NO COMMAND FROM THE LORD

God does not give us an exhaustive list of directions. He doesn't provide case law for every situation. He doesn't always tell us when to turn right or when to turn left. Jesus is the only way to God, but life in Christ offers many adventures to pursue. Dr. Michael Ziegler asks, which ones will you pick? Next, on The Lutheran Hour. And later, more of our ongoing conversation with author and teacher, Dr. Jeff Gibbs. I'm Mark Eicher. Thanks for making The Lutheran Hour part of your day. The Lutheran Hour is listener-supported. Your gifts and prayers help in bringing Christ to the nations and the nations to the church. Get connected at LutheranHour.org. Now, with a message titled, No Command from the Lord, here is our speaker, Dr. Michael Ziegler. They were supposed to turn right. The command was as clear as could be, go down Summit Drive and turn right. Do you hear me, Helen? Gladys, you too. Go down Summit Drive and turn right. They'd even been given a map. It was all planned out, step-by-step instructions. Go right at the end of the street. But Helen and Gladys, both approaching 80, and both having served as school teachers for most of their working lives,

were apparently more accustomed to giving instructions than taking them. Because when they got to the end of Summit Drive, looked both ways, checked for traffic, and proceeded on their merry way, Helen and Gladys, despite what they've been told, turned left. And consequently, evangelized the wrong neighborhood. So begins the story by William Willovan, the pastor who'd been a witness to Gladys and Helen's rogue left turn and the result that followed. It was part of a neighborhood canvassing activity, door-to-door evangelism. To evangelize means to good newsify someone, to share the good news about Jesus with them. It's another one of these weird things we Christians do. I've been part of several of these door-to-door neighborhood canvassings. In fact, I'm part of a planning team for training young adults to go door-to-door later this summer. And I'll tell you from experience, it's pretty awkward for everyone involved usually. So why do we do it? Same reason Christians have been reaching out to their neighbors for 70-some generations since Jesus rose from the dead. Same reason we do this program every week. We Christ followers believe what the Bible says,

that the whole world has been infected with a sickness, that this sickness leads us to worship ourselves, that it cuts us off from each other and from life with the God who created us. And if untreated, this condition will kill us and cause us eternal suffering. And Jesus, who was crucified and risen and is returning for us, is the only cure. Trusting him. It's the only way we get pulled up out of ourselves. And no one can find this cure on their own. Someone has to tell you to knock on your door to knock on your door, to announce it over the airwaves or bring it up in conversation. This word from God that his son Jesus is for you. You simply must come and join us. Follow him for life. And when you send Christians out with a message like this, you never know what might happen. Gladys and Helen might turn left. Now, if they had done as they'd been instructed, things would have been different. They would have knocked on the doors in the nice neighborhood. And maybe even some of those nice folks who live there would have taken a brochure about the church and they would have admired the pictures of Pastor Will, smiling and accessible, inviting them to church. And maybe some of them would have come. And that would have been good.

But instead, they got Verlean. Nobody else on Gladys and Helen's spurious route was interested in church. No one except Verlean. She lived off to the left from Summit Drive in the projects in a three-room apartment. Verlean had never been to a church in her life. And God only knows why she accepted. did Helen and Gladys' invitation, but she did. And the next Sunday she showed up at the 11 o'clock service with her two feral-looking children. And Verlene liked the church so much, she wanted to attend the Women's Thursday Morning Bible Study. And Helen and Gladys agreed to pick her up. And no thank you, they didn't need directions, they knew how to get there, just go down Summit Drive and turn left. At the Women's Thursday Morning Bible Study that week, Pastor Will was leading a discussion about temptation. They had read the account of when Jesus, the Christ, the King, just before he began his public ministry to bring God's kingdom, was tempted by the devil in the desert and resisted that temptation. So Pastor Will asked the group, have any of you ever been faced with temptation and with Jesus' help resisted? One woman raised her hand and shared with the group how she'd been in the grocery store and after she went through the checkout line in the parking lot, she realized she had a loaf of bread in her shopping cart that she hadn't paid for. And at first she thought, well, they have enough money in there as it is, why should I pay for it? But then she thought, no, I'm a Christian. So she went back into the store and paid for the bread.

