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Johnny had been misbehaving and was sent to his room. After a while he came out and told his mother that he had thought it over and said a prayer. His mother said, “Good, if you ask God to help you not misbehave, He will help you.” Johnny replied, “Oh, I didn’t ask Him to help me not misbehave. I asked Him to help you put up with me.” Johnny did not want to let Christ be in control of his life. He is like another little boy who was overheard praying, “Lord, if you can’t make me a better boy, don’t worry about it. I’m having a really good time like I am.” Our sinful nature will tell us not to let Jesus be the Lord and Master, not to let Him have control. The devil will work on you to convince you that you can take care of things all by yourself. That is when we need to focus on the cross. Remember the love of God that led Him to send Jesus to that awful death in your place, so that your sins would not be held against you. Your faith in Jesus means He is your Savior. He has saved you from death and everlasting condemnation. The follow-up in your living is to let Him be your Lord, too.

I remember a time long before everyone bought everything online. I was looking for a particular book and had gone to several Christian Bookstores in our area. As I was looking, I came across this title: “Great Heroes of the Bible.” We’ve all used that terminology at some time, speaking of the heroes of the faith. As I thought about that title, “Great Heroes of the Bible,” I realized that was inappropriate. The Bible is not a book about heroes, but about one Hero, the one who became flesh in Jesus the Messiah. The message of the Bible is about God’s grace, not human goodness. The stories in the Bible tell us about sinners, people to whom God reached out in grace to offer undeserved love and forgiveness. This is the message of the Bible that should be shared in your homes.

Home improvement is needed in all homes, whether you a family with children, a single young adult, and older couple, or a widowed person living alone. We all need to work on letting Christ be the Lord of our lives and our homes.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)

God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. (2 Corinthians 5:19)

If you want home improvement, don’t pretend to be without sin. Admit your faults. Confess your sins to each other and to God. Extend God’s forgiveness to the ones in your home. Home Improvement will be the result of setting apart Christ as Lord, letting Him be the one in control.

After putting her children to bed, a mother changed into old slacks and a droopy blouse and proceeded to wash her hair. As she heard the children getting more and more rambunctious in their bedroom, her patience grew thin. At last she threw a towel around her head and stormed into their room, and started screaming, warning at them to get back to bed “or else.” Naturally, the children scampered back into their beds and pulled the covers up over their heads to hide from this fury being unleashed on them. As she left the room, the mother heard her three-year-old say with a trembling voice, “Who was that?”

Moms lose their tempers. Kids don’t obey. Fathers avoid responsibility. Snide remarks among siblings. Blowing up at the kids when they fail to do something even though you have told them time and time and time again to do it! Taking it out on your spouse when you have a bad day. Personal relationship problems. Finances. Job anxiety. School turmoil. Depression. Anger. Laziness. The problems in the home may come from a variety of areas, but they all have the same source. Sin.

Properly speaking, our homes are dens of iniquity. We don’t usually use that terminology, but that is what our homes are: They are places where sinners live. I point this out to clarify the need for HOME IMPROVEMENT. You need to set apart Christ as Lord in your homes. You need the healing power of His love and forgiveness in your day to day difficulties in your home life. To set apart Christ as Lord in your home means more than lip service or a plaque on the wall or a Bible on the shelf. It means speaking your faith to one another. Praying together. Spending time in the Word of God and sharing that with each other. It means there will be repentance and God’s forgiveness will be offered to one another in your home.

In my home, having family devotions together was something we tried to do daily. It wasn’t easy. Even though I am at a different stage in my life, I remember the demands on time when kids are in school and both parents work outside the home. Your time together is a limited, yet precious, commodity. It seems like it would be easier to not have devotions. If you set apart Christ as Lord in your homes, you will  make it a priority to have devotion time together daily. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can use a prepared devotional resource, or simply read a passage of Scripture, discuss it, and pray for one another.

It might mean getting up a little earlier and sometimes being grumpy. Satan has a lot of tricks he uses to try to convince you to just say, “Forget it – we’re too busy!” But to do so would mean you are not setting apart Christ as Lord of that part of your lives. It may be a small thing, but those small things have a way of adding up. Think of it this way: if there are areas of your life where Christ is not in control, then who do you think is in control? If Christ is not the Lord of some part of your life, who have you put in that position? It is as though in our hearts we have set apart SELVES as Lord. And that will lead to ongoing problems.

