BENEDICTION BLESSINGS
1. The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
2. The Love of God
3. The Fellowship of the Holy Spirit
Pastor Kassulke is pastor. Pastor Patoka is pastor. Pastor Koehler is pastor. Yet they are not three pastors but one pastor. That sounds ridiculous. That’s because it is ridiculous. We’re not even remotely close if we try to use something like that to explain how the Triune God can be three-in-one.
You obviously can’t just take any three things and declare that they are one. How about “I am one person, but I am a husband, a father, and a pastor”? Nope.
God is not one being that plays three different roles.
Maybe this is better: A shamrock has three leaves, but it is one shamrock. Three-inone—just like the Triune God. St. Patrick came up with that one as he did mission work in Ireland. Still no.
You can remove a leaf of a shamrock because it is an independent piece of the whole. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct persons, but inseparable.
We try to understand, don’t we? We try to get it straight in our heads. We try to take what we believe and make it understandable to someone for whom this is new or confusing. We try.
But every time we try with an illustration, we fail. We might feel like we are close with some of them, but none of them work perfectly. They can’t. They can’t because the Trinity is unlike anything else. The triune God surpasses human understanding.
What we can do is listen to what God tells us about himself. We can believe what God tells us about himself. We can view God with wonder and awe. We can be thankful that the triune God, who is beyond our understanding, comes to bless us.
These words allow us to do those things today: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
If you’ve been around church for any length of time, you know what a benediction is, but it’s pretty much just a church word. There aren’t many other places that it is used. It means something like well-wishing or speaking something good. Worship services very often end with a benediction. Our service today will. If you want to look at page 16 to see that, you can do that now. You can call it a benediction. You can also call it a “blessing,” which we do. Today, we are using the Aaronic blessing, named for Moses’ brother Aaron, the priest whom God told to say this blessing before his people. Don’t linger on that page though, I don’t want you to miss this other benediction!
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. This is called the Apostolic Benediction. The Apostle Paul wrote it in his second letter to the Christians in Corinth. It was at the end of that letter, not at the end of a service. Today, as we think about what’s in this Trinitarian Blessing, you’ll have to admit that it’s a lot bigger and much more important than a simple “closer” before cookies and coffee are served in the courtyard!
1. The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
Picture a terrorist in your mind. The kind of terrorist you’re imagining is likely a little different than the one pictured by the person next to you. Maybe for you he looks like one of the FBI’s 42 Most Wanted terrorists in the world, Abdullah Shair Khan, wearing a kaffiyeh wrapped around his head. Maybe it’s a man holding a flight attendant in front of him with his arm wrapped around her neck. You could be thinking of a woman instead. If you looked at the photos on the Most Wanted Terrorists list, you’d find 7 women pictured there.
You realize, don’t you, that the person we know as the Apostle Paul, was a terrorist? Just the mention of his name struck fear into people’s hearts as he went from place to place rooting out Christians. The Bible tells us that dragged Christians away and imprisoned them just because they followed Christ. He made murderous threats against Jesus’ followers. He stood there and watched while Stephen was murdered for his faith. He went by Saul at that time.
You might understand, then, how a man like that could appreciate Jesus wiping his sinful slate clean, forgiving him of every heinous thing he’d done, and truly turning his life around 180 degrees, making him likely the greatest proclaimer of Christ the world has ever seen. God then used him to write some of the most beautiful and reassuring words about grace in the Bible.
That Jesus would do that instead of obliterating him…well, that’s what grace is. Grace means undeserved love. Paul deserved anger and eternal punishment. What he got instead was love and eternal life.
We should think of the perfect life of Jesus lived because sinners like Paul and sinners like us can’t live without offending God. It is who we are. Terrorist or not, we’re all the same before a Holy God. We don’t meet the standard of perfection. We should also think about cross, that place Jesus went so that he could offer his perfection as a sacrifice for sins. And we should think of a burial cave, vacant because Jesus rose from death and left it.