Pastor Will smiled, made an approving comment. Does anyone else have an example of resisting temptation? Verlene raises her hand. A couple of years ago, she began, I was into cocaine really big. You know what that's like, you know that stuff makes you crazy. Well anyway, my boyfriend, not the one I've got now, the one who was the daddy of my first child, that one, well, we knocked over a gas station one night, got $200 out of it. It was simple as taking candy from a baby. Well, my boyfriend, he says to me, let's knock off that 7-Eleven down on the corner. And something in me, it says, no, no, I held up that gas station with you. But I ain't going to hold up no convenience store. He beat the hell out of me, but I still said no. It felt great to say no. That's the only time in my life I ever said no to anything. Made me feel like I was somebody. Through the stunned silence of the white-haired ladies of the Thursday morning Bible study group, Pastor Will says, well, that's resisting temptation, sort of what this text is about. And in my mind, that's when I hear Gladys lean over to Helen and say, I like her. Evangelizing, it's risky business. Because the gospel says that there are no wrong neighborhoods for God. And there are no wrong turns God can't redeem. The gospel, it's an odd message, so odd, says Pastor Will, that we never get so good at hearing it and living on the basis of it that we don't need to hear it again. It's an odd message that God, the God who created everything and needs nothing, that God, who overflows with joy, the joy of community and conversation between Father and Son and Holy Spirit from eternity, that this God, he doesn't just love the world, he likes it. He liked it enough to call it out of the chaotic nothingness, to make it someplace rather than no place, and to make a place in it for us, nobodies, who've become somebodies. And that God would do all this knowing full well that we would reject him, opting for self-worship instead.

And that the cure would cost God dearly, patience and pain and sacrifice incalculable, culminating in the crucifixion and bitter death of God's Son, which Jesus paid gladly. And he rose from the dead, walked out of his borrowed tomb and turned left. He came to your door because he likes you. He wants to hear what you have to say, what you're thinking about, what you're thinking of doing next, because he's interested in you. He doesn't just love you, he likes you. And when you and I remember that we were once the... the oddballs God invited to his Thursday morning fellowship. Maybe that helps us be a little more hospitable, a bit more patient, a bit more willing to risk it all on someone like Verlene. The Gospel has this effect on us. That's what it did for a Jewish man named Paul, one of the early followers of Jesus. Paul had been suffering from that self-worshipping condition, just like the rest of us. He had covered it well with religion and rule-following, but just under the surface, Paul was just as wrapped up in himself as Verlene's gas-station-robbing boyfriend. And then Jesus, risen from the dead, appears to Paul, good-news-ifies him, and Paul becomes an evangelist for Christ. He travels all over, talking to his fellow Jews, telling them that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ they'd been waiting for. And if ever some of his own people wouldn't listen, Paul would head out of the local synagogue, down Summit Drive, and turn left. That's how the church got started in the ancient city of Corinth. A bunch of people from the wrong neighborhood started coming to Bible study. Paul stayed with them for over a year, and then he moved on to evangelize others. After he left, the Corinthian Christians had questions, lots of questions, questions about how to resist temptation, how to be somebody in Christ, even as they still struggled with the relapses of a self-worshipping way of life. When Paul got the report about the Corinthian church, in a lot of ways they looked like the same old convenience store bandits.

They were high on themselves, bragging about who was more popular or powerful. Some of them were suing each other, turning petty grievances into lawsuits. Some were still visiting Corinth's red-light district. One man was even having an affair with the wife of his father, shacking up with his stepmother. And then, there were others among them who were so hyper-vigilant, so against all this filthy worldliness, that they wanted strict rules about everything. How to be better, how to be different, how to be holy. They wanted clear commands, step-by-step instructions, do this, not that, stay in these neighborhoods and out of those ones. So they wrote Paul, and asked for directions. But Paul did not give them what they wanted. Not exactly. Instead of an exhaustive set of rules, he gives them a foundation to build on. Instead of play-by-play instructions, he gives them sidelines to play within. In the first four chapters of the letter to the Corinthians, Paul doesn't answer any of their questions. Instead, he sets the foundation, the foundational truth about the world. It's called the gospel, the good news of Jesus, or Christ crucified, as Paul says it. Christ crucified because of our sin, the deadly consequence of self-worship. Christ crucified and risen because God chose to love us despite our sin. That's the foundation. And living on that foundation means that everyone and everything we have is a gift from God. And we're each called to care for and share these gifts with others. And that we have to say no to some things so we can say yes to others. That's how we build. We're not building on ourselves or for ourselves, but on Christ, for Christ. He's the foundation, sturdy, deep, wide. And there are boundaries, edges, foul lines. And when we stray from Jesus and try to build on the sinking sand of some other foundation, we need to be called back, turned around, repent.

