In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.    

After Jesus ascended into heaven, the Bible tells us that His disciples “returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” This is a helpful detail for understanding what the ascension of Jesus is all about and what it means for the Church. The disciples were not sad when Jesus ascended. They were not angry about it. They were not bitter about it. They were glad about it. When Jesus ascended into heaven, it filled the disciples with joy. 

We should ask ourselves if it does the same thing for us today. When we think about what Jesus did forty days after He rose from the dead, does it still fill us with joy? Do we get excited about celebrating our Lord’s ascension, or is it something that we really don’t think about that much, or maybe even something that we don’t completely understand? My guess is that for most of us, if we are being honest with ourselves, it’s probably the latter. But if we don’t understand exactly what happened when Jesus ascended into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God, then we are missing out on the crown jewel of our Lord’s redemptive work to save us. We are missing out on something that Jesus accomplished specifically that it might bring us joy; that it might comfort us in the midst of worldly sadness and bring us the peace that passes all understanding.

So, in today’s sermon, as we celebrate this pivotal event in the life of Christ, let us answer two questions about it. First, what exactly happened when Jesus ascended in heaven? And, second why should what happened give us joy?

The Bible tells us in multiple places that forty days after His resurrection our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven and took His seat at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. In Acts chapter one, Saint Luke tells us that “[Jesus] was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” In His Gospel, Luke also adds that, “While [Jesus] blessed them, He parted from them and was carried up into heaven.” And Saint Mark reminds us that Jesus was “taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.” 

But where exactly is the heaven to which Jesus ascended, and what does it mean that He is now at the right hand of God? As difficult as it can be for us to understand, we should not think about our Lord’s ascension into heaven in the same way that we think about our loved ones who have died in the faith and whose souls are now at rest in heaven. The Bible does not just say that Jesus went to heaven, but that He ascended far above all the heavens. For example, Saint Paul tells us in Ephesians chapter four, that “He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.” Furthermore, Paul says, and this is also in his letter to the Ephesians, that “[God the Father] raised [Jesus] from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority… and He put all things under His feet and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.”

The ascension of Jesus does not mean that is now confined to heaven as the other saints are who dwell there with God eternally, but rather that He is far above heaven. It is not that Jesus was received by heaven, but rather that He received heaven, as in, He took up the rulership of heaven. The ascension of Jesus means that Jesus, as both God and now as a man, fully exercises His divine right as the king of heaven. He lords over heaven. He lords over everything. He fills all things.

That is also what it means when the Bible tells us that Jesus is at the right hand of God now. Again, the right hand of God is not a place on a map where Jesus is confined. That is not how the Bible describes God’s right hand. The right hand of God is God’s divine power. It is the way in which God accomplishes His holy will. His right hand is His omnipotence, His omnipresence, and His omniscience. It is synonymous with His almighty rule over all creation. Consider some of the other passages from the Scriptures that talk to us about the right hand of God. From Psalm 118 we read, “the right hand of the Lord does valiantly, the right hand of the Lord exults.” And from Psalm 139 it says, “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” When we say that Jesus ascended into heaven to the right hand of God, we are not saying that Jesus went to live someplace far far away from us, but rather that Jesus now rules over us and is constantly with us, even as a man. Jesus can be in more than one place at the same time. 

Now, of course, everyone who believes that Jesus is God, would say that this is true according to His divine nature. Since Jesus is God, and God can be everywhere, Jesus can be everywhere. But the precise meaning of the ascension is that now Jesus promises to be everywhere not only according to His divine nature, but also according to His human nature. Jesus, as a man, can be present with His Church bodily in more than one place at the same time even though He only has one body. Obviously, this is a profound mystery. The ascension of Jesus is sort of like looking at the sun. The more that we stare at it, the more it blurs our vision. The more that we try to figure out how these things are possible, the more that we struggle to believe them, and the more we will be tempted deny them.

