Daily Devotional 5-13-21

The Ascension of Our Lord

When it comes to the holy days and festivals of the Church year there is perhaps no greater confusion than over the Ascension of our Lord both in terms of what we are celebrating and why we are celebrating it. We confess the ascension of Christ every Sunday in the words of the both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creed: “And he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father” but no further explanation is really given in either of the creeds, and we are left with more questions than answers concerning Christ’s ascension:

Why didn’t he stay?

Where is he now?

What is the right hand of God?

Where is it?

Does this mean that Christ isn’t with us anymore?

These questions are worth exploring from the Bible because they determine how we, as the Church, receive Christ and his benefits on the other side of his death and resurrection.

The appointed readings for the Ascension come from Acts 1, Ephesians 1, and Luke 24, and historically these three sections of Scripture have served as the basis for our confession of the Ascension. From both his Gospel and Acts, we hear Luke’s historical retelling of the events after Jesus’ resurrection: that Christ appeared to the two disciples on the Emmaus road and also to the Eleven, teaching them, and delivering to them the promise of the Holy Spirit. He says, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem…Behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you” (Luke 24:46-47, 49) and after this he takes them out to Bethany, blesses them, and “while he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:51) or as it says in Acts, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9).

These passages from Luke and Acts help greatly with both the “what?” and the “why?” First, Christ is taken, body and soul, as God and man in one person, and is received into heaven by a cloud. The testimony of the angels in Acts confirms this when they ask the disciples, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus… was taken up from you into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Not only is he in heaven, but Mark 16 and 1 Peter 3 add that Christ is “at the right hand of the Father” which we hear also reflected in our creeds.

Christ promises at the end of Matthew that he would “be with us always” and this remains true – especially in light of the Ascension.

The “why?” Luke provides in part, namely, that everything which had to be fulfilled by Jesus in his earthly ministry was fulfilled. It was necessary for Christ to come, die, and rise, and these very things Jesus did and was standing before them live-and-in-person to testify to that fact. The promise of the Holy Spirit or the “promise of my Father” and the preaching of the Gospel play another part in answering why. The giving of the Spirit and the preaching of the Gospel hint that Jesus is not ascending into heaven with the result that he is absent from us or that he is no longer with us. Christ promises at the end of Matthew that he would “be with us always” and this remains true – especially in light of the Ascension.

Ephesians 1 and 4 help further clarify what Luke hints at saying that Christ “ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things” and that God “set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places” to have “power, and might, and dominion” so that “all things are under his feet.” Paul confesses that Christ’s Ascension is not Christ’s absence, but real presence. Because of Christ’s ascent to the right hand of God he is not constrained to one place, but is, as God and man, filling all things. In light of these verses, we confess the right hand of God, not to be a seat of rest, locally fixed in heaven, but Christ’s authority over all creation in all creation. His authority is everywhere. Even though Christ is “out of sight” as it says in Acts, Christ is yet present, and not only in power, but physically in his body and blood in the Lord’s Supper.

As a person, God and man, Christ was crucified, dead, and buried, and as a person, God and man, Christ ascended into heaven and is therefore present for you today as a person, God and man, concretely, tangibly, and physically. In this there is no greater comfort and glory for God. Because of Christ’s Ascension, Christ himself absolves me of my sins through the mouth of a pastor. Because of Christ’s Ascension, Christ himself has baptized me and made me his own. Because of Christ’s Ascension, Christ himself serves me at the table with his very own body and blood for the forgiveness of my sins. And because of Christ’s Ascension, the ruler of this world has been cast out and Christ alone reigns in glory over all creation.

From: https://www.1517.org/articles/the-ascension-of-our-lord

Daily Devotional 5-12-21

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Daily Devotional 5-11-21

Confronting Paganism

Nehemiah served in a pagan government as a believer in God. He was humble and respectful to the king, but proper fear of his king did not stop him from acting to save his people. He prayed to God and made a request of the king, asking for permission to go to Jerusalem to rebuild it. He also asked for letters that he might present to various governors for safe conduct, and even a grant for building materials.

Not all the pagan governors were sanguine toward Nehemiah and his plans. Indeed, some were fiercely resistant to them. When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite heard of his efforts, they were deeply disturbed that a man had come to seek the well-being of the children of Israel.

When Nehemiah set about the task of rebuilding, his enemies laughed at him and despised him. Nehemiah, though, did not let his critics determine his agenda. Nehemiah’s temptation would have been to allow the pagans to alter the plans and engage in a joint venture of compromise in the mission. That would have eased the burden on his own people and won him the applause both of the Jews and the pagans. But Nehemiah cared nothing for the applause of men and was totally unwilling to compromise the mission he had undertaken for God.

