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Here I Stand 2017 HIGHER THINGS CONFERENCES
Retrospective Issue www
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THINKING ABOUT MINISTRY? “Taste of the Sem was especially impactful for me. At this event I saw how God worked in the lives of His people at Concordia Seminary. Now as a seminarian I am beginning to see the same transformation happen in my life as I grow in my knowledge of God and the faith He has given me to ultimately serve others to His glory.” - RYAN MASSER FIRST-YEAR MASTER OF DIVINITY STUDENT
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YOU CAN SERVE GOD IN MINISTRY!
TASTE OF THE SEM Feb. 17-19, 2018
(for high school men only)
VOCATIO
June 23-28, 2018 (for high school men and women)
H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 2
801 SEMINARY PLACE • ST. LOUIS, MO 63105 • 800-822-9545 • WWW.CSL.EDU • ADMISSIONS@CSL.EDU
Contents T A B L E O F
Volume 17/Number 3 • Fall 2017
Special Features 4 Why Be a Lutheran?
By Rev. George F. Borghardt You don’t have to hold to the Lutheran confessions to be a Christian, but if you are looking for the clear proclamation of the Gospel as found in the Scriptures, those confessions won’t disappoint. Rev. Borghardt explains why this is the case by sharing his own story, which is all about Jesus.
6 On What—or Whom—Do We Stand?
By Rev. Chris Hull It’s been 500 years since the curtains that obscured the Gospel began to part as Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg! What’s at the heart of the Reformation? Find out as Rev. Hull recaps his plenary sessions from the San Antonio conference.
8 A Profound Mystery
By Sandra Ostapowich There’s more to the “leave and cleave” aspect of marriage in Genesis 2 than meets the eye. Sandra sheds the light of Christ on this mystery that Paul describes in Ephesians 5.
10 Sometimes the Devil Loves It When You Pray
By Rev. Harrison Goodman Sometimes we are afraid to be honest with God when we pray. Rev. Goodman encourages us to come before God openly since He knows the depths of our hearts anyway and loves us for the sake of His Son, Jesus.
12 Purpose and the Queen of Persia
By Rev. Kurt Onken Do you wonder what it is God wants you to do in this life? Rev. Onken’s retelling of Queen Esther’s story will help to give you some perspective.
14 2017 Here I Stand Conference Photo Retrospective
Spot your friends, find your youth leader, or maybe even catch a glimpse of yourself in this whimsical collection of conference photos!
20 Leviticus: A Book of Shadows
By Rev. Ryan J. Ogrodowicz If you’ve ever tried to tackle the book of Leviticus, you might have found yourself lost in a maze of ceremonial laws. However, Rev. Ogrodowicz encourages you to look at this book through the lens of Jesus because it will reveal God’s amazing plan of grace for His people throughout the ages.
22 Making the Case to Be a CCV
By Katelyn Marie Hunt Katelyn provides yet another enthusiastic report as one of our College Conference Volunteers. Perhaps her experiences will spur you on to apply for one of the Sanctified 2018 Higher Things conferences!
Regular Features 28 Catechism: The 10 Commandments: A Summary
By Rev. William M. Cwirla Rev. Cwirla succinctly sums up his series on the Ten Commandments and revisits that nagging question: If we’re baptized children of God why do we need the Law?
30 Bible Study: Sometimes the Devil Loves It When You Pray
Be sure to check out this sample of one of our student Bible studies which links up with Rev. Harrison Goodman’s article on p. 10.