And sadly, that is what many Christians do. Some Christians today even claim that because Jesus ascended into heaven, He cannot be with us bodily in the Lord’s Supper. If you know, this is actually one of the main differences between us Lutherans and the so-called Reformed, which would include the modern-day Presbyterians and Baptists. Reformed churches, following the theological tradition of men like John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, say that because Jesus ascended into heaven the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper is only a symbol of Christ’s far off body and blood and not His actual body and blood. They say that when we take Communion we do no actually eat and drink Jesus real Body and Blood, but that we only eat and drink a reminder of it. But that is not what the Bible says. And that is not what the ascension means. And that false theology can lead people to eat and drink Christ’s Body and Blood without discerning it to their own spiritual harm. As Saint Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, “anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.”

Jesus is not gone. Jesus is exulted. Yes, Jesus has disappeared from our eyes, but He has not disappeared from us entirely. Yes, we can no longer see Jesus as others once saw Him, but Jesus is still here. Jesus is still with us. And He is with us in the places that He has promised to be. As Jesus says, and this is also on the mount of His ascension in Matthew’s Gospel, “Behold I am with you always even to the end of the age.” Jesus does not tell us that He is with us only according to His divine nature. He says, “I am with you.” The “I” to which Jesus refers is His whole person, both His divine and human natures. All of Jesus is with us, and He is with us always. That is what His ascension means. That is what happened when He ascended.

So, why should what happened at Jesus’ ascension give us joy? Well, it should give us joy for at least two main reasons. The first reason, as we already talked about, is that Jesus is actually with us. Again, as our Lord says at His ascension, “Behold I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Jesus is truly with us. He is not symbolically with us. He not with us only in spirit. He is not with us only in our memory. Jesus is really with us. And He is with us where He has promised to be: in His Word and Sacraments.

We all know that there is a big difference between someone being there for us for real and someone only being there for us symbolically. There is a big difference between a friend actually standing by your side when you have to do something difficult, and him watching you from afar, giving you encouragement at a distance. We face real challenges in our lives on this side of heaven. We have real temptations that we face day after day. We have reals sins that we fall into day after day. We have real enemies that seek to do us real harm day after day. But Jesus is with us every day. And when we come to church to take Communion, He is actually there with His Body and Blood to feed us with the food that forgives our sins and strengthens us to meet every trail that we face. And that is because of His ascension. That is because Jesus is at the right hand of God, meaning, Jesus has fully taken up the divine authority and power that is His by right. He has stepped into His exulted state, which allows Him to be with us as a man wherever we men and women are.

The second reason why the ascension should give us joy is because not only is Jesus with us, but we are with Jesus. As Saint Paul writes in Ephesians chapter two, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” The Bible teaches us that through faith in Jesus we are seated with Him in the heavenly places. It tells us that because of Christ’s ascension we have the promise of our ascension too. All those who trust in Christ and cling to Him for forgiveness and salvation have the assurance that one day they will live with Jesus in heavenly glory too. 

The Church is the Body of Christ. The Church is all believers in the Gospel. As the Scriptures say, “If one member suffers all suffer together; [and] if one member is honored all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” What that means for us is that the triumph of Jesus is our triumph. Just like His death for sin is our death to sin, and His resurrection to new life is our resurrection to eternal life, His ascension to heaven is our ascension to heaven too.

In His ascension, Jesus showed us that He is the king of kings and the lord of lords. He showed us that He rules over everything. Nothing rules over Jesus. Sin doesn’t rule of him. Death doesn’t rule over him. The devil doesn’t rule over Him. And because we believe in Jesus, none of those things can rule of us either. Because we believe in Jesus, sin can torment us, but it cannot condemn us. Because we believe in Jesus, death can kill us, but it cannot destroy us. Because we believe in Jesus, the devil can accuse us, but He cannot judge us. We have victory over our enemies, because we belong to the One who put all of our enemies under His feet. We belong to Jesus. We have been united to the One who has overcome all our enemies for us already. We have been joined to Him who died, rose, and ascended.