Maybe I’ve pointed out a home improvement project you need to work on in your life. If so, remember that you have been covered over with the righteousness of Jesus. He forgives your failings and shortcomings and wants to draw you closer to Himself. Resolve to spend time together getting closer to Him.

“I can live with that.” I have used those words many times in my life. It usually has to do with some kind of negotiation, when the other party names a price or makes me an offer. I will weigh the pros and cons and as a way of coming to an agreement will say “I can live with that.”

When you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you should be able to happily say about your faith, “I can live with that.” You have been led to know and understand that because Jesus died in your place to pay for your sin, you can live. Not just now, but forever. “I can live with that.” What makes this even more significant is that the message of Jesus Christ as your Savior is something that you cannot live without!

Most of the people in this world think they are getting along just fine without Jesus. And from the perspective of the world, they are doing well. But if the message of Scripture is reliable, and I believe it is, those people are sadly mistaken. I once heard a speaker proclaim that every second someone dies without faith in Jesus. That means that every second someone is lost for eternity.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Forgiveness and eternal life are available as a free gift from our loving God. It is the message believers have taken to heart. It is a message people cannot live without. It is a message people can live with.

That message is for everyone. Jesus is the only hope for eternal life, and He is a certain hope. It is a message we need to share. It can seem like a daunting task, but just focus on what you can do where you are. You can’t do everything, but you can do something.  That something is to share Jesus with someone. Today.

When you have faith in Jesus, you have something you can live with. And faith in Jesus is something people cannot live without.

Luke 4:14-21   Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.  Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.  The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

At the time of Jesus, there were synagogues in almost every place there were Jews.  In order to hold worship in a synagogue, there only had to be ten married Jewish men in a community. A synagogue was a sort of community center, school and worship facility all rolled into one, with its primary function being a house of worship.  And the worship followed a structured pattern.  It would begin with the confession of belief in one God:  “HEAR, O ISRAEL, THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE…” Then there would be a prayer, followed by the reading of a portion of Scripture and a brief instruction concerning God’s Will.  In a synagogue, any male could be called upon to read and expound upon God’s Word. On this particular day, Jesus was the one chosen. He stood up to read, as was customary in reading God’s Word. Then He sat down to teach and discuss its meaning, which was also the normal procedure. The Lesson He read was from Isaiah, a passage that described who He is and what he would do.

After Jesus read this, THE EYES OF EVERYONE IN THE SYNAGOGUE WERE FASTENED ON HIM; they were hanging on His every word, wondering what He would say. I doubt they were expecting what He did say: “TODAY THIS SCRIPTURE IS FULFILLED IN YOUR HEARING.” It spoke of the ministry Jesus had come to perform. The first part speaks of His earthly or physical ministry. He did preach the good news to the poor, give sight to the blind, providing healings and showed compassion. But the most important aspect of His work was spiritual in nature. He would PROCLAIM THE YEAR OF THE LORD’S FAVOR. He proclaimed salvation to all men through Himself.

To His listeners, this was good news indeed, but not for the reason you might think.  They heard it in light of their expectations about the promised Messiah. They thought now would be the time to be rid of the Romans, that they would be free from their earthly bondage to another country. In fact a big part of worship in the synagogue was praying that they might be delivered from Rome and have Jerusalem restored to her former prominence. Naturally they would be excited. They were probably ready to cheer, “GO JESUS!”  They expected Him to give them a worldy deliverance from their enemies.

But that is not the salvation he had come to proclaim in the year of the Lord’s favor.  The Liberty Jesus proclaimed was different than the one from bondage that Isaiah foretold. It was liberty from a different kind of bondage–the bondage to sin and its consequences. The eternal consequences of sin are removed through faith in the Lord Jesus.

Don’t we often have the same expectations of the Jews in Jesus’ day? We look to God for relief and freedom from all our trials and problems. Then we get upset when He doesn’t come through for us. We’ve all had times when we were angry with God because He didn’t do things our way. How do you deal with that?  Just remember:  God did not cause your problems. Rather, they are the result of sin, which came into the world through man. And before you try to shift all the blame to Eve and Adam, look at your own life. Once you examine your own sinfulness, you can truly appreciate the way in which Jesus has fulfilled the Scripture. The temporal consequences of sin may remain, but they are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed in Jesus Christ, our Savior.

