9/05/21 - 16th Sunday after Pentecost - Jesus’ Grace Is All In All To Us: It Leads To Obedience From The Heart - Mark 7:1-8, 14, 15, 21-23
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The Pentecost Season
The Sundays after Pentecost focus on how Christians live in response to all that God has done for us. This part of the Church Year focuses on Jesus’ Grace Is All In All To Us.
This Sunday
With this Sunday readings from Gospel of Mark resumes and with it a shift again in emphasis for the third cycle of the Pentecost season. Loosely expressed, the emphasis in this third cycle might be this: Jesus wants to so deepen our understanding of his grace that he becomes all in all to us. The particular emphasis in the readings for this Sunday is the truth that all God pleasing obedience must begin in the heart.
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First Lesson: Deuteronomy 4:1, 2, 6-9
God is serious about all of his Word, both the law and the gospel. As the verses left out of the reading (3-5) make clear, those who only take God’s gifts seriously soon lose those gifts as a consequence of despising his commands. His commands are good because he who gave them is good. And because he is good, his abundant blessing through a peaceful and orderly life rests on those who follow his Word. That blessing brings forth a still greater blessing and honor: those who do not know his Word may be moved to hear it by the evidence of God’s blessings on the godly lives of Christians.
Second Lesson: James 1:17-27
Calls for a sanctified life always find their basis and their motivation in the precious gospel message of God’s gifts to us. His gifts are all good and perfect (even and especially the crosses—a point coming up on another Sunday) because God is changeless; he only knows how to give good and perfect gifts that suit our needs and fit our circumstances in life. But to recognize those gifts and to appreciate them and then make use of them in life we need the Word. The Word clears the clutter from life and the temptation to hypocrisy from the heart by showing us the first and best gifts, the gifts of salvation and adoption. With such gifts how could we doubt that anything he does in our lives would be anything but good and perfect? Therefore, listen to the Word; be honest with God in confession; get on with the life that reflects the good and perfect gifts of God. For his gifts are given to us as a reflection of his goodness, so that we can reflect his goodness in our use of those gifts.
Gospel: Mark 7:1-8, 14, 15, 21-23
Adding to God’s Word is just as bad as subtracting from it. In both cases man sets aside what God has said in favor of what he wants in order to justify himself apart from God’s Word and Christ’s work. Precisely because the Word of both the law and the gospel is addressed to the heart, it allows for no additions, no subtractions. For to the extent that the heart is cleansed by the gospel, to that extent what flows from it will be clean and in accord with the law. An unclean heart can produce only unclean works, no matter how clean those works may appear on the outside. Those who take the law seriously need first and always the cleansing power of the gospel, lest their outward works be only outward and ultimately a mask for hypocrisy. On the other hand, those who refuse to take God’s law seriously prove thereby that their hearts are still unclean and separated from God. The sin that begins in the heart will not agree to stay there; it will look for ways to get out and express itself. The Pharisees should have recognized that happening in their own hearts: their hearts harbored hatred for Jesus which yearned for expression in acts that ended in murder during Holy Week.
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