When the disciples saw Jesus ascend into heaven they returned to Jerusalem with great joy. You can return to your life today with great joy too. No matter how miserable your life might look, no matter how hard your life might be to live at times, you can go back to your life with a greater joy than this world could ever know, because you know that your life is bound up with the life of your ascended Lord. Jesus rules and reigns to all eternity, and by faith in His word, you reign along with Him. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus says in John chapter sixteen, our Gospel lesson for today, “Whatever you ask the Father in my Name, He will give it to you.” This, of course, is a wonderful promise from God’s Word about the gift of prayer. Jesus not only invites us to pray. But He also encourages us to believe that God will actually hear our prayers and answer them. And yet, if these wonderful words from Jesus about prayer are not understood correctly, they can have a negative effect not only on our prayer life, but even on our life of faith in general. In fact, if we misunderstand what our Lord means in this verse, as many people often do, it could lead us completely away from God’s actual will for our lives.

And so, what a perfect text for us to talk about on the day that we recognize our high school graduates here at St John. Certainly, as was the case for many of us in the past, when you graduate from High School you are thinking about your future plans. You are thinking about what you’re going to do with your life, and hopefully, if you’re a Christian, you are trying to discern what God wants from your life. You are prayfully considering the different paths and options that God has laid before you, evaluating those things in light of His Word, and you are diligently seeking His approval over which one to take. And in the midst of all that, Jesus says, “Whatever you ask the Father in My Name, He will give it to you.”

So, in this morning’s sermon, as we recognize our gradates and pray for God’s continued blessing on their future, let us think a little bit more about what these words from Jesus mean and what they don’t mean.

We’ll start with what they don’t mean first. Obviously, when Jesus tells us in our reading from John chapter sixteen that God the Father will give us whatever we ask for in His Name, He doesn’t mean that if we simply conclude every one of our prayers with the words, “In Jesus’ Name,” then whatever we said will automatically come true. Praying in Jesus’ Name is not a magic formula for getting whatever we want from God. That’s not what God’s Word teaches us about the gift of prayer.

According to the Bible, some prayer is good prayer and some prayer is bad prayer, and God will not necessarily answer our prayers just because we end them with certain words. Listen to what James says about prayer in the fourth chapter of his Epistle. He writes, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” Apparently, some of the people that James was writing to thought that they could use prayer to get whatever they wanted from God. They thought of prayer as an instrument to gratify their own sinful desires. But that, of course, is not the purpose of prayer. And praying in that kind way will not bring about the same result that Jesus is talking about in our reading.

Or think also about what our Lord says concerning prayer in Matthew chapter six, which is the place in the Bible where Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer. There Jesus says, “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.” When we Christians pray to God, we shouldn’t act as if we are trying to get God to do things that He otherwise doesn’t want to do. That’s what the pagans believed about prayer. They thought that if they impressed their gods enough with the way that they prayed to them, if they said enough fancy words, or kept saying the same words over and over again, then their gods would eventually break down and give them whatever they asked for. But again, that is not the right way to pray. Prayer is not about bending God’s will to our own. It is about conforming our will to His. 

And lastly, think about what Jesus teaches us concerning prayer in the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in the Temple. You know how the parable goes. Two men went into Church one day to pray. But one man used his prayer to brag about himself, and the other man used his prayer to humble himself. One man thanked God that he wasn’t a sinner like other people were, and the other man cried out to God to forgive him for his sins. And who did Jesus say had the better prayer? Who did Jesus say went down to his house justified that day? Whose prayer did God really answer? It was the man who asked God for forgiveness, and not the man who asked God for praise. 

Clearly, according to the Bible, not all prayer is the same. And just because we end a prayer with certain words, such as, “In Jesus’ Name,” that does not automatically mean that God will give us whatever we ask for. That cannot possibly be what Jesus means.

So, what does He mean then? Well, simply put, when Jesus tells us in our reading from John chapter sixteen that “Whatever you ask the Father in My Name, He will give it to you,” our Lord is talking about asking for things in faith. He is saying that when we as God’s children bring our requests to Him, trusting that for Jesus’ sake, and because of what He did for on the cross, God will hear our prayers and answer them in the exact perfect way, then we can have every confidence in the world that He will.

