Sermon from 8/31/2014

Matthew 16:21 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

1. To remove the ____________ is to lose ____________ and ____________.

2. Rebellious sinners are conquered, not by earthly ____________, but by Jesus' ____________ ____________.

3. Our cross is to ____________ for ____________ sake.


Scripture Readings
Jeremiah 15:15-21
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

Take It With You!

Here we will offer thoughts and meditations on the message to help us as we contemplate and discuss and wrestle with what we are hearing.

If the cross is the place where God reveals Himself in hiddenness, then it is also the place where God's revelation is most repugnant to our reason. Measured by everything the world calls wisdom, as Paul already saw, the word of the cross is the greatest foolishness, the most ridiculous doctrine that can confront a philosopher. That the death of one man should be the salvation of all, that this death on Golgotha should be the atoning sacrifice for all the sins of the world, that the suffering of an innocent one should turn away the wrath of God-these are assertions that fly in the face of every ethical and religious notion of man as he is by nature. Already the presupposed doctrine of universal sinfulness is for the world something that cannot be discussed, because it would mean the end of philosophical ethics.

Now Holy Scripture declares that just this "foolish" preaching of the cross is the wisdom of God which "will destroy the wisdom of the wise" of this world [I Cor. 1:18ff]. Here between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world there is a complete unbridgeable contradiction. What is foolishness to man is regarded as wisdom by God and vice versa.

Herman Sasse, The Theology of the Cross, Theologia Crucis: Letters to Lutheran Pastors, Number 18. Jubilate 1951 in We Confess Anthology

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