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Grace to you and Peace, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus.
Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.
This is Your Word heavenly Father. Sanctify us by the Truth. Your Word is Truth. Amen.
Fellow redeemed: This is what you should know– Jesus tells you that His words will by no means pass away. God’s Word is sure and eternal. That’s what you should know. And based on this eternal truth, you should receive a warning, and a comfort.
Jesus tells you today that His words will by no means pass away. That means that if you are not in keeping with His words, you are in crisis now, and if you remain apart from Jesus words, you are throwing away your place in His eternal kingdom, and choosing eternal death for yourself. That’s a warning. Pay attention to it. The anxiety and perplexity you feel and hear in the voices around you are based on the fact that we are all dying, and the world around us is in trouble, as the Scripture says, groaning under the weight of our sin. The calamity and disaster, disease, war, and horror of every kind all point to the terrible damage sin does to us. The ultimate reign of man in sin is death. As