That's what we hear Paul discussing in 1 Corinthians chapters 5 and 6. He's teaching them to resist temptation with Jesus' help. He's teaching them when to say no and when to say yes. To say no to despising your father and mother or stepmother. And yes to honoring them according to God's command. To say no to treating a person like a sex object. And yes to God's desire. fine for marriage between one man and one woman for life, to say no to using your fellow Christians for compensatory damages in a lawsuit, and yes to loving them as fellow members of the body of Christ, and also to say no to knocking off a 7-Eleven, and yes to Thursday morning Bible study with Gladys and Helen. When we begin to hear the gospel and to build our lives on it, we learn to respect the edges of the foundation. We learn where the out-of-bounds lines are and how to play within them, but within the boundaries of that field. And on that foundation, God does not give us an exhaustive list of directions. He doesn't provide case law for every situation. He doesn't always tell us when to turn right or when to turn left. In 1 Corinthians 7, we hear Paul reckoning with this. He tells them that he can't give a definitive answer to all their questions. Many of their questions were about marriage, how to be married, whom to marry, whether to be married or to be single, whether to have children, whether to change jobs or change neighborhoods. Three times, Paul more or less tells them, I don't have a command from the Lord in these cases. I can give you my opinion, my judgment, but I'm not your judge. I'm just his messenger. And the judge, the Lord God, has left many of these choices up to you and your community, because they're not choices between good and evil. Some are, but others are between good and better. You can turn right or left. Both are good. And God is pleased to leave it to you and your community to decide which is better. And your better might be different than somebody else's. And your better today might be different than your better five years from now. And that's okay. Because what God wants most is you on the foundation. What God wants most is you fully alive in Jesus. What God wants most is you with him. Imagine a loving father or mother, what they might want for their young children. The kids are all there at home. One's out back playing in the yard. Another is inside reading a book. Another

is drawing. One's in the kitchen having a snack. And mom and dad, they don't have a preference as to what exactly each child is doing or when or where or how they're doing it because what they really want is for their kids to grow, to be strong and wise and reliable. They don't want compliant robots or sycophantic yes-men or yes-kids. They just pray that their kids become mature adults. And so, mom and dad, they don't try to micromanage their decisions. They're just happy to have them around, safe, learning, and not fighting. It's something like that with God. God created us and brought us back from sin and death with the blood of his Son, which means I do not belong to myself. And you, you are not your own. You're a bondservant of Christ because you were bought with a price. But God is a special kind of master. He's the kind of master who wants his servants to become sons and daughters, adult children who can help run the family business. He doesn't want you to dissolve back into elemental dust in his presence. He wants you to be somebody because you are somebody to him. He's interested in you. With all these good gifts before you in Jesus, he's interested in seeing which one you'll pick. He gives you the freedom to go right or left because he doesn't just love you, he likes you. Which was clearly the consensus about Verlean among the ladies of the Thursday morning Bible study group. Pastor Will, still slightly stunned from the morning's excitement in the fellowship hall, afterwards was visiting with Helen in the church parking lot. As he helps her into her Plymouth, she says to him, you know, I can't wait to get home, get on the phone and invite people to come next Thursday. Hey, your Bible studies used to be dull. I think I can get a good crowd for this. In the name of Jesus, amen. You're listening to The Lutheran Hour. For free online resources, archived audio, our mobile app, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. Now back to our speaker, Dr. Michael Ziegler. Thank you, Mark. Today, I'm visiting with Dr. Jeff Gibbs. He's an emeritus professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and a Bible teacher and a frequent guest on this program.

