9/19/21 - 17th Sunday after Pentecost - Grace Leads Us To Pick Up Our Cross and Follow Jesus- Mark 8:27-35

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Announcements for the week - https://mzluth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/weekly-announcement-Sept-19-2021-1.pdf

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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
Just how deeply should the Word of God penetrate heart and life? Jesus himself is the model in whose footsteps we follow, stumbling though that following be. Jesus’ Grace is All in All to Us…It leads us to pick up our cross and follow him.

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First Lesson: Jeremiah 38:1-13
Jeremiah warned the people of the coming judgment of God. How God loved his people! He always sacrifices his best to save the perverse and the rebellious, beginning with his own Son and then with the lives of his apostles and prophets. How disgraceful that for the sake of God’s love and faithfulness, the faithful and loving servant receives abuse and persecution! Notice that the most severe persecution and abuse comes from those who should know better, and the only help comes from an outsider, a foreigner. Not much has changed, has it? Warn the nation about the sword of God’s justice hanging over a people that defends the murder of children, every form of perversion, and that insists God’s truth is relative and not absolute. But do not expect a medal! Expect what God promised: the cross. Or would we rather not? Listen again to the closing words of the gospel.

Second Lesson: 1 Peter 4:12-19
The cross by definition is anything that we suffer as a consequence of our relationship with Christ. It is not the suffering that is ours in consequence of our own sins; the bankrupt gambler, the divorced adulterer, and the imprisoned murderer are receiving the due reward of their evil deeds. But the soul that struggles with temptations to be a wastrel or impure or violent, suffers in the struggle. His conscience suffers when he wants the forbidden as well as when he actually falls. Yes, it is indeed hard even for the righteous to be saved! Even in triumph over temptation there is temptation, the temptation to be self righteous. Therefore, in every day and every way we have but this consolation, that our righteousness can only be the gift of the Crucified, and that God will not despise us in our struggle to follow under his cross.

Gospel: Mark 8:27-35
Those who confess that Jesus is the Christ and not just another great prophet or teacher or role model for good living must let even this truth penetrate: Christ came to suffer, Christ came to die; he did it in perfect obedience to his Father; he did it in perfect love for us and for our salvation. His obedience and love were not cheap. Ours should not be either. We are not saved to sin all the more. We are rescued for life and for life eternal but only in the procession of cross bearers following in his footsteps. Notice that our cross bearing is a necessary consequence of believing, but it is not a cause of salvation. Notice, too, the emphasis on the singular in vss. 34-35: Anyone, whoever. No one cross-less can hide in the procession of cross bearers; no cross, no Christian. As Peter well understood, the cross is always painful. The cross is anything that we suffer in consequence of our faith in Christ, e.g., outward persecution or ridicule, but even more often, internal struggle with temptations to pet sins and to sins of moral indifference and laziness, and to sins of either self-righteousness or of despair.

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