Our Daily Bread in ALL Things

     My dear friend Gary Cepek has given me permission to share his words of response to my brotherly concern for his health. He has Lyme Disease, which has recurring symptoms that are sometimes very severe. His response is one that I believe can serve us all as we look to our gracious God and Father for purpose and understanding in our daily experiences.

     Thank you again for your encouragement and support about my health issues. Our God graciously grants such expressions in Christ to add to the goodness of the day He grants me. As Luther was granted insight to teach Scriptural truths about daily bread, he noted that good health is a daily gift our Father grants us each day. As the Spirit mercifully renews me in Christ during the day He gives me, I grasp by faith that truth, that no matter how I or anyone else may adjudge my health (or any other aspect of daily bread for that matter) it is good because it is exactly what the Father knows will best serve His eternal purpose for me "today" all the while serving my earthly life in the best possible way also. Paralleling that truth, all that is of the curse from Adam and on Adam and us must also serve that wonderful purpose. So truly, each child of God has each moment every good and perfect gift, coming down from the heavenly Father with whom there is no variation or change.

     Gary has been taught in the school of the Holy Spirit the faith that grasps God’s gracious activity even in the things that cannot be understood from our ordinary human reason. The Holy Spirit is poured out to us in our baptism to be our counselor and comforter and teacher. The Lord Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would lead His disciples into all truth, causing them to recall all things whatsoever that He had taught them and putting these into the proper perspective. That same promise is given to us.

     This faith is not a faith that we generate for ourselves. It is the faith of Jesus, the faith through which His life, His accomplishments, His faithfulness, His goodness, His merits are accounted to us as our own so that we are made to know God as our loving, gracious, merciful Father.

     Gary’s words above are more than just a statement of what he personally chooses to believe. These words are a wonderful prayer. This prayer is taught by the Holy Spirit. In this prayer is expressed the absolute confidence that the Holy Spirit gives concerning God’s promises to work good through all things to those who love Him, the called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28)

     In the following verse St. Paul further explains this, saying:

     For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

     Here St. Paul explains that God’s knowledge concerning us is perfect. His knowledge of who we are and what we need is from eternity. We see things from the limitations of our temporality. Our perception is blurred by our senses of pain and loss and grief and sorrow. We often cannot see the good that God is working for us through the circumstances that we encounter. Through the faith of Jesus, however, we do see. This faith directs us beyond what we can know according to our own reason and strength to the assurance of God’s perfect holiness and goodness, His limitless mercy and love. We are made to have this confidence in connection with the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. As the doctrine of the true faith directs us away from ourselves to the preaching of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, then we see how God works for us through the most horrific suffering and anguish. Our fleshly nature looks for help and relief through other means, but God brings us perfect deliverance through the cross.

     In their eternal counsel together the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit predestinated our salvation through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. From beyond the reaches of time they stretched forth their mercy to us and redeemed us from the destructive choices of our sinfulness. And God turned suffering and death and misery into the opposite for us, He turned these into blessedness, life, and everlasting joy. Even our considerably lesser troubles also serve God’s purposes for us, if we receive them in the faith that He gives. Then we begin to pray as dear Gary has shared with us. Then we begin to understand how our Lord Jesus prayed especially in the garden, “Not My will but Thine be done.” Then, by faith, we already have the blessing that we will only perceive with our time bound reason on the other side of the trial.

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No longer a child

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Yesterday I had an experience that brought this passage to my mind. I cut a gash in my leg just above my knee. This gash is not far from one from my youth, when I was teenager. It is about the same size and severity. But when I was a child, this gash was debilitating. It kept me from participating in PE in Junior High School until it was healed. But yesterday, I examined it to see that it was a clean laceration that cut completely through the skin but did no serious damage to other tissue beneath the skin, walked to the truck, acquired my first aid supplies, applied some antibiotic ointment, a bandage, gauze and tape to hold the bandage in place and the wound closed, and finished the day’s work.

Truly a man thinks and acts differently than a child. Part of this comes from the responsibility of adulthood and manhood. A man dare not let the troubles of the world beat him down. He has responsibilities to fulfill. So he presses onward.

I tended the wound more thoroughly when I arrived home. My wife was aghast. This is why I did not tell her of the event when we spoke on the phone. She heard discouragement in my voice and commented on it, but since there was no reason to share the cause with her at that time I waited. I will be out on the job site a bit later again today.