Like every other Christian discipline, true prayer is an act of faith. That’s what it means to pray in Jesus’ Name. It means to trust in Jesus and to receive from Him whatever it is that He gives with thanksgiving. Faith isn’t about getting what we want, it is about accepting whatever God wants. It is about trusting that whatever God gives us is always best, because He already gave us His Son, so now we can come to Him and ask for other things too knowing that He will never give us the wrong thing. As Jesus says elsewhere, “What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg will instead give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”

Now sometimes even when people recognize that praying in Jesus’ Name means praying in faith, they still get it all wrong. For example, not too long ago there was a very popular religious movement in America called the “name it and claim” movement, also known in some circles as “the power of positive thinking.” Proponents of “name it and claim it” theology taught that if you wanted something bad enough, and had enough faith that God would give it you, then you could literally get whatever you wanted. If you wanted a new car, simply “name it and claim it.” If you wanted a new house, simply “name it and claim it.” If you wanted a completely new life, where all of your wildest dreams came true, then simply “name it and claim it” and all of it would be yours. The “name it and claim it” folks maintained that if you believed in Jesus enough, there was nothing that Jesus wouldn’t give you. And if you didn’t get what you wanted from Jesus, then you must not have had enough faith in Him to begin with. 

But just because we don’t always get exactly what we want as God’s children, that does not mean that we don’t have faith in Him. Did Saint Paul not have faith in Jesus, when he pleaded with the Lord three times to remove from him the thorn that was in His flesh and God told him, “No.” Did King David not have faith in Jesus, when he prayed and fasted all night that his son wouldn’t die, and God did not let the baby get better? Did Moses not have faith in Jesus when He asked God to let him cross over into the promised land and instead the Lord only let him see it from a distance? And what about the prayer that Jesus Himself prayed in the garden of Gethsemane? In the mystery of His state of humiliation, our Lord prayed multiple times that if it were possible for the cup of His suffering to pass from Him, that God would take it away. Did that mean that Jesus did not have enough faith? Of course, it didn’t. Jesus had perfect faith. He completely trusted in the will of His Father at every single turn. And yet, Jesus still had to go to the cross and suffer for our sins.

Lots of times today people act as if prayer is all about trying to figure out God’s secret purpose for their life. Many Christians almost drive themselves to despair, looking for direct answers from God over things that He has completely left up to our freedom. Where in the Bible does it tells us that we should expect direct signs from the Lord about what job we’re supposed to take, what college we’re supposed to attend, or who we’re supposed to marry? Where do the Scriptures tell us that God is going to speak to us through extra-Biblical revelations so that we can have precise directions for every little thing that we face on a daily basis? They don’t. And when Christians act like they do, and when they act like prayer is the means by which we can figure it all out, they turn prayer completely backwards and take away all of the comfort that God gives us through it. What happens when a person thinks that God will show him what to do even in instances where His Word is silent? What happens is that the person makes a decision, the decision leads to hardships, and then they doubt whether or not they made the right decision. Then their conscience becomes burdened over something that God never even commanded them to do in the first place.

The point in all of this is that God’s ultimate will for our life is not something that is hidden. It is very clear in the Bible. As Saint Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification.” God wants us to live holy lives according to His Word, where we repent of our sins and put our faith in Jesus. He wants us to do that, so that we will go to heaven when we die. Remember what the Catechism says about God’s will? First, it reminds us that “the good and gracious will of God is done even without our prayer.” Then it tells us that “God’s will is done when He breaks and hinders every evil plan and purpose of the devil, the world, and our sinful nature, which do not want us to hallow God’s name or let His kingdom come; and when He strengthens and keeps us firm in His Word until we die.”  That’s God’s will for our lives. It isn’t a secret. It isn’t a mystery. It isn’t something that we have to worry about trying to figure it. God wants us to go to heaven. God wants us to be saved.