This account of Jesus in the synagogue was all a part of God’s plan.  He mentions the Spirit of God being a part of this. He was anointed for this task, set aside for this special purpose. Jesus came into a world of sinners to change our situation. It was not for His own benefit that He became man, but for yours and mine. Even though we are by nature spiritually blind, dead and enemies of God, He came to give sight to the blind, to raise us from death to life, to make us God’s friends. This is what He did through His death and resurrection. The Scripture is Fulfilled.

JOHN 1:29-34 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”

One of my professors at the seminary called this type of passage a GOSPEL METAPHOR.  A metaphor is a comparison without using the words “like” or “as.” So Jesus is being compared to a lamb. But we need to be careful to distinguish between what is literal and what is metaphorical. While the sacrifice that Jesus made is literal, He was not, of course, actually a lamb. We know that to be true. The incarnation of Jesus means that He became a literal man, not a literal lamb. However, Jesus would serve the function of a lamb for the people. He would be their sacrifice for sin.

What an ecstatic moment in the history of God’s chosen people that must have been for those who understood what John was saying: Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. The Jews who studied the Old Testament knew that there were prophecies of the Messiah that compared Him to a lamb (e.g. Isaiah 53:7). The hopes and aspirations associated with all the years of repeated sacrifice of literal lambs would find their fulfillment in this metaphorical lamb, the Son of God.

The reason Jews sacrificed lambs was to make payment for their sins. The sacrifice of lambs was something commanded of the people in the law of Moses. Yet they knew that a lamb itself did not have the power to forgive sins. Rather, their sacrifice of lambs pointed to the ultimate sacrifice for sins, which would be fulfilled through the death of Jesus Christ. One of our Lenten hymns explains this:

Not all the blood of beasts on Jewish altars slain
 Could give the guilty conscience peace or wash away the stain.

But Christ, the heav’nly Lamb, takes all our sins away;
A sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood than they.

On a little church in Germany stands a stone lamb that has an interesting history.  When some workmen were building the roof, one of them fell off.  His companions hurried down to the ground, expecting to find him dead.  But he was unhurt.  A lamb was grazing below when he fell on it, crushing the lamb but sparing his life.  He was so grateful that he made an image of the lamb in stone and placed it on the building as a memorial. That is what Christ has done for us.  He was crushed by the weight of our sins so that we might be saved from the punishment we deserve.

Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

Prayer is not getting ready to live the Christian life. Prayer is living the Christian Life. People who have put their faith and confidence in Jesus follow Him. Their lives are not perfect, but they strive to live in a way that will please God. They will talk to Him in prayer and listen to Him in His Word.

Years ago I heard the story of a pastor who had a kitten that climbed up a tree in his backyard and was afraid to come down. He tried to coax it, offer it food and milk, even shook the tree a little, but nothing worked. The cat wouldn’t come down. The tree was too tall for him to reach up into it, but it was not sturdy enough for him to climb, so the pastor decided that if he tied a rope to his car and pulled it until the tree bent down, he could probably reach up and get the cat. So he attached the rope to the tree and his car and carefully pulled the tree down, all the while checking his progress. He needed to go just a little bit further, he figured, in order to be able to reach the cat, when suddenly the rope broke. The tree snapped back up and launched that cat through the air and out of sight. The pastor felt terrible. He walked all over the neighborhood asking people if they had seen a kitten. No luck. So He prayed, “Lord, I just commit this kitten to your keeping” and went on about his business. A few days later, he saw one of his members in the grocery store. He noticed she had cat food in her basket, but he knew she was a cat hater, so he asked her about it. She said, “You won’t believe this. My daughter has been begging me for a cat, but I told her ‘no!’ She kept asking and begging and pleading, so finally I said, ‘Well, if God gives you a cat, I’ll let you keep it.’  I watched my little girl go in the back yard, get on her knees and ask God for a cat. And I wouldn’t believe this if I had not seen it with my own eyes. A kitten came flying out of the sky with its paws outstretched and landed in the yard right in front of her.”

Prayer is not getting ready to live the Christian life. Prayer is living the Christian Life. It is an integral part of our existence as disciples. Conversations with our Lord may sound like this:

• “God, I don’t understand why you did this – help me figure out what is going on and what I’m supposed to do.”
• “I’m angry right now. This isn’t what I wanted, this isn’t what I expected.”
• “I know something is going on with my friend right now, but I don’t know what it is. Be with her and help her and show her your love. And let me know what I can do to help her, too.”

Prayer is not getting ready to live the Christian life. Prayer is living the Christian Life.