St. Paul used this contrast to make a point regarding a person’s spiritual walk through this world. He used this contrast to demonstrate the difference between what we perceive now and what we will be shown when the Lord brings us to heaven. When we see and know the Triune God face to face, we will understand fully that the many gifts that He has bestowed in this world were insignificant contrasted to the restoration to His Holy Communion. Then all of the struggles and trials of living in this world of sin will fade, as will the many temporal gifts. But the Holy Trinity remains, as God gives Himself to us through His means of grace we receive the everlasting gifts of faith, hope, love, the gifts of the very presence and activity of the Trinity in our lives. When a Christian grows to understand this, spiritual maturity has been reached. No longer is the person impressed by this or that spiritual gift, and much less so with the worldly gifts. Now the person appreciates and relies upon the gift of God Himself, that which remains forevermore.

Trinity Sunday & the Athanasian Creed

At Necessary Roughness is an interesting post on Trinity Sunday. His pearl illustration, in which he compares the writing of the Athanasian Creed to the formation of a pearl, generates some helpful thinking, but it is generated by thinking that is not quite accurate.

As he indicates, a pearl is the product of covering over of something that is foreign and harmful to the oyster. But the Creed is not like this. Rather than a covering over of a foreign and harmful substance in the body of Christ with an inanimate and innocuous material, the Creed is an exposition of the all-powerful Truth, which actually exposes and expels what is foreign and harmful.

It seems that the most common response to the Athanasian Creed is to call it a refutation of the various heresies. It certainly was written in response to these, but not with refutation as the foundation. The Creed is written as an exposition of the true and catholic faith, without which salvation cannot be given and received.

When a person reads or recites this creed, what is encountered is not a refutation of falsehood, but a confession of the Truth. The Creed is very much more than a refutation. The Truth always leaves falsehood refuted, simply by the light that is generated by the Truth. In the light, that which is false simply does not match that which is true.

The Creed is written as a confession of the catholic faith by which salvation is given and received. It is written for the purpose of edifying the body of Christ, for strengthening the weak and faltering. Those who refuse to receive this Creed are surely exposed by their rejection of the Truth as it is clearly stated, but that is a secondary function of the Creed.

It is a mistake to view the Ecumenical Creeds as means of keeping heresies and heretics out of the Church. Rather, they are declarations of what the Church really is, so that people may freely come to the source of the Truth and not have the true faith stolen from them by false prophets and by people’s own misunderstandings.

Conservative Lutheran church bodies have often presented the creeds and especially the Athanasian Creed as refutations of false doctrine. Because of this much legalistic thinking has prevailed amongst those holding such. Then the notion that the Bible is counted as the Word of God and that the Creeds and the Lutheran Confessions are counted as true expositions of the Word of God is counted as being equal to and truly holding and believing and living the true faith. This is what happened with the Pharisees and the scribes and Sadducees.

The true Church does not have as its business the refutation of falsehood. Rather, it is the living body of Christ, founded upon and gathered unto the Truth. Where the Truth is taught and guarded, all that is false is naturally perceived as false and foreign. Where the activity is continual confession and exposition of the Truth, falsehood has no foothold and those who prefer falsehood expose themselves. Such shall be acknowledged according to what their own works/confessions expose concerning them and they are thereby refuted and ultimately excommunicated. But this is actually a foreign work of the true Church and of the Creeds of the true Church.

It is notable that in the Gospel accounts the Lord Jesus is not reported as having given orders to the apostles or to the others who were sent out that they should refute falsehood. Rather He sends them forth to preach the Gospel to all who will receive their peace. He said that where that peace is rejected that they should simply depart and make clear in their leaving that they are not one with those who reject their peace, which is the peace of God in Christ.

In contrast, consider the immense amounts of energy wasted in the building and defense and reclaiming of people’s church bodies. Consider the amount of time and money and energy thrown away on evangelism programs and on trying to win souls for Christ. If only those professing to be the Church of the Creeds would live by them, not counting their confession of them as anything more than the Truth at work in them. Then they would be true gatherings unto the pure Word and Sacraments, rather than gatherings of mangled church bodies where fighting for the Truth is the order of the day.

The Athanasian Creed is not written to be used as a refutation of heresies, but as a confession of the true faith by which all men must be saved. Salvation, not refutation, is the foundation of the creeds. Since this salvation is unlike any other proclamation in the world, it stands in such stark contrast to everything else that the foreign notions, when exposed to the Truth’s light are by their very nature exposed as foreign and false. Anyone who truly knows the God of the Athanasian Creed naturally cringes at the hearing of anything else and will gather only to the proclamation of the catholic faith confessed in this creed.

This is the purpose and nature of the creeds.