And when we pray for things with that perspective in mind, then it becomes easier to see how God actually does give us everything that we ask for in Jesus’ Name. Think again about those examples from earlier. No, God did not take away the thorn from Saint Paul’s side, but He did give him something even better. God gave Paul the assurance of His grace. God reminded Paul how His power is made perfect in weakness so that Paul could continue to trust in the Lord and be saved. No, God did not let King David’s son get better from his sickness in this earthly life, but He did usher David’s son into everlasting life early. Remember what David said, “He cannot come to me, but I will go to him.” No, God did not let Moses go into the promised land, but He did take Moses directly to the promised land of heaven. Which is better, a piece of land in the Middle East that people are still fighting over or a place in our Father’s House where there are many rooms? And no, God did not take away the cup of His wrath from Jesus, but by letting His only begotten Son drink it, God satisfied His wrath over sins of the whole world and made it possible for everyone who believes in Jesus to be saved.

God always answers the prayers that we pray in faith. Even when we don’t know what to pray for, and even when we unknowingly pray for things that could harm us, as it says in Romans chapter eight, the Holy Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. God takes our feeble prayers and He polishes them up, and then He provides the perfect response to them. He does that not by giving us necessarily what we always expect, but by giving us exactly what we need the most in order to remain faithful to Him and go to heaven when we die.

No doubt, we have many different things on our hearts and minds this day. Our graduates in particular are probably thinking a lot about their future and what’s going to come next in their life. It’s a good time to think about prayer. We can’t do anything without God’s help. That’s what prayer is all about. When we pray to God, we are acknowledging that we need Him, and that there’s nothing that we can do apart from Him. But simply praying to God is not enough. You also need to pray in Jesus’ Name. Praying in Jesus’ Name does not mean simply ending every prayer with certain words. It means praying in faith and trusting in God’s mercy. It means relying on the Scriptures and believing that Jesus always wants what is best for you. It means having confidence that regardless of what He sends your way, God’s purpose in all things is your eternal salvation. He sent His Son to die for it. He sends His Holy Spirit through the Word and Sacraments to give it. And He gives you the gift of prayer so that you can rest within it.

So, may the Lord bless each and every one of our graduates this day that their prayers, and more importantly, their faith, would never faulter. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the defining characteristics of our time is widespread skepticism. While in times past there was an overall consensus, at least among members of Western Civilization, that certain things were right and certain things were wrong, and that truth was actually something that could be known, nowadays even the concept of truth itself is under attack. Many people assume that it is impossible to know the truth and that there is no such thing as objective or absolute truth at all. Case in point, how often do we hear people say things like “well that’s just your truth” or “I’m just living my truth,” as if two things could be true at once even if they are contradictory to each other? Sadly, by today’s standards, claiming to know the truth is not only considered to be arrogant, but in many cases, it’s almost seen as immoral: “Who are you to tell me what’s true and what isn’t? What makes you so special that you think you have the truth all figured out? Don’t you dare impose your truth on me.”

That is the situation that we find ourselves living in as twenty-first century Christians, and it is very serious problem that we as the Church need to address. We especially need to address it today, because today at St John Lutheran Church we are celebrating Confirmation Sunday. Three of our young people are about to stand in front of this congregation and make certain vows about what they believe and how they intend to live their lives. Among other things, one of the questions that they will get asked is this: “Do you confess the doctrine of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, drawn from the Scriptures, as you have learned to know it from the Small Catechism, to be faithful and true?” To which the confirmands will respond, “I do.” 

That is what we Lutherans think about the truth. Not only do we think that it can actually be known, but we also believe that by God’s grace, and His grace alone, we actually have it. We believe that what we teach in this Church is nothing other the pure, unadulterated truth. So, in today’s sermon, on the basis of our Gospel lesson from John chapter sixteen, where Jesus talks to us about this exact thing, let us consider together how we know the truth.

The first and most fundamental thing that everyone must recognize when to comes to knowing the truth is that ultimately all truth comes from God. As Jesus says very clearly to His disciples in our reading, “When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth.” According to Jesus, the way that a person comes to the knowledge of the truth is not by his or her own intellect and abilities, but by the intervention and revelation of the Holy Spirit. The truth is not something that we establish, it is something that we receive. It is something that God gives to us. It is something that the Holy Spirit makes known to us.