Instead of worrying about accommodating the pagans, Nehemiah focused on the reforms needed among his own people. The paganism Nehemiah feared was not the paganism of the pagans; it was the paganism of his own people. It was not paganism outside the camp that threatened Israel so much as the paganism within the camp.

Coram Deo

Are you seeking the applause of men rather than the approval of God?

Passages for Further Study

Nehemiah 2:18

Nehemiah 2:10

Nehemiah 4:9

From: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/confronting-paganism/

Daily Devotional 5-10-21

Inclined to Love

There are no divorces among the class of 1950 at a certain Christian college. Amazing. This must be an example of Romans 12:9. “Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good” (Romans 12:9).

We love without hypocrisy by abhorring what is evil and clinging to what is good. The Ten Commandments define evil. Lying, adultery, murder, rape, etc. are evil. The Ten Commandments also define the good. “The commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Romans 7:12). Telling the truth, fidelity in marriage, and preserving life are good. If you add up the Ten Commandments, the sum is love. “For this, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Romans 13:9).

In addition, we love without hypocrisy when heart and head are hooked together. Convictions expressed with the mouth are backed up with heartfelt actions. When we encounter lying or adultery or murder, we bristle in horror. We cling to truth and life and faithfulness in marriage like a new bride and new groom cling to each other.

Think about it. A whole college class without a single divorce after fifty years. What a testimony to love without hypocrisy.

To help you understand this love better, listen to an audio message called, “Inclined to Love.”

From: http://dennyprutow.com/daily-devotions/

NFL Draft ’21 Report

From left to right, top to bottom: Alexander Greenlee, Heath Pucel, Terry Cohea, Bill Schank, Warren Marquardt

Daily Devotional 5-7-21

Then and Now

What a variety of sickness must have been presented to the gaze of Jesus! Yet we do not read that He was disgusted but patiently waited on every case. What a combination of evils must have met at His feet! What sickening ulcers and putrefying sores! Yet He was ready for every new shape of the monster of evil and was victor over it in every form. Wherever the arrow landed, He quenched its fiery power. Fevers, lameness, sadness, or the cold of dropsy; the lethargy of madness, leprosy, and blindness—all knew the power of His word and fled at His command. In every aspect of the battle He was triumphant over evil and received the homage of delivered captives. He came, He saw, He conquered everywhere.

It is still the case today. Whatever my own condition may be, the beloved Physician can heal me; and whatever may be the state of others whom I may remember at this moment in prayer, I may have hope in Jesus that He will be able to heal them of their sins. My child, my friend, my dearest one—I can have hope for each, for all, when I remember the healing power of my Lord; and on my own account, however severe my struggle with sins and infirmities, I can still rejoice and be confident. He who on earth walked the hospitals still dispenses His grace and works wonders among the sons of men: Let me go to Him immediately and earnestly.

Let me praise Him this morning as I remember how He worked His spiritual cures, which brings Him the most renown. It was by taking upon Himself our sicknesses. “With his stripes we are healed.”1 The church on earth is full of souls healed by our beloved Physician; and the inhabitants of heaven confess that “he healed them all.”

Come, then, my soul, declare far and wide the virtue of His grace, and “it shall make a name for the LORD, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”2

1) Isaiah 53:5

2) Isaiah 55:13

From: https://www.truthforlife.org/resources/daily-devotionals/latest/?gclid=CjwKCAjwnK36BRBVEiwAsMT8WCR8UteIwaWlAyP4o9ZIuAWio8l7qmAM1nDcB3pFiYr-jOUNkgMsShoC68IQAvD_BwE

Daily Devotional 5-6-21

The Death of Frederick the Wise

1525 was an eventful year for Martin Luther. For months he’d been mulling over how he ought to counter the argument Erasmus of Rotterdam had made against him in his Diatribe on Free Will. At the same time, he’d become a virtual placement agency for a passel of nuns who’d left the abbey at Nimbschen and needed either husbands or employment. About the only one left was Katharina von Bora, who was regarded by locals as far too demanding to make a decent wife and who insisted the only man she’d accept was either Luther’s colleague, Nicholas von Amsdorf, or the reformer himself. In the south of Germany, the peasant protestors were acting on their grievances by taking up arms (and pitchforks and scythes, no doubt) against their lords. Elector Frederick the Wise’s brother John had reported upwards of 35,000 of them massed just a few days to the south. In the midst of it all, on May 5, 1525, Frederick died at Lochau, his hunting lodge, indeed his favorite castle.

