Posts

“Christ With Us”

/in /by

Series:  “Christ Through Us” (WELS 175th Anniversary)

Theme: “Christ With Us” (Revelation 3:7-13)

Pastor Nate Walther – Sunday, October 26th, 2025

Eastside Lutheran Church – Madison, WI

            Christ with us.  It’s a fitting theme today as we celebrate the Lutheran Reformation and as we conclude our celebration of our synod’s anniversary.  Christ has certainly been with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod over the past 175 years, just as he has been with all true confessional Lutheran churches over the past 500 years – as we look back on the past, there’s just so much to be thankful for in connection to this theme… but we’re not going to be focusing on the past in this sermon.  Instead, as we live in the present and as we look at the future, do you appreciate what this means for you dear WELS Lutheran, dear believing Christian, dear precious soul bought back from the fires of hell by the blood of a Savior who loves you dearly?  Christ is with you.

            That may have been true in the past, that may be true for others, that may even be how we comfort people who are hurting in our lives, but what about me?  Do I always believe it’s true for me? What about when people ridicule you for agreeing with the Bible’s Creation account: “you don’t believe in science”, even though you do believe in science – that is, real science, not empty hypotheses about things long ago that no one observed? Or, what about when people attack you for calling something a sin: “you’re so unloving”, even though you do believe in love – that is, real love, which starts with God’s unconditional love for us no matter how we sin, and you’re always ready to share that with anyone who confesses their sin, as a fellow lost & redeemed sinner yourself?… Are we OK when that happens?  Are we certain we’re right?  Do we feel Christ is with us in those moments?  Or, if things aren’t going so well, do we wonder what we’re doing wrong?

            Let’s up the ante a little bit.  Do any of you know what it’s like to have your life in danger?  Do you know what it’s like to live in fear of death because of some serious illness, or fast-spreading infection, or a cancer you’re battling? Do you know what it’s like to have a loved one go through that?  Or, do you know what it’s like to worry that someone close to you with mental illness or a substance abuse problems will come busting through that door, because you know what they’re capable of? Do you even know what it’s like to live like our soldiers who have survived warzones and threats to their lives?  Have you had the experience of falling asleep with a loaded pistol in your hand, and every noise outside or in the house at night wakes you up in a cold sweat with your finger on the trigger?… When this becomes our lives, when we experience the evils of this world, when our suffering gets so severe, where is Christ in all of it?  What are we doing wrong?!

            You’re not alone… these fundamental matters of faith & doubt (ultimately, of life & death) are what our spiritual forefathers faced throughout the past.   For our Lutheran forefathers in America 175 years ago, did you know that, more than anything, they came here from Europe because of persecution.  The government was forcing them to unite with Reformed Christians, even though the two groups believed different things!Meanwhile, for our Lutheran forefathers in Germany 500 years ago, you may already know the story: when told to renounce his teachings that agreed with Scripture if not with the Church of his day, Luther took his stand against the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms and refused to compromise on a biblically-bound conscience… so what did the Holy Roman Emperor decree as the most powerful man in the world at his time? He basically had a “hit” put out on Luther.  For the remainder of Luther’s life he lived with the distinct threat that any one of his enemies could simply kill him as an outlaw, and there would be no legal ramifications to dissuade them. Finally, it’s the same thing true believers have always faced, going back to our Christian forefathers in the “O.G. city of brotherly love”, ancient Philadelphia from 2,000 years ago.  As we heard earlier, the first audience from our sermon text was being persecuted for their faith.  Bitterly so.  By this point Christians were being killed for what they believed.  It had happened in nearby Pergamum, to which this letter of Revelation was also written.  It would happen in Philadelphia as well.  And in all of this… seriously, was Christ still with them? 

            Listen again to what we God told them in our sermon text.  “8Look, I have set before you an open door, which no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”So, in the following verses,the Apostle John (who wrote these words to them) goes on to explain how God would work all things for their good as they continued to place their faith in him… which is great, but it’s in the future, it’s not reality yet.  Instead, for the time being, he simply says “11Hold on to what you have so that no one takes your crown. 12 The one who is victorious I will make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he will never leave it again…” What we have here is not a message of immediate gratification, but it is a certain message of hope.  Whatever you face in life, however evil has assaulted you, now matter how it causes you to question and worry and doubt, God’s message is crystal clear: “Hold on to what you have.”  Why?  Because if you are with Christ, God says this is doorway.  It will simply get you where you need to go.  That’s why you want to stay on that path. 