HigherThings
®
Volume 17/Number 3/Fall 2017 Bible Studies for these articles can be found at: higherthings.org/ magazine/biblestudies.html Executive Editor
Katie Hill Art Director
Steve Blakey Editorial Associates
Rev. Greg Alms Rev. Paul Beisel Rev. Gaven Mize Rev. Dr. Matthew Richard Copy Editors
Kay Maiwald Dana Niemi Bible Study Authors
Rev. Jacob Ehrhard Rev. Sam Schuldheisz Joshua Ulm Subscriptions Manager
Elizabeth Carlson ___________ Board of Directors President
Rev. George F. Borghardt Vice-President
Rev. Duane Bamsch Treasurer
Mr. Eric Maiwald Secretary
Rev. Joel Fritsche Deaconess Ellie Corrow Rev. D. Carl Fickenscher Mr. Bob Myers Mrs. Sue Pellegrini Rev. Chris Rosebrough ___________
Executive Council Deputy Executive/ Conference and Retreats
Sandra Ostapowich Media Executive
Rev. Aaron Fenker Business Executive
Connie Brammeier Marketing Executive
Ann Osburn
Development Executive
Erica Jacoby
Higher Things® Magazine ISSN 1539-8455 is published quarterly by Higher Things, Inc., PO Box 156, Sheridan, WY 82801. No portion of this publication may be reproduced without the written consent of the executive editor of Higher Things Magazine. Copyright 2017. Higher Things® is registered trademarks of Higher Things Inc.; All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States. Postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri. For subscription information and questions, call 1-888-4826630, then press 4, or e-mail subscriptions@higherthings.org. (This phone number is only used for subscription queries.) For letters to the editor, write letters@higher things.org. Writers may submit manuscripts to: submissions@ higherthings.org. Please check higherthings.org/magazine/ writers.html for writers’ guidelines and theme lists.
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Why Be a
Lutheran? By Rev. George F. Borghardt
The day I became Lutheran, my sponsor looked at me and said, “Now that you are Lutheran, why would you be anything else?” I had been raised Roman Catholic. I had a first communion in the Roman Catholic Church. I went to the Roman Mass every week. My parents would even drag me to confession when I really sinned. H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 4
In high school, I walked away from the faith. It wasn’t that I stopped believing in God. I just didn’t care anymore. After all, didn’t we come from monkeys? And who wants to serve a God who makes you feel guilty all the time and fills you with shame? I considered myself “undecided.” If there was a God, I thought I should get credit for not outright denying Him. If there wasn’t, I’d be just fine. Some good evangelical Christians
loved me enough to invite me to a Bible study. I was so lost in their study that when they were reading from 1 John I was looking at the Gospel of John. Whoops! They told me about Jesus. His forgiveness was free. It was undeserved. It was unmerited. It was earned by Jesus’ holy life and bitter sufferings and death. It was given as a gift to those who believed. They told me to say a prayer and said I was a Christian again.
I went home and every page I turned in the Bible confessed this faith. I learned that the world wasn’t just an accident of some Big Bang. I was created by a God who loved me by giving up His Son. I learned that salvation is by grace alone, received by faith alone, from Scripture alone. Unfortunately, at every church I went to with my new friends, there were “buts” to this beautiful Gospel. Jesus saves you, BUT you have to give Him your heart. Salvation is free, BUT you need to make Him the Lord of your life. Jesus loves you, BUT you need to make a decision for Him. He died for you on the cross, BUT you need to be rebaptized—either by getting dunked in water or by speaking in tongues or by both. I searched and searched for a church where salvation was actually free and I couldn’t find a single one. Then, a girlfriend took me to a Lutheran church. Keep in mind that today I serve in Lutheran heaven where there is a Lutheran church on every corner. Not in Louisiana, where there aren’t many Lutheran churches. When I told my friends I was going to go visit a Lutheran church with a friend of mine they said, “Is that like Mormons? Are they even Christian!?” I didn’t initially like the liturgy. It seemed too Roman Catholic. The hymns were great. I didn’t take communion. But, when the old retired vacancy pastor began preaching, I heard something on that Holy Trinity Sunday that I had never heard clearly before: I heard the Gospel. Jesus alone saves me—no “buts” about it. He saves me by grace alone without any works or merit on my part. What He did on the cross is received by faith alone—not by works—so I can’t mess it up. I didn’t have to give my heart to Jesus. I didn’t have to be rebaptized or speak in tongues. I didn’t have to make Him the Lord of my life. He did it all for me! He kept the Law in my place and then died the death that I deserve. Everything that He did with His holy life and His bitter sufferings and death comes to me in His gifts as a gift. I wanted more and more of that Gospel. I learned everything I could from my pastor. His wife must have gotten tired of my sitting at his feet every day. I didn’t just become Lutheran; my friends said that I became “really Lutheran.” And even after it didn’t work out with the girlfriend, I still couldn’t get enough of the Gospel. I dropped chemical engineering and switched to classical Latin and the rest is a gift from God.