In his thorough biography Frederick the Wise: Seen and Unseen Lives of Martin Luther’s Protector, Sam Wellman recounts the events surrounding Frederick’s death. German had first been used as the language of worship in Wittenberg at the behest of Luther’s colleague Andreas Karlstadt while Luther was in hiding at the Wartburg Castle, on Palm Sunday (April 9, 1525), the elector attended worship and first heard his own tongue spoken there. As the month progressed, his health took a tailspin. On the last day of April, he wrote his brother:

“I do not know how to spare your grace, however, that I become ever weaker. I have in eight days had little rest, neither day nor night. I am not able to pass water, I write only tentatively, I may not eat, then I sleep painfully…Dr. Auerbach who comforts me, is with me.” (Wellman, Frederick the Wise)

Auerbach was a famous doctor and wouldn’t have made the house call if the situation hadn’t been grave.

Frederick’s faithful court counselor, Georg Spalatin, one of the great movers and shakers of the early Reformation, came to visit his prince. Frederick was in a rudimentary wheelchair and joked to Spalatin, “You do well that you come to me, one should visit sick people.” The conversation between the two Saxons floated into the evening. Later the prince’s confessor came so Frederick could name his sins and hear absolution. Just after midnight, he received the Lord’s Supper for the last time. Wellman reports that “Together Frederick and Spalatin wept.”

In the morning, Frederick spoke to his servants and begged their forgiveness for being surly. Later in the day, he dictated a new will and answered Spalatin’s question about whether he had any other burdens by saying, “Nothing but the pain.” The wise prince who had refused election as Holy Roman Emperor, and which opened the door for the elevation of Charles V, and who had stood by his pesky university professor at the Diet of Worms, died late that afternoon. Luther wrote his brother-in-law that he’d seen the omens: “The sign of it was a rainbow that Philip (Melanchthon) and I saw over Lochau one night last winter, and a child born here at Wittenberg without a head; also another with club feet.”

After a service for the elector in Lochau, Frederick’s body was placed in a coffin that was sealed with tar and taken to Wittenberg where, as was requested in Frederick’s second to last will, he was to be buried. The will stated that “all temporal ostentation, as much as is fitting, [be] avoided. The prince’s final resting place was directly in front of the altar in the Castle Church, which he himself had built, and a bronze epitaph with his likeness was placed on a nearby wall. Luther preached two funeral sermons, and the choir sang his hymn based on Psalm 130, “Out of the Depths.”

While Elector Frederick and Martin Luther never had a face-to-face meeting (their communication usually was done through Georg Spalatin), the prince can be credited with the early success of the Reformation. It was Frederick who had established the University in Wittenberg and saw to the restoration of the city’s castle and erection of the building of the All Saints Church (which we know more commonly as the Castle Church). When Luther began to draw attention before the indulgence controversy, he didn’t try to clamp down on the friar who lived at the monastery up Kollegienstrasse. The same was true after the Ninety-Five Theses and Luther’s sudden elevation to the status of an infamous rabble-rouser.

After Luther’s failed self-defense at the Diet of Worms, Frederick concocted a fake kidnapping and secreted Luther at the electoral castle above Eisenach, the Wartburg. The Holy Roman Emperor responded to Luther’s trial by issuing the Edict of Worms, which banned Luther throughout the empire, ordered that his books be burned, and proclaimed him wanted dead or alive. Frederick must still have had some political capital to spend from his refusal to accept the emperor’s throne. Charles V owed the elector for his position, and it must have been Frederick working behind the scenes who made possible the exemption of Electoral Saxony, Frederick’s territory, from the edict. While Luther was never allowed to leave Saxony from that point, his prince’s work did allow him to move freely in the territory and saved him, life and limb.

At the start of the Reformation, Frederick was steadfast and faithful in his loyalty to the church and its practices. He had made a pious pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1493. He had accumulated a highly regarded collection of 19,013 relics; church teaching said that if you had venerated them all you would have your time in purgatory reduced by tens of thousands of years. His gradual elimination of the relics from his castles indicates his ever-closer identification with the preaching and teaching of the Wittenberg circle of reformers and their wider social network. One curious bit of ephemera from Frederick’s holdings is not a relic: he had acquired a whale vertebra, and it now sits on the floor like a footstool at Luther’s desk in his cell at the Wartburg.

