Lutheran Church of the Master Corona del Mar, CA
Click on sermons. Scroll down to the botton of the list to November 13. It was mislabled. It was delivered yesterday, February 13.
Don’t let that stop you from listening.
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click on the above ^
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Thanks to Flickr and Elle for the photo.
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Click here http://www.lightofthemaster.com/ , and then click on 
‘sermons’ (top of page towards the right side) – yesterday’s sermon, Nov. 21 should be cued up, just click on the start arrow.
(the sermon is about 20 minutes long, so you might want to wait until you have the time)
Listen. Do you hear the law presented as something you should be doing in order for you to be a proper Christian? Is the law presented as a way to make you better? Or, is the law presented as a way to describe the way that we really ARE ? (As a mirror, to reflect our sinfulness and our need of a savior).
Then listen for God’s promises. Are they presented with string(s) attached? Must you DO anything for the promises to be good and valid for you? Or are they just handed over to you, the unworthy, free of charge?
I’d like to know what you think. I’d like to know if you can detect a difference in this preaching, in contrast to the typical preaching in an Evangelical church.
Thanks for your thoughts.
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Go to ‘sermons’ page. 
Scroll down to Oct. 31
Enjoy.
Pass it along if you know someone who may benefit from it.
And never forget just who it is that God, in Christ Jesus, justifies.
The ungodly!
That’s you.
And that’s me.
tThanks to ‘honecr5‘ at flickr, for the photo illustration.’
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Check out the sermon (2nd from the bottom) on the ipod thingy (scroll down with the white button on the right)
It’s the one titled track01.lite
http://www.lightofthemaster.com/ Go to sermons page
The apostles asked Jesus for more faith. Why?
I think you’ll find it very ________________ . (you fill in the blank, after you listen)
*Thanks to flickr for the photo by britnard.
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Toleration is an important word in our culture. It may be important to you. In a “live and let live” society such as ours a certain amount of toleration is expected and necessary. But tolerance is not the same as indifference. A person may appear to be tolerant simply because he or she carries no convictions. This is not tolerance. It is indifference rooted in a practical nihilism, and it is all around us. Is it also a part of us?
The indifference toward belief which often accompanies the absence of authentic faith is one thing. Such unbelief can easily lead someone to conclude that there really is nothing to believe in beyond the self. Indifference on the part of those who have come to know Christ is something else again.
We Christians dare not worship at the American cultural altar of toleration if it leads to this damning indifference. The Christian cannot be neutral or indifferent about belief, not without denying the Lord of the Church. This we simply cannot tolerate. For the fact is that if we have truly been grasped by the Gospel of Christ we will not be indifferent about the matter of beliefs.
If your neighbor were attacked by a robber, wouldn’t you go to his assistance? If a close friend were stricken with a disease of the body, wouldn’t you go to her aid? So, if your neighbor is captured by false beliefs or no belief at all, is it not your duty as a Christian to wage war against what is ultimately more destructive than thieves or disease? Thieves and disease can rob us of aspects of our lives. Ideas can take the whole person – body and soul. To practice indifference toward our neighbors beliefs in the name of tolerance is, in fact, to “live and let die.”
Jesus calls you to be vigilant about the matter of beliefs, for there is “one name by which we are saved.” Belief in Jesus is the path God has laid down by which human beings come to authentic faith. We believe and confess that in Jesus Christ all truth, meaning and purpose are revealed – for all. This is not a popular idea, nor has it ever been, as the blood of the martyrs will attest. God may have other avenues by which people are saved. We do not know. What we do know is that our Lord, in viewing the human landscape has said, “Go in all the world and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” This is not a formula for toleration as our culture defines it, to be sure. It is something much better.
These words resonate from the heart of God, who in His love and grace has provided the way of authentic trust and belief through Jesus. When the life-changing truth of the Gospel of this same Jesus Christ is openly and courageously shared, people are freed, by God’s grace, from false belief and no belief. Their lives are set on the hopeful course of a living faith. Someone you know needs to hear this life-changing message. May God grant us the grace and courage to care less about the bland tolerance advocated by the culture and more about the truth that God has revealed in Jesus Christ!
Pastor Mark Anderson
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From the revamped website of Lutheran Church of the Master, Corona del Mar, CA
http://www.lightofthemaster.com/
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By Pastor Mark Anderson
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Who am I? This most basic of questions demands a response and 
every human being makes one. Humans answer this question largely by determining their own identity: I am who I choose to be. Yet our insistence on taking life into our own hands is easily distorted and becomes defining of what the Scriptures call ‘sin’ – that willful insistence on resolving every issue down to what I want.
