a Lutheran’s Confessions

     Next to being my wife’s husband, my greatest joy during the day is being a father to my daughters. As a father, I have authority over my children, but so much of being a father involves self-sacrifice—giving of my time and my energy to my children.
     Fathers bear a cross of self-sacrifice for their children, making sure they hear God’s Word daily and providing for their temporal needs also, but we really don’t mind. We gladly do these and other things for them because we love them.
     One of the greatest things I can do for my children is to love their mother. When the parents are united and place one another above even the children, the children find peace and security in that strong union of husband and wife.
     Every child needs to learn that he is not the most important person in his mother’s life—dad is. Likewise, let the child learn that mom is the most important person in dad’s life.
     This makes for a happy and healthy home.

     You test drive a car to know whether you will like it. Why not live together before marriage and “test drive” your significant other?
     That sounds good if you’re the driver, but what if you’re the automobile?
     When you return a car to the lot, it has no feelings. It neither knows nor cares that you have dumped it.
People are not automobiles. Human beings attach to each other emotionally. The sex act, formerly known as the act of marriage, creates an emotional bond between two people that is not easily broken or forgotten.
     Like an amputee who continues to have ghost pains from a former limb, we continue to hurt when our former partner, who had become part of us, is no longer in our lives.
     Christ is our healing for the hurts of life. He knows the meaning of true commitment, and He demonstrates it at the cross, taking all of our sins completely away.
     The church is the bride of Christ, made holy, spotless and blameless by His blood.
     You will experience rejection by the world, but there is One who accepts you in spite of the world’s rejection. Look to Him and His cross and discover the meaning of true, sacrificial love, which the world neither knows nor gives.

     The flood of 2008 was the worst natural disaster ever experienced in this community. In a short afternoon, lives were changed forever. Taken together, the emotional and material losses are incalculable.
     The unexpected gifts of God are incalculable as well. Unity transcended individual concerns. Millions of dollars were given and many thousands of hours of labor were donated to rebuild what was lost. Neighbors and people from outside the community came together providing much-needed support.
     Such generosity cannot be coerced. It cannot be mandated or taxed into existence by the government or any other authority.
     Such generosity flows from the generous heart of God who enables His people to give sacrificially as we all have been given to sacrificially at the cross.

“He who spared not His own Son, but gave Him for us all—how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32)

     It is God’s generosity to us in Christ that enables us to be generous toward others.
     All praise, honor and thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ or Lord, in the power of the Holy Spirit! Amen.