Finally, I can’t share an answer with you that will make all the challenging moments in your life easy.  I can just share the answer that’s always worked for God’s people.  It’s what worked for the founders of our church body.  Just think of how their situation turned out: how blessed are we now as Lutherans in America with the religious freedom we enjoy!  It’s what worked our namesake as Lutheranism also.  Despite how dark his things looked at one point – where Luther even had to go into hiding, holed up in a castle while he translated the Bible – still, Luther had a happy and productive life, he even got married and had kids, he died several decades later as an old man surrounded by friends and family. God worked that situation out for good.  It’s even what worked for those Philadelphian Christians.  Yes, including those of them who were killed for their faith!  Because they immediately got to heaven to be with Christ.  No one could shut that door.  In fact, if anything death only allowed them to pass through that door faster.

In a broken world where sin invites such difficult situations, such challenging problems, such pain into our lives, Jesus provides a different kind of solution.  Not searching for something else that still won’t put an end to the bad.  Not trying harder when our efforts are less than perfect and will still yield less than perfect results. Not treating the symptoms, all while ignoring the cause.  No, in fact, where do we find Jesus in all of it?  There, himself in the midst, of it.  He faced that darkness too.  He encountered those threats as well.  He was even killed by them on the cross… And God says, “Hold on to that,” which he has already given you: a substitute who died for your sin and a Savior who conquered your death, a God whose love for you is never in question and whose future for you is never in doubt.  That’s what will work, even if it doesn’t currently seem to be working! 

What else can we say when, in this very last book of the Bible that was written, this is what God says?  His final message through the Apostle John here isn’t to try this new spiritual craze when things don’t seem to be working out for you, nor is it to make new changes in your life. It’s simply to “Hold on to what you have!…”  That may be so hard to do at times, but it doesn’t make it the wrong answer.  Granted, when you’re persecuted or threatened, when you’re sick or suffering, when those questions or doubts creep in, the hardest thing to do is to do nothing.  We want to take matters into our own hands and fix it!  But sometimes there’s just nothing else to do.  Not when you are on the right path.  Because the door is open in front of us, even if the path is hard.  Other paths may be easier along the way, but how often do we fail to raise our eyes and see: there is no open door at the end of those paths, only dead ends!  It’s why – like the difficult daily exercise that eventually gets you to your fitness goals – we need to stay on this path, the same path Christ went on himself.  And he’ll get you through it;  somehow he’ll even spare you even worse trials, just like he promised in our sermon text.  That’s what he’s done for the past 175 years for our synod.  That’s what he’s done for the past 500 years for all true Lutherans.  That’s what he’s done for the past 2,000 years for all true Christians in every congregation.  That’s what he’s done for the past 6,000+ for all believers in the one true God of Israel who always made this the center of his promises: Christ with us. From the beginning of the Bible – as we heard two weeks ago in Genesis 3 – to the end of the Bible – as we hear in Revelation 3 today – that has always been God’s answer.  He’s not going to stop now.  Dear fellow brother or sister in Christ, whatever you face, know that this is true for you.  Christ is with you.  Be comforted by that always and in all things.  Amen.

“Christ For Us”

/in /by

Genesis 3:8-15

Pastor Nate Walther

            Last month we celebrated the 100th anniversary of this congregation.  This month we are celebrating another anniversary, an even lengthier one at that: the Dodransbicentennial of our Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod – i.e. the 175th Anniversary of our Lutheran Church body here in America. That’s kind of remarkable, and it gets me thinking about why our collection of churches has lasted.  Is it truly phenomenal preaching?  (All us pastors think we’re good preachers… but such longevity makes me wonder whether I’d make the cut!)  Or is it having a good, Christian day schools?  (Historically, that’s been a staple of our church body, and we are certainly no exception.)  Or what kinds of programs and ministries does a church offer?  Or what kind of a difference are churches actually making in the lives of their parishioners? 