The culture says that we are bundles of largely unrealized wonderfulness only inhibited by the myriad injustices foisted on us by others (who are, apparently, not so wonderful).
The Bible reveals God’s assessment of the human to us. The defining word regarding what it means to be human does not rightly derive from us but the One who created us…from God. And God says we are willful sinners, deserving of His wrath, in need of repentance and forgiveness. Small wonder humans flee from this God of wrath for all they are worth, preferring to “re-imagine” God in kinder, gentler forms.
If, however, there is no need to talk about the wrath of God, then there is not much need to talk about the sin that incurs the wrath. But this avoidance is no answer to the real problem of sin and all it’s consequences.
Christianity is incoherent without the idea of sin. There can be no good news of the Gospel without first understanding the bad news of sin. The mission of Jesus makes no sense if we remove such concepts from out thinking.
Jesus made it clear that the reason he came to earth was to save sinners. For example, as he said in all three Synoptic Gospels: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners”. Take away the doctrine of sin and we take away the doctrine of the Incarnation. Indeed, we take away the entire message of the New Testament.
Because we are born in the darkness of sin, we assume our blindness to be life in the light. But Christ has come to give us the new birth that we might walk in the “true light”, Christ Himself. When we persist in our self-defining intransigence, we remain in our sins. When Christ opens our eyes by His amazing grace, we see ourselves as God sees us…as sinners in need of His mericful love and forgiveness.
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It seems to me that there is a great problem with many Christians, and in so many churches that have long ago passed the problem of sin ( when they accepted Jesus), and have moved on to other, more important things.
I think that our sinfulness needs to be front and center, all the time, otherwise forgiveness (the gospel) just…goes away, and the religious life of ‘doing’ takes over.
What do you think?
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. Thanks to Josh Sommers and Flickr for the artwork
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Here’s another one: 
The-Problem-with-the-World…and-the-Antidote
A sermon for the second Sunday in Lent by Pastor Mark Anderson, Lutheran Church of the Master, Corona del Mar, CA.
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By Pastor Mark Anderson
Then God set up a cross.
It was forged by nameless servants of imperial authority. A bare, rude thing. A time tested instrument designed to evoke terror and coerce obedience through the application of unspeakable cruelty. Only the very worst, despised offenders suffered the fate of the crucified ones. The Romans lined roadways with them so that passers by would be forced to carry the weight of pitiful suffering and inhale the stench of rotting corpses. It was about as far from divinty as one could get.
This is the symbol of God’s presence with us?
Yes.
God set up His cross where the four roads we travel most, meet: guilt, failure, spiritual poverty, and willful disobedience. The gift of God’s cross, the baptism into Christ’s death, is not given until I see that nothing in the world – nothing – can address my sickness unto death except this one, impossible, ridiculous sacrifice. For only by the shame, cruelty and utter godlessness of the cross can the true magnitude of our guilt be measured. The cross proclaims to us what our true position in life really is. No wonder we flee from it for all we’re worth.
But Christ Jesus did not flee from the cross. He embraced it’s suffering and shame – for you. And three days after they laid His battered corpse to rest, God vindicated His trust and raised Him from the dead.
For Lutherans the season of Lent, therefore, is no occasion for self-conscious schemes of spiritual navel gazing or sentimental musings on self-pity and the like. Lent is no time for half-measures. You may want to give yourself some sort of moral or ethical tune-up during Lent. That’s fine. Your life might need one. But have no illusions that it will somehow earn points with God.
During Lent we return to Holy Baptism, through an active and living faith. There we remember with joy that our lives were drowned with Christ, crucified with Christ (Romans 6), and then raised with Christ. We give thanks to God who forgives our sins and who has brought all our works and all our ways under His judgment and mercy on the cross.
Through Word and sacrament God continues to set up the cross – and the empty tomb – in the center of our lives, and through them release hope and the divine power of His kingdom. And since Christ Jesus embodies hope He rightly calls us to hope – not in our efforts, will or determination, but in Him, the crucified. This is the scandal of the gospel – Jesus appears in the defenseless form of the crucified God to put an end to our pretensions to righteousness in order that we might have a righteousness based on faith. A righteousness won for us, the ungodly, through His death on the bloody cross, where the true glory of God is revealed.
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Mark Anderson is pastor at Lutheran-Church-of-the-Master , Corona del Mar, CA
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Do you notice what’s missing from Pastor Anderson’s piece?
An appeal to you to do, or think, or feel…anything.
This is a great example of Christ centered, cross focused Christianity.
Death and resurrection. Both Christ’s, and yours…in Him.
Is there anything else that is needful?
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The Old Adam Lives! 