It keeps us in constant contact with the one who loved us enough to die in our place and earn our forgiveness. That doesn’t mean all our problems and difficulties, our lack of understanding and our anger just go away. It means we have confidence as we deal with our problems and difficulties and anger and lack of understanding.

A priest, a minister and a guru sat discussing the best positions for prayer, while a telephone repairman worked nearby.  “Kneeling is definitely the best way to pray,” the priest said. “No,” said the minister. “I get the best results standing with my hands outstretched to Heaven.” “You’re both wrong,” the guru said. “The most effective prayer position is lying down on the floor.” The repairman could contain himself no longer. “Hey, fellas,” he interrupted. “The best prayin’ I ever did was when I was hangin’ upside down from a telephone pole.”

Talking to God should be natural for believers. It is not about the words you use. It is sharing your heart. It should be easy. We make it more complicated than it has to be. Prayer is just talking to God. That can and should happy anywhere and anytime.

Kids know how to keep it simple. One class of young children was given the assignment to write letters to God. Look at how easily they are able to talk to Him about any and everything.

Dear God …

• Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones why don’t you just keep the ones you got now?
• I went to this wedding and they kissed right in church. Is that ok?
• In Bible times did they really talk that fancy?
• We read Thomas Edison made light but in Sunday School they said you did it. So I bet he stoled your idea.
• I bet it is very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it.
• Please send Dennis Clark to a different camp this year.
• I think about you sometimes even when I’m not praying.

When do we lose that ability to talk to God so freely? Jesus showed His love and care and concern for you when He died in your place to conquer sin and death. Why do we think it is difficult to talk to Him? Take some time to do it right now.

The thought “this is how we know” occurs eight times in 1 John. The translation of Scripture I normally use is the 1984 edition of the New International Version (NIV84). It may be worded differently in the translation you use, but this recurring phrase is in the following passages.

1 John 2:5 But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him:

1 John 2:18 Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.

1 John 3:10 This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.

1 John 3:16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.

1 John 3:19 This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence

1 John 3:24 Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

1 John 4:6 We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

1 John 5:2 This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands.

John uses this phrase to show his brothers and sisters in Christ that there is reason for certainty, confidence and conviction. We have evidence, we have proof. We just need to see things for what they are. People reveal themselves by their actions, good or bad. In His Sermon on the Mount, our Lord said , “By their fruit you will know them…” (Matthew 7).

In the same way, we know God by His actions. His Spirit abides in those who put their faith in Him. Our efforts to live according to His will show us to be His children. And we know His love because we have seen it in Jesus laying down His life for us.

One way “this is how I know” is reinforced for me is in the songs and hymns of the church. This is one I learned in Kindergarten or First Grade back at St. Paul/First English Lutheran School in New Orleans, and it is still a favorite of mine.

There is a green hill far away, Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified, Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell, What pains He had to bear,
But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered there.

He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven, Saved by His precious blood.

There was no other good enough To pay the price of sin,
He only could unlock the gate Of heaven and let us in.

Oh, dearly, dearly has He loved! And we must love Him too
And trust in His redeeming blood, And try His works to do.

(The Children’s Hymnal #43, Concordia Publishing House, 1955)

John 4:28–30 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

Jesus came to the woman at the well and revealed Himself to her as the Messiah. She, in turn, invited others to come and meet Him as well.

Jesus came to this world. He invites us to come to Him. And He wants us to invite others, just as that Samaritan woman did. The promise attached to responding to His invitation is resurrection and life.

John 6:44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

I came across a great song of invitation about 15 years ago written by Joel Payne. It is used a lot around Easter, but it can and should be sung all year. The lyrics are printed below and there is a link to the video as well.  We need to share this information and invitation in our daily lives.

Come, see the Son of the living God
hanging on a tree, dying there for you and me.
Come, see the bringer of truth and grace
nailed there for us, agony across his face.

(Chorus)
This is love displayed,
this is mercy perfectly portrayed in Christ, the cross of Christ.

Come, see the innocent Son of God
punished there for us, rescuing us with his blood.
Come, see the healer of wounded souls
crucified for us, broken there to make us whole.

(Chorus)

Come, see the tomb where they laid him down;
the stone is rolled away, nothing but the grave clothes now.
Come, see the King is alive again,
risen from the dead, ushering a new age in.

 This is victory,this is life for everyone who will believe in Jesus Christ.

Come and worship him, come and sing to him,
come and live for him, Jesus Christ.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp6dniY1atQ