Christ Church Downtown Exhortation

The fifth commandment requires the preserving the honor and performing the duties belonging to everyone, so says the WSC, whether they be our superior, inferior, or equal. Our envious age is violently opposed to the idea of superiors, and we have endured decades of stories and sitcoms where fathers are ridiculed and smart alecks are the heroes. But this was always just a way of flattening the world.

But the real world contains hierarchy and obligations and duty and honor. Our individualistic age would have every man and woman an island, bound to no one. But the word of God says to honor your father and your mother, to give them reverence and to exercise the duties they are owed. God could have made us emerge full grown out of holes in the ground. He could have had us delivered by storks or raised by wolves or dropped unceremoniously from the sky onto something soft. But He didn’t. He ordained it such that every single person comes into the world enmeshed in relationships. We are not free, we are bound, from the very beginning.

Our age wants to have the right to murder unwanted children and ignore or euthanize unwanted parents, but the word of God requires us to joyfully and faithfully accept the bonds of covenantal love.

So children, obey your parents from the heart. Guard their honor. Consider how you speak to your parents, how you speak of your parents, how you are entrusted with your parent’s honor. And you are supposed to guard it, maybe even more than they guard it.

And parents, you have obligations to your children, to nurture and teach and protect and provide and snuggle and to read stories and make forts and feed them and sing with them. And to guard their honor. What does that look like? How do you guard your five year old’s honor? Consider that.

Time fails us to look at the obligations we have to uncles and nephews and younger siblings and grandmothers and third cousins and, zooming out, what we owe to our civil leaders and pastors and to the fathers and mothers in the church. But the point remains: we are bound by God’s good design in a complex tapestry of duties and obligations. Our envious and individualistic age wants to ignore that truth. So don’t.

Joshua Edgren – June 16, 2024

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On Pentecost, like at Mt. Carmel, the fire of God fell. In both cases the Lord gathered the people called by His name together and demonstrated His power by sending fire on an unlikely place in order to bring them to a point of decision. That they might be holy and purge out the evil among them. When the Israelites saw the fire fall on Elijah’s altar, they executed the prophets of Baal. When the Israelites gathered for Pentecost heard Peter’s sermon, they repented of their sins and were saved, as Peter says, from the crooked generation.

This is an exhortation to zeal. Consider the logistics of Mt. Carmel: Elijah personally, it seems, slaughtered four hundred men in his zeal for the Lord and His holiness. But similarly impressive is the mass baptism after Peter’s sermon: three thousand baptisms. Which I’ve heard as an argument for sprinkling as opposed to immersion, but that’s neither here nor there. But regardless, in each case, the people hear and rush to obey.

The Devil would have us delay, slow down, don’t rush into anything, Consider all the implications of your actions. In general, while zeal without knowledge is bad, we are commanded to be zealous for holiness and more often than not caution is not a mark of the Spirit’s presence. Our inclination is to hold back, to not commit ourselves, to delay obedience to a more opportune time, but God requires us to take the prophets of Baal down to the Kidron valley and slaughter them as soon as we know them for the treacherous snakes they are. We must seek cleansing as soon as we know our sins for the cancerous blights they are.

When the Spirit’s conviction falls on you like fire, illuminating and purifying, know that fire goes on altars, i.e. things that are holy. So when the Spirit’s conviction falls on you, know that it is because you belong to God, and obey.

Joshua Edgren – May 19, 2024

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It’s easy to forget what you’re doing. Easy to walk into a room and then stare off into space perplexedly, wondering why you came in there and why you’re holding a hammer. This is a classic danger when heroes go questing: inevitably they will walk over some enchanted ground, or they will fall under some witch’s spell, or they will dally with a fair maiden with the result being that they forget what they’re doing and some helpful squire or mentor has to come along and remind them who they are and what they’re supposed to be doing.

All throughout scripture the Lord instructs his people to remember, remember, remember. Remember the gifts of God, remember the past faithfulness of God, remember the work he has given you to do. Paul tells Timothy to stir up, or rekindle, the gift of God. So consider what God has given you, and what God has given you to do, and how God has provided for you in the past. Remember that God is remaking the world and that he is doing so by means of word and sacrament each Lord’s Day, and psalms around the dinner table, and hard and honest work throughout the week, and laundry washed and folded, and joyful marriages, businesses built, and children loved and fed and taught to fear God. The Kingdom of Christ is built in these things, and it goes forth invincibly.

One of the ways we forget the gifts and calling of God is when we stop believing that the Kingdom of Jesus shall be victorious in this world, that the will of God will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

But if we’re honest, the truth that the church will be victorious in the world is frightening. It means that we really are engaged in a great war and that what we do matters. It means that the sword in my hand is for stabbing and the shield is for blocking real arrows, and not just for looking cool until the play is over. But our God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love and of power and of a sound mind. Love for God and neighbor, the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us remaking the world, and the wisdom of Christ which looks like foolishness to the world.

So let us pray to our God for Christian courage and repent of our faithless cowardice.

Joshua Edgren – April 7, 2024

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Jesus said that unless a grain of wheat goes into the tomb, unless it dies and is buried, it remains alone. In other words, the way God multiplies is by death. From the very beginning this is so. God multiplied Adam by laying him down in deathlike sleep and fashioning a woman from his rib.

We don’t know what it would have been like without sin, but in this fallen world it continues this way: the woman lies down in the death of childbirth, the man puts his body on the line every Monday morning when he goes out to turn his time and sweat into the means of his family’s provision, the two of them together died to their unbridled freedom when they bound themselves in covenant marriage to the other, and they bury themselves in dishes and laundry and sick youngsters and leaky pipes and sleepless nights. These are the means by which God has ordained us to be fruitful and multiply. We die and die and die. And if we did not, we would remain alone. But in God’s great wisdom, He multiplies by means of our death.

This was true of Adam, it is true of every family, and it is far truer of Christ.

None of us really know what we’re getting into, but Jesus did. He stretched out his hands willingly to receive the Roman nails. He was the only crucifixion victim ever who wasn’t powerless, who stayed voluntarily. No one took his life from him, but he laid it down willingly. He gave up his spirit, his side was pierced as Adam’s was, and he went into the ground like a seed.

And when he rose again on Easter morning, he rose triumphant with a host of captives in his train. He rose again in order to give life abundant, life eternal to an uncountable number of saints. God multiplied by Christ’s death.

If you love your life, you will lose it. But if you hate your life in this world for the sake of loving God and neighbor, then God will raise you up as he raised Jesus. The temptation is to cling to our lives, to selfishly carve out a little bit for us. But that’s just hewing out broken cisterns, it’s putting water in a sieve. The way to save your life is follow Christ’s example, and to lose it. 

Joshua Edgren – March 31, 2024

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