We are not the source of ultimate truth. Despite what so many people teach these days, truth does not come from inside of a person, but from outside of them. Just because we feel like something is true, or think that something should be true, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is. The Disney corporation might make some very entertaining and enjoyable movies, but they are dead wrong when they teach little children to follow their own hearts. Listen to what the prophet Jeremiah says about the human heart in Jeremiah chapter 17. He writes, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” And then there are the words of Jesus from Matthew chapter 15. There our Lord tells us, “Out of the heart comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, and slander.” Far from being the source of truth, God’s Word teaches us that our hearts are the source of sin. And that is why if we want to know the truth, we must not listen to ourselves, but to God. We must listen to the Holy Spirit.

And yet, simply saying that we must listen to the Holy Spirit if we want to know the truth, is, of course, not enough to actually know the truth. We also have to know how the Holy Spirit speaks to us and where He wants us to listen for His voice. Often times, Christians today will claim that they have direct access to the Holy Spirit. Since the Bible teaches us that when we get Baptized, we receive the Holy Spirit, and that now He lives within us, many people think that means that now the Holy Spirit speaks to them directly. When they have a certain strong feeling about something in their lives, they will say that “God laid it on their heart to do it.” Even if that thing is not something that is talked about in the Bible, and sometimes even if it is directly spoken against in the Bible, people will ignore it on the basis that the Holy Spirit told them otherwise. This is literally the exact argument that every liberal congregation which has deviated from God’s Word because of popular culture trends in the last fifty years has made. Why does the ELCA ordain women to the pastoral office and say that it’s okay for two men or two women to be married to each other even though the Bible says otherwise? They do it because they say that the Holy Spirit led them to that conclusion.

But this is no different from those who claim that we should simply follow our own hearts. Just because the Holy Spirit lives in our hearts does not mean that everything that we feel in our hearts necessarily comes from Him. We are still sinners after our Baptism. Even though the guilt of our sins has been washed away by the water and the Word, our sinful nature remains. Yes, we are being made new in the image of God our Creator, but our regeneration is only begun. It is not complete. And that is why simply saying that the Holy Spirit told you to do something as a Christians because you feel strongly about that thing doesn’t mean that it’s true.

Where does the Holy Spirit speak to us? Where does He Himself tell us to listen for His voice so that we can know the truth? He tells us to listen to the Bible. The Bible does not just contain God’s Word, the Bible is God’s Word. Every bit of it is the inspired and inerrant Word of God. Listen to what we read about the Bible in 2 Timothy chapter 3. There the apostle Paul, who spoke with Jesus in person, and saw Him in His resurrected state with his own two eyes, says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” The word in that passage for breath is the same word for Spirit. You could just as easily translate it as “All Scripture is Spirit breathed,” as in, all of it comes from the Holy Spirit. Or think about what Saint Peter writes in 2 Peter chapter 1. This is a great passage to bring up when someone claims that the Bible is just the opinions of certain Christians and not really the opinion of God Himself. Peter writes, “For no prophecy was every produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

When we read the Bible, it is not just men who are speaking to us. It is God who is speaking to us. Even when Jesus was being tempted by the Devil in the wilderness, how did our Lord respond to his attacks? He responded with the Bible. Jesus quoted the written Word back to Satan thereby showing all of us just how reliable it really is. As Jesus also tells us about the Bible in John chapter 10, “the Scriptures cannot be broken.” And as He says in John chapter 8, “If you continue in my words, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

Not only is the Holy Spirit the source of ultimate truth, and not only does He reveal that truth to us in the Bible, but He also guides us into all truth by using the Bible to do it. Sometimes when Christians quote the Bible to try and prove a point they are met with the response of, “Well, that’s just your interpretation.” I can still remember one time when I was in college and I told one of my roommates that we shouldn’t be getting drunk because the Bible tells us not to, and he dismissed my rebuke by claiming that what I said was just my own interpretation of the text. Of course, when I asked him how he interpreted the text differently so that it meant the exact opposite of what it plainly said, he didn’t have any response.