Welcome back, Jeff. Thanks very much, Mike. It's good to be here. We're continuing this study of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and it sounds like the Corinthians, they had some questions for Paul, and he's written six chapters and has finally got around to answering the question they actually asked about chapter seven. Maybe deal with some other issues they didn't want him to deal with first. Correct, in five and six. And then he finally says, now concerning the matters about which you wrote. The first question that he deals with, maybe not their first question they had, is about human sexuality. What are they asking and why are they asking it, I guess is the question. He begins with the husband-wife relationship and the uniqueness of that. He says, here's the way you think about it. He'll move on to people who aren't married yet, and it's okay to get married, but it might be better to stay single, and he goes on and talks about all those things. But the first thing he wants to nail down for them is the attitude of husbands and wives towards each other and their sexual life together. So again, that's kind of revolutionary, especially because in a way that's equal to the husband owning the wife's body, the wife owns the husband's body. See, it's her property and nobody else's. And so the Apostle Paul, he goes into this place and he plants, or God plants a church. He planted a Paulist water and God gave the growth, right? Paul's head must have been spinning when he encountered all these, some of which he knew already, of course, all these attitudes and ungodly claims about what it means to be human and what it means to be a sexual being and all those kinds of things. But the thing he wants to nail down first is let's get the marriage thing right, and this gift is, once again, it's mutuality. So I was talking about this passage with a friend, and he's really pushing back on Paul

saying, I wish everybody were like me. He says he wants to hold up marriage and hold up the state of singleness and celibacy. But it sure seems like he says it, in fact, I wish everybody were like me. And he doesn't seem to be doing justice to marriage in this passage. You know, marriage is something you do if you can't control yourself. But the real better calling in Paul's opinion here, and he even says this is his opinion, not the Lord's. That's right, that's right. These sorts of things, when am I allowed to agree or disagree and push back against the apostle in his teaching? And how does, what's that mean for scripture? Well, I think you're allowed to push back and disagree when you've read all of his letters. Okay. And you read Ephesians 5, where marriage. Pretty high view of marriage. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to find a higher view of marriage. So again, that would be part of the context of reading 1 Corinthians is to, this is not the only thing the apostle Paul says about marriage, right? But again, the Corinthians are... They're a special case. They are a special case. In Ephesians, it's like Paul just expects them to get it. You know, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her that he might present. You know, it's just, he just lays it out and there's no indication that his readers are gonna say anything other than, yeah, isn't that beautiful? Our marriage, the husband gulp, I'm supposed to be Christ to my wife and the wife gulp, I'm supposed to be church to my husband, right? So that's a challenge, but it's just right out there. And again, it's hard to get any higher than that.

So Paul gives us this foundational truth to live by here. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to Jesus and he's given you to your neighbors, your closest neighbor being your husband, your wife, your family, your church family. And that just changes everything. I really like 1 Corinthians in a sense when you compare it to Galatians. Whatever's going on in Galatia, Paul is, he takes no prisoners. It's black and white. It's this or that. But see, you can see him working almost like a pastor would with these kind of fractious, confused believers. I mean, he knows at least many of them well. And as Christ said in a vision to him, I have many who live in this city. I mean, so the mission went forward and the church. succeeded in that sense in Corinth during Paul's ministry there. He's just saying, okay, now remember this, remember this. And then when he gets to the whole thing about meat sacrifice to idols, there it kind of actually matters where you eat the meat. Are you in the worship service itself? Okay, now you're face-to-face with demons. Don't even think about it, get out of there, yeah. But if it's in an unbeliever's home and he's serving you dinner, and he says, oh, by the way, I got this at the idol temple, I bought meat there. Now your reaction is different. You don't eat, not for your conscience sake, but for his. So again, he's trying to show them how to love one another,

how to love their neighbors, even their unbelieving neighbors. And as we all know, that can be very difficult. And we see Paul doing that. Yeah, and it's on, again, this foundation of you don't have to look for something better because you're in Christ. And I love how he ends this section in chapter seven of there, let each one remain as he was called in, there with God or something like with God is the emphasis. The road to Damascus experience was the seed by which he began to rethink everything. Oh, this Jesus is not crucified, but crucified and risen. And now he's the center and you can imagine all those years as Paul prayed and thought and read the Old Testament, trying to get them to work through the implications of what it means to be in Christ. Amen. Now, Dr. Ziegler leads us in praying the Lord's prayer. Taught by Jesus and trusting in his promises, we are bold to pray. Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.

Amen. Receive the blessing of the Lord. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord look upon you with his favor and give you peace. Amen. The Lutheran Hour is made possible through the support of faithful listeners like you. To learn how your prayers and gifts can extend the worldwide outreach of the Lutheran Hour, go to lutheranhour.org. Join us again next week when our guest speaker will be Pastor Gregory Manning, coming to us from New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Mark Eicher. This has been a presentation of Lutheran Hour Ministries. Lutheran Hour Ministries www.lutheranhour.org