Jesus did all those things because of grace because he loves us even though we don’t deserve it. If you write this blessing in a card or an email, or if I say it to you here in church, we are saying that we want the grace of Jesus to be with that person or these people. When we hear it in church, it should be more than a signal that we’re about done. We should give it a momentary thought that the underserved love of Jesus has touched me and will continue to. What a blessing to hear of grace in the benediction!
How much do you love your cat or your agile pet of another kind? If it made its way onto the roof of your apartment building or your house, and you went up there to get it down…and it was going to jump from the highest point…would you leap to try to stop it, knowing that you might fall to your death? No, at the end of the day, though you love it, it is an animal. You wouldn’t risk your life to save it. You certainly wouldn’t purposely give your life so that kitty could live.
Among the several Greek words for love that are used in the Bible, there is one that is used to express a self-sacrificing love. Some of you have heard it agape. We don’t have agape to the extreme for our pets. You would not sacrifice your life or the life of someone else to save a kitten no matter how cute it is. You might think that the almighty, eternal, holy, holy, holy God would never give himself up to save sinful human beings who are not nearly as cute in God’s eyes as a kitten is in ours.
But God’s agape love for us is seen in his sacrifice for us. What did God the Father give up for us? He loved us so much that he sent his Son into the world to live and die to save sinners. He watched as his divine Son took on humanity and as he took on the sins of humanity…and as he died for humanity. What was that like for the Father? I have no idea…an neither do you. Since we can’t understand the three-in-one nature of God, how can we understand the thoughts and feelings of God? But we know it was in love that he did these things, and we know that God’s giving for us hasn’t stopped.
Every day we enjoy the blessings that he gives us out of love for us. If you’re not in the habit of doing so, I recommend that you spend some time reviewing the good things for which you have the Lord to thank. Every day should have some “thanksgiving” to God in it. The love of God is so big that he has saved us and on top of that gives us hundreds and hundreds of good things.
One of the blessings in the benediction is that we get to hear about the love of God. And in the brief second that we hear it, it can flash in our minds how amazing it is that God’s love for me would move him to make sacrifices for me sacrifices I can’t understand. I can’t fully understand the Trinity, and I can’t understand how and why God would love me so much that he would give his Son for me and continue giving gifts of love to me. But I believe that it is true because he tells me that it is.
3. The Fellowship of the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is the one who brought us into fellowship with God. Through the words and promises of the gospel, the Holy Spirit gave us faith to believe in God’s love shown in Jesus. He did that work in our hearts to join us to him when we were far from God because of our sinfulness.
As a result, we now go through life with the confidence that we are loved by God and trusting that he is with us at all times. The peace that brings to our hearts influences how we approach everything during our day. We also have the peace that comes from knowing that we will be together with the Lord in a new and perfect way in heaven .
You’ve likely felt the closeness that comes when a group of people is united by something specific. There is a bond with the others in a musical group…or those you’ve spent countless hours with rehearsing for a play…or a team that has practiced and practiced together and experienced the struggle and the joys of the games…or the closeness of your family forged over time and through all kinds of experiences.
Many, (most?) of us here have experienced that with this church family. We have the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ in common. We have a shared appreciation for the love of God, and in many ways, we have experienced it together. This is the other part of the blessing of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit blesses us with people who share an understanding of God’s Word. We support each other in a way that is consistent with what God wants for his people. That fellowship is seen when we Bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2a) in times of grief and sorrow, and when we are happy and excited for one another when the Lord blesses us with baptisms and confirmations and weddings—and even in regular, everyday things as we see them through the lens of Christian faith to be the Lord’s hand working in our lives.
Our fellowship formed by the Holy Spirit is evident when we do what Paul says here at the end of this letter: Agree with one another. Be at peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you. God’s peace lives in us and through us as we appreciate and live the fellowship we have by the Spirit’s power.
The fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. It’s said in just a couple seconds, but what a benediction blessing it is if we let that word “fellowship” linger in our ears and in our hearts.
I encourage you to remember these BENEDICTION BLESSINGS from our Triune God. The benediction is brief, but packed with the promises of grace and love and fellowship—gifts of God for you and for me. Amen.
Now the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.