            Initially, our sermon text may not seem to answer those questions or have anything to do with the topic, but it really does get at the heart of the matter. You may know the background.  When God first created Adam & Eve and placed them in the Garden of Eden, he gave them one command, “Don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good & evil.”  Yet they ate from it.  And it may not seem like a big deal, it’s just one tiny act of disobedience.  Yet there’s no denying the results

            8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they HID from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.  Immediately it’s clear something is wrong.  Never before did Adam & Eve have reason to hide from God, but now something has separated them from God.  So,  9 The Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”  As if God didn’t know!  10 (Adam) answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was NAKED; so I hid.”  That’s a sign that something is wrong also. God made Adam and Eve perfectly in his image, and how could anything that ourperfect Lordcreates elicit shame?  Unless, Adam & Eve’s bodies somehow had been corrupted and changed into something less…  and they were. 11 (God) said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”  That would be disobedience to God’s expressed will.  That, by its very definition in the Bible, is sin.  Sadly, it’s not hard to see their sin in what follows: 12 The man said, “The WOMAN you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”  Instead of accepting responsibility for his action, Adam deflected blame to his wife and even to God, if you noticed!  Likewise, Eve followed her husband’s lead: 13 The Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”  As they point the finger at each other, it’s just an ugly attitude, it’s never what God intended…

            And that’s just the start of it.  In the verses immediately after these God shares that their sin would result in pain: 1) physical pain, like a woman’s pain in childbirth or a man’s painful labor; 2) emotional pain too, of the sort you see that divides families and destroys relationships; 3) finally, there’s the pain of mortality, there’s just nothing as bad as what you find at a gravesite… Speaking of which, in the chapter immediately after this we meet the world’s very first children, Cain & Abel.  What happens to them?  One of them kills his brother!  How serious was their problem with sin if this is what was happening only one generation after God made everything perfectly!?… But the worst part? These aren’t just empty threats or idle warning for us.  This is real for us too.  This is exactly what we see in our world also.  This is sin we are complicit in as well.

            We may try to tell ourselves this story doesn’t really apply to our lives: “Some of what the Bible says is old fashioned!”  Or we may try to rationalize our sin: “A little disobedience isn’t a big deal, it didn’t hurt anyone!” Or we may point the finger: “It’s the people around me who made me to do this, and they’ve done much worse!…”  What we cannot deny is that sin is simply alive & active in our lives.  It’s there in every awful word we let slip out of our mouths that we immediately wish we could take back.  It’s there in the terrible things we’ve done that we wish we could just scrub from the pasts.  It’s there in the pain we suffer in our own bodies, more and more so every year. It’s there in the horrible ways that people have treated us, that we just can’t forget.  It’s there in the depravity we all see on the news or on social media, there’s always something worse!  Even when we try our best to live a good life and do what’s right and push through all of this, still we mess up, still bad things happen to us, still we die… Yet how often do we go to church for something less?  “Don’t actually fix my sins, Lord, or the sins of others! Don’t concern yourself with this eternal chasm that would forever separate us from the good and perfect things you want us to have!… Don’t worry about it because I don’t really want to address this dreary topic, not when it would mean actually confronting my sins, and confessing them, and repenting of them, and changing my life.  Instead, just give me a little less pain on this earth, a little more money in my bank account, a few less problems to deal with – a little more recognition for my (mostly) good deeds – that’s all I’m asking!…” As if that’s gonna cut it in the end! We’re as shallow as Adam & Eve pointing the finger at each other.

            But God wasn’t shallow.  Think about God’s immediate reaction to sin. It wasn’t just to smite Adam & Eve (or you & me) for ruining his perfect plans.  Nor was it to give us all the things we’d like to distract us from the real problems in our soul, but which wouldn’t matter when we’re gone in 175 years (if they even matter next year).  It wasn’t even to spell out all the consequences for their actions (that was important and it needed to be dealt with, but that would come later, only after our sermon text).  Instead, immediately,

14 the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals!—That being Satan, who had taken the form of a snake. You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring—that being unbelievers—and hers… HE—that being an individual among Eve’s offspring—will CRUSH your head, and you will crush his heel…” 