Salvation is a gift in Jesus. Gifts are free. That’s what a gift is! You don’t deserve your birthday present. Despite what you’ve heard about St. Nick, you’ve never ever earned a Christmas present by being “good for goodness sake.” You weren’t that good. In fact, if you ask your parents, you probably deserved to be on the naughty list. Apart from Christ you have no life, no salvation, no heaven. But you aren’t apart from Christ. You are baptized. You are alive to God and dead to the way you used to live. You are a new creation—born from above to love and care for others. I don’t tell this story often. In fact, people have to drag it out of me because I usually just say, “The Gospel!” when they ask me, “Why’d you become a Lutheran?” I don’t want anyone pointing to me. What I’d like you to see is how wonderful the Gospel is that you hear in church every Sunday. It’s rare. It’s hard to find. It’s not everywhere and every church isn’t the same. So, don’t give up this Gospel for anything less! Don’t let this Gospel be snatched from you. Don’t let your job take you away from it. Don’t let a girl or boy entice you to a different faith. Don’t leave it for the wisdom of the world. Don’t let the preachers you lend your ears to “but” Jesus’ Gospel. Always be around the Lord’s gifts. Cherish every Jesus-y word in Bible class. Dump your sins on your pastor. Make him do his job and forgive you. Treasure the liturgy. Belt out those hymns. Gobble up that forgiveness at the Lord’s Supper. In a changing world that’s here today and gone tomorrow, the liturgy is an anchor that will keep you from drifting down the river of unbelief and despair. It’s not that the liturgy is magical, it’s that it’s filled with the Gospel! For salvation is by grace alone, that is Jesus alone, received by faith alone, from Scripture alone. Now that you’ve been washed in this Gospel, confirmed into it, believed it, eaten Jesus’ Body and Blood for the remission of your sins, why would you be anything else other than a Lutheran? Rev. George F. Borghardt is the senior pastor at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in McHenry, Illinois. He also serves as the president of Higher Things.
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A Profound
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Mystery By Sandra Ostapowich
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uch of the Christianity we talk about tends to center on living in a virtuous way and believing the right things. We don’t even think about it. We just believe and do things that we’re taught because they’re true or good, or have a beneficial effect on society. Having a Christian marriage is one of the big areas that gets a laser focus from this kind of Christianity. It’s easy to do, because it’s a major theme for faithful living in both the Old and New Testaments. But for Lutherans, all of our theology and practice starts and ends with Jesus, including when we talk about marriage. And when we talk about marriage, the starting point is generally Genesis 1-2. In Genesis 1, we get an overview of how God spoke creation into existence. In Genesis 2, God gives us a closer look of the inner workings of Day 6, when He created Man, and then Woman for man. I always thought Moses had made a weird narrative comment when he wrote Genesis 2:24. There we are, minding our own business, reading along in Genesis 2 about how God gathered up the dust of the ground and breathed into it the breath of life, making Adam. God then takes Adam on a tour of Eden where Adam names all the animals. Next, Adam naps while God removes his side and builds Woman from it. Adam wakes, meets Woman, and they have their first date/ wedding. Tra-la-la. Then, out of nowhere, as though the narrator lowers the 4th wall and gives the audience a private aside, we get to Genesis 2:24:“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Now on some level, we know this statement can’t be about Adam and Eve. Adam didn’t have a father or mother to leave before holding fast to his wife. But we breeze right past it anyway, figuring it’s just a lesson for us, telling us why we have marriage today and what God created it to look like. We probably would’ve figured that out without an obvious moral of the story tacked onto the end. But there it is, inspired by God Himself. Good to know. Thanks, God. Centuries later, when St. Paul writes about the way God ordered men and women to be in intimate relationships in his letter to the Church in Ephesus, he clues us into an even more important ordering of male and female that creation reflects with marriage. That relationship isn’t ordered by God’s created work. It’s a
