doing something, but we don't really know what's going on.

And there's the fourth view, which is the memorial view, where it's just symbolic, just a time of remembrance.

And once again, like I said, if we land in different categories, that's fine.

You still have a seat on the bus, but I'm hoping to invite you into something so much richer today, something bigger today, which is the Lutheran understanding.

So we're gonna dive in.

We are going to look at the Last Supper slash first communion meal in Matthew 26.

This is what it says.

It says, While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take and eat, this is my body.

Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink from it all of you.

This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Now, once again, in a sacrament, we need three things.

So we need, first of all, the commandment.

And every time that you take communion, or you've been participating in a church that's taking communion, what do they say?

Do this in remembrance of me.

The command.

Now, if you're really astute, you might be thinking, but that wasn't in the passage you just read.

And you would be right.

You see, the last supper, the first communion meal, is actually referenced multiple times in the Bible.

And so what we've done as a church is we bring all these concepts together to give us the most whole picture of what Christ said and what was happening in that specific time.

And that's where do this in remembrance of me comes in.

So we have God's commandment.

And then, of course, we need a physical element.

We have bread and wine, which leads us to God doing something in this moment, a means of grace.

And what does Jesus say?

He said, This is my body, and this is my blood for what?

For the forgiveness of sins.

This is how Luther captures it in his small catechism.

He says, It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the bread and wine, instituted by Christ himself for us Christians to eat and to drink.

Here's another section.

It says this These words given and shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins, shows that in the sacrament, forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation are given through these words.

For there is for where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.

Now, once again, this is a mystery.

It is confusing.

It seems too good to be true.

So once again, we have to go back to our simple rules for Lutheran understanding.

We are going to start with the fact that we are assuming he's saying what he is saying, right?

It is literal, unless otherwise proven to be hyperbole, allegory, or story.

And then if it's still confusing to us, we are going to take scripture in light of scripture to have a fuller sense of what we're actually looking at.

And so this is the posture that's going to take us to John 6.

Because you might not have noticed this before, but but when these disciples took communion for that first time and Jesus spoke this way, this was not the first time that they had heard these words or him speak this way.

In John 6 it says this.

Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves.

How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

Jesus said to them, Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.

For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink.

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.

Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.

This is the bread that came down from heaven.

Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

Now, once again, in this section of Scripture, this is hard to wrap our minds around.

And when those people in that first century heard these things, it was hard for them to wrap their minds around because it sounds terrifying.

It sounds like cannibalism.

And if you read that whole section of scripture, there's this back and forth, and they're wrestling with it and trying to figure it out, and they're asking Jesus questions, and he keeps going back to these same words.

This is my body, this is my blood, this is my body, this is my blood.

He does it three times, and at the end of this conversation, the crowd is divided.

Some people walk away, and some people stay.

And I hope today that you stay.

And I hope today that you experience something deeper in communion than you ever have before.

Because there's a richness here.

We don't just stop and we we don't just remember what Christ did on the cross.

We don't stop and just remember a moment in history.

We don't just stop and say, hey, I'm sorry for the sins that I've done this week or this past month, because honestly, we can do that at any point in time in our lives.

And we should be doing that on a regular basis.

But what sets this part apart from those moments is Christ's promises that he will be with us, his body and blood for our forgiveness, which doesn't make intellectual sense, but it makes biblical sense, and that's all that matters, especially from a Lutheran lens.

Because Scripture never calls us allegory, it's not hyperbole, it's not just simply a story.

I mean, this is this is teaching from Christ, this is what is happening.

In fact, Jesus, in his own words, triples down on this concept, and then the rest of the Bible backs it up in the words that he's saying, which means it's possible today that when you come to communion for the first time, that you experience something fuller than you ever experienced before.

Or maybe for you, this is kind of like your first communion class that you didn't know you were walking into.

And now you are excited to come forward and to receive when the time is right, and I hope you do.

Because I know God's going to meet you in that moment.

Well, all throughout the series, we have been unpacking some Lutheran distinctives, but I've also been sharing my own story.

Because I didn't grow up Lutheran, as many of you have heard.

I grew up in a town where all my Lutheran friends had a lot of Lutheran friends, but they were not what I would call people who were walking their walk.

I mean, they knew the stuff, they were confirmed, they did all the things, but they weren't living it out.

I mean, they swore all the time.

They watched movies that my parents would never let me watch, drinking before age, drinking too much, right?

If it was on the table, they were doing it.

And so when I went to a Lutheran university later on in life, you can see where I would have thought, I'm here to save the Lutherans.

But what I found on that campus was this.

I found people who were passionately in love with Jesus Christ.

In fact, more than me.

And I was incredibly humbled by that.

But I also found something else on that campus that has become so critical to my relationship with Christ.

And that's a deep understanding of grace.

And a deep understanding that God is my father.

And there's nothing I could do, there's nothing I could say that doesn't leave a spot open at the table for me.

And I was so impacted by that that I decided to dedicate my life to ministry.

Where I ended up working at a Lutheran church teaching confirmation with two simple goals.

I wanted to make it interesting, because all I heard about confirmation before that was it's boring.

And I wanted to make it applicable.

I wanted every kid who came through my program to get it from here to here, right?

I wanted it actually to change their life.

I didn't want them to just know stuff.

I wanted them to live stuff and feel stuff, be moved by the Spirit.

That's that's what I wanted for them.

Well just so happens that as I was working at that church, a new senior pastor came in.

His kids were confirmation aged, and all of a sudden I had his kids, the pastor's kids, in my confirmation, no pressure.

They're in my confirmation program.

And so every once in a while he would come down and he would sit in there and he would watch me teach and he'd watch me interact with the kids.

And so he called me into his office one day and said, I want you to preach on a Sunday.

But just so you know, in a hundred years of history of this church, there has not been one single person who's preached on Sunday that hasn't been a pastor.

And I said, No, thank you.

I don't want any part of that.

I said, What I want to do is I want to do youth ministry, specifically youth ministry for as long as I can.

And then someday what I want is I want to become a professor to teach other people to do the same.

That was my dream.

He said, Well, the colleges and universities are filled with great professors, but the churches don't always have great pastors.

Changed my life.

That's the main reason that I'm standing here today.

And if you're thinking, you shouldn't be standing up there.

You can actually find him.

He lives in White Bear Lake, walk to his church, you can talk to him.

He actually was here a few weeks ago.

But in that moment, I dedicated my life to word and sacrament ministry.

Because I want to give everything and offer everything that Christ wants to offer to you in his word.

The word of God, the sacraments of God, where he shows up and he moves us forward in life.

Let's pray.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this time to unpack your truth and your word.

And Lord, I know we might not see eye to eye.

I know we don't see eye to eye with other denominations in this respect, even people within this room.

But Lord, I'm just hoping that maybe today at least one person has a deeper sense of what you are doing through the everyday means of bread, wine, water.

That's through the power of your work on the cross, and through the power of your word, that we can trust in moments like this, that you are doing something far more than we can hope or imagine, that you are giving us life, that you are giving us forgiveness of sins, that you are ultimately inviting us into a life changing, an eternity changing relationship with you.

We pray this all in Christ's mighty name.

Amen.