When the various princes, electors, representatives of free imperial cities, and papal envoys met at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1522, the members of Frederick’s court outfitted themselves with the words Verbum Domini manet in Aeternum from 1 Peter 1:25, “The word of the Lord endures forever” on their sleeves. In some circles, the initialism VDMA remains shorthand for the theology and work of the reformers and is a fitting way to remember Frederick who remained faithful in the face of the storms that buffeted his realm. You could do worse than choose those letters in an old Fraktur font as part of your next sleeve tattoo.

From: https://www.1517.org/articles/the-death-of-frederick-the-wise

Daily Devotional 5-4-21

Awaiting the City of God

Evangelical Christians love America. Some see in her the last hope of creating a Christian nation. But it is not a Christian nation. It is pagan to the core. It is in danger of becoming, if it is not already, the new “Evil Empire.” The Mayflower Compact is a museum piece, a relic of a forgotten era. “In God We Trust” is now a lie.

Yes, we must always work for social reform. Yes, we must be “profane” in Martin Luther’s sense of going out of the temple and into the world. We do not despise the country of our birth. But in what do we invest our hope? The state is not God. The nation is not the Promised Land. The president is not our King. The Congress is not our Savior. Our welfare can never be found in the city of man. The federal government is not sovereign. We live—in every age and in every generation—by the rivers of Babylon. We need to understand that clearly. We must learn how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange and foreign land.

America will fall. The United States will inevitably disintegrate. The Stars and Stripes will bleed. The White House will turn to rubble. That is certain. We stand like Augustine before the sea. We pray that God will spare our nation. If He chooses not to, we ask for the grace to accept its demise. In either case, we look to Him who is our King and to heaven, which is our home. We await the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, whose builder and maker is God.

Coram Deo

Are you looking to your King and to your eternal destiny, despite the circumstances around you? Keep your focus on the heavenly Jerusalem, whose builder and maker is God.

Passages for Further Study

1 Corinthians 15:50

John 3:5

2 Peter 1:11

From: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/awaiting-city-god/

Daily Devotional 5-3-21

Science and/or Faith

The Bible begins with this grand and sweeping statement, “In the beginning God created the heavens and earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is a critical element of the old fashioned Christian faith. And Bible believers insist that Genesis 1:1 is truth and not poetic myth. This means, that from the perspective of Bible believers, Genesis 1:1 involves science. It must. Because here we have the basic fact regarding the origins of the universe. It was created by God. It did not evolve. And mounting scientific evidence supports the Bible believer.

But many of those committed to evolution argue that Genesis 1:1 is a matter of faith while evolution is science. Is this really the case? The noted astronomer Carl Sagan has done a great deal to popularize the theory of evolution. But he says, “Today it is far easier to believe that organisms arose spontaneously on earth than to try to account for them in any other way. Nevertheless, this is still a statement of faith rather than of demonstrable scientific fact.” Here is a noted proponent of evolution who maintains that holding to evolution is a “statement of faith.”

In other words, belief in evolution is just as much a matter of faith as belief in creation. And the clash between the Bible and the theory of evolution is a clash between two different faiths.

For some clarity about true faith, click here and listen to the message called, “The Testimony of Faith.”

From: http://dennyprutow.com/daily-devotions/

Kentucky Derby Outreach 2021

The Kentucky Derby Outreach was a wonderful opportunity to preach to many individuals, who turned out in huge numbers as they flocked into Churchill Downs. In total, 17 men traveled to Louiseville, KY for the outreach, led by event leader Bobby McCreery.

There was some tense moments and confrontations, particularly when some of the team were moved away from Churchill Downs by the police at the request of the Churchill Downs management. But the Lord provided us with a great alternative location, and we were able to hand out many tracts, and preach to people queueing up to get into the venue, right up close. 

Take a look at some of our photos and videos.

Spectators heading into Churchill Downs

From left to right: Dan Davis, Matt Griffin, Timothy Ferguson, Sam Harris, Greg Fischer, Ken Hisle and John Coble 

Many individuals heading into the venue

Ken Hisle preaching 

From left to right: Alex Burt, Adam Cutshaw, Stirling Long, Wendell Shrock and Troy Goldsmith,  and Josh Payne

Donald Stark preaching outside Churchill Downs before being moved on

Ken Hisle ministered to MP Morgan 

Sam Harris prays with a passer-by

Check out how many people showed up! Ken Hisle interacting with a passer-by

Timothy Ferguson preaching 

Take a look at Alex Burt’s live from the Kentucky Derby: https://www.facebook.com/preachon/videos/10221689266393633