copy of the relationship between Christ and the Church! Reading Ephesians 5:21-33 as sinners in this fallen world, it’s easy to miss this point. We assume that Paul is just talking about regular human marriages, with regular human wives and husbands. After all, he tells wives to trust their husbands like the Church trusts Christ. And he goes into great detail to tell husbands to love their wives sacrificially, like Christ loves His Bride, the Church. Our usual takeaway from this? Be like the Church if you’re a wife, and be like Christ if you’re the husband. Just follow these simple rules and you’ll have a happy, Christian marriage. In spite of our innate desire to sin, we sinners love rules. With a handy-dandy checklist in hand, we can measure how well we’re doing. When we read the second half of Ephesians 5 like it’s a list of what husbands and wives are to do in marriage, we can mentally check off the boxes and work on our own selfimprovement. And since we’re such great sinners, we take note when our spouses fall short on their list. Even better, when we think we’re doing a bang-up job on our own checklists, we beat our chests in righteous indignation when those “other people” don’t share our virtuous values. But this would be a really short-sighted way to read this passage. Paul doesn’t clue us in on us what he’s really getting at, with all this talk about husbands and wives, until the very end of Ephesians 5. There, he quotes Moses’ (God’s) words from Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” And we, thinking that this makes a nice conclusion to a few paragraphs laying out the rules for Christian marriage, gloss over it as another reminder of how God created marriage in Genesis 2
But, no…that’s not it at all! Paul, just as inspired by the Holy Spirit as Moses centuries earlier, continues, saying, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.” And we still miss this giant neon billboard statement and skim over this sentence, thinking that Paul is just summarizing the earlier stuff he wrote about how wives are to be like the Church and husbands are to be like Christ in their marriages. Let me repeat it for you so it sinks in… It (Genesis 2:24, the “random” statement from Moses, which Paul “randomly” quotes out of the blue) refers to Christ and the Church. Is your mind blown yet? Paul calls it a “profound mystery.” That’s about the biggest understatement I can think of! Not only have the instructions for husbands and wives in this epistle actually been about Christ and the Church, but so is Genesis 2:24! The “therefore” of that verse is not actually about Adam and Eve, it’s about Christ and the Church. Marriage itself, and even the very creation of humankind as man and woman, is a picture of Christ and the Church! Profound, indeed! When it’s all about Christ—and Christ for His Church— then it not only culminates on the Last Day…but precedes creation in eternity! Now, lest we allow ourselves to be so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good…these “rules” about marriage between regular human men and women are good for us to follow. Husbands really should love their wives, and wives really should make sure they respect their husbands. But we sell ourselves short, as we do our relationships with one another, and God’s own Word, if we fail to see Christ and the Church at the center of it all. This isn’t simply an ordering in the created world, it’s an ordering of the cosmos in the image of Christ and His Bride into which creation gives us a shadowy glimpse of something beyond our comprehension. Seeking (and finding!) Christ at the center of it all…now that’s how you dare to be Lutheran. Sandra Ostapowich is the conference executive and deputy executive for Higher Things. She is a member of Faith Lutheran Church in Plano, Texas and lives in nearby Dennison with her 15-year-old son, Isaac.
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