With anniversaries, we sometimes use Latin phrases to highlight their significance.  In a similar manner, theologians call this promise from God the protoevangelium – “the first promise” – first because this great promise that would be repeated many times.  Just as the Bible highlights man’s sin one generation after another, God promised this same solution to sin again and again: A descendant from Eve’s own line to crush Satan’s head.  It’s a picture of totally destroying the evil work of sin that the devil helped introduce into the world.  In the process this figure would be wounded – his heel would be crushed – but of course, that’s not a mortal blow… It’s exactly what we see in the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who also took on human flesh as a descendant of Eve, who lived a perfect life without sin as our substitute, who could therefore overcome this work of the devil on the cross.  Granted, Jesus was killed in the process, but it would be no mortal wound.  Jesus rose on Easter morning, and he promises the same final victory for us over sin’s worst consequence.

It’s the last thing Satan wants us to know, so with one last lie he tries to get even Christians distracted, and he succeeds in many churches! Oh, he’ll give us Christ, sure, he knows he can’t take that from Christians… but it’s not as we really need Jesus: as a Savior from sin.  Instead, Satan will give us Jesus as a cheerleader, or Jesus as an example for us to follow as we do our best, or Jesus as someone who will make your life better on earth as you follow him – all without pressing on the more pressing matters of sin and salvation. 

But God doesn’t get distracted.  Right from the start, God was ready with something better: CHRIST FOR US. Christ taking our place as a man himself, but doing what we could not do ourselves: a life of perfect obedience without sin, then his work on the cross to crush this work of Satan.  That’s what our brand of Lutheranism is all about.  Not empty promises that can never be certain in a fallen world, nor happy thoughts that simply ignore the reality of sin, just a real Savior with a real solution to the very real effect of sin that we see around us. Thank God for 175 years of that message, and 100 years of it personally as a congregation.  Finally, that’s what truly phenomenal preaching, and a truly good Christian school, and truly fantastic programs boil down to: not distractions, just the cross.  It’s not about what we do, but about what Jesus has already done.

So if you happen to be new here, if you’re looking for a church home to truly settle into, if you’re not sure who would do your funeral when you die… this is what we’re about and this is what we offer.  Talk to us pastors about how we can get you more connected to Christ.  No, I can’t fix all the problems in your life, but I can point you to the one who fixes your soul, and that will help with everything else.  On the other hand, if you have been here a long time, if this was your grandparents’ church, if you’ll be in that pew until you die… don’t forget this is what we’re still about and this is what we always offer.  Finally, Eastside Lutheran isn’t about this building or that school; it’s not defined by an excellent June Jumble Days or an Arts & Craft Fair; we don’t go here because our family has always gone here or our friends go here now.  There may be blessings in these things, but in a far greater way Eastside Lutheran is about CHRIST FOR US.  As we enter our second hundred years as a congregation, and as we march toward two hundred years as a synod, we should keep asking what we can do to further that mission.  You’ll hear more about that next week as we continue this celebration and see that Christ doesn’t just work for us… he works for others too.  But as he does so, that’s where he graciously chooses to work THROUGH us. Amen.

Finding Real Worship in Christ!

/in /by

Who would have ever thought that reality TV would become the juggernaut that it is today? And we’ve all been bitten by the reality TV bug whether we want to admit it or not.

Read more

Confidence with Christ

/in /by

The coach, with his cap on and his head down, starts out of the dugout and makes his way towards the mound.  You know the scene well if you’ve played baseball, softball, or watched any Brewers games. 

Read more

The Church Lacks Nothing in Christ

/in /by

I want you to picture this scene in your mind: You’re sitting at a table at a local establishment. You’re enjoying a nice dinner with your spouse or your friends.

Read more

“In View of His Appearing…”

/in /by

Everyone gets the same amount of time in a day, but it seems like some accomplish much more than others. It’s why productivity experts often say that the one commodity more important than your money or even your time, is your focus.

Read more

Christ’s Compassion Will Bless America

/in /by

I’m guessing that at some point everyone in this room has either said or sung the words “God bless America.” In fact, it’d be interesting to have a count of the total number of times that short prayer will be spoken in the coming weeks as we approach the 4th of July.

Read more

There Has Never Been a King Like Christ!

/in /by

Long ago, England was ruled by a king named Canute. And like many who are successful, Canute was surrounded by a bunch of “yes men,” people who were constantly praising him.

Read more