If we approach the Bible with the intent of looking for the answer that we already want to hear, then we will never be able to find the truth there. No, the right way to read the Bible is to let the Bible speak for itself. As the Old Lutherans used to say, “Scripture interprets Scripture.” When you come across something in the Bible that is confusing or hard to understand, you go back to the basic truths of the Bible and you let those guide you in your study. That is what Jesus is talking about in our reading from John chapter sixteen when He says that the Holy Spirit will convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Those are the basic teachings of the Bible.

First, there’s what the Bible teaches about sin. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” – “We are conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity” – “All sin is lawlessness.” You know what is sinful and what isn’t by looking at the Ten Commandments, and those commandments show us that we need a Savior. 

Next, there’s what the Bible says about righteousness. “No one is righteous, no not one” – “Abraham believed in God and it was credited to him as righteousness” – “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.” According to God’s Word, true righteousness, or the kind of righteousness that gets us into heaven, doesn’t come from us, it comes from Jesus. Christ is our righteousness, and we receive His righteousness through faith alone. We get it not by doing a bunch of good deeds, but by believing in the promise that for His sake our sins are forgiven.

And lastly, there is what the Bible teaches us about judgment. Jesus will “come to judge the living and the dead” – “After death comes judgment” – and “My Word will judge them on the last day.” This life is not all that there is, and the time is coming when Christ will bring it to an end. We need to be ready, and the only way to be ready is by feeding our faith with God’s Word and Sacraments so that it doesn’t die out before we die.

These are the truths that the Holy Spirit leads us into. They are the basic teachings of the Bible and the tools that we use to read the Bible correctly. When we come across something that we don’t understand in the Scriptures we look at it through the lens of those passages that are very easy to understand. Then the other passages become clearer and clearer.

Yes, it is true that that the Holy Spirit does not teach us everything that we might want to know in the Bible. But He does teach us everything that we need to know. He teaches us everything that we need to know to be saved. As we read in 2 Timothy chapter three, “the Scriptures are able to make you wise unto salvation.” That’s why God gave us the Bible. And that’s how He wants us to use it. He wants us to listen to it and let the Holy Spirit guide us into all truth. 

Confirmands, now I am speaking to you directly. I can assure you without a doubt in my mind that you are going to be bombarded by all kinds of different messages in your life that will try and pass themselves off as the truth. I know it because I’ve lived it. I went to public high school. I went to the big college. I remember what things were like fifteen years ago for me, and I can’t image what they are going to be like for you. People will tell you things and expect you to believe them without any consideration. They will make ludicrous claims about all kinds of nonsense and pretend that what they’re saying is common knowledge. Outside of the church you will be told that all truth is relative and that you can’t be sure of anything expect for the stuff that is popular at that particular moment in time. And inside of the Church you will hear from many how the truth is given to us directly and that the Holy Spirit talks to us apart from the written Word.

I’m telling you all of this not to scare you, but to prepare you. As you will soon confess in your Confirmation vows, the source of all truth is the Bible. That means that you need to know the Bible. That means that you need to keep coming to Church to hear the Bible read and pay attention when the meaning of the Bible is explained by the pastor. Just because you learned the Catechism once doesn’t mean you can’t forget it. Even Martin Luther said that he recited the whole Catechism every single day. God’s Word isn’t just for kids. It’s for everyone. And the older you get the more responsibility you need to take for yourself. Be in Church. Be in your Catechism. Be in your Bible. 

Because even though all of that might sound like a burden, you know that it is a blessing. Having access to the God’s Word is the greatest blessing of your life. It is the greatest treasure God has given you, because in giving you access to the Bible, you have access to Jesus. You have access to the One who is the way, and the truth, and the life. You have access to the one who lived and died for all of your sins so that you can have access to your Father in heaven.

So, do not grow tired of listening to the Bible. Let your heart and your ears be opened to the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit who wrote them will guide you into all truth through them. He will guide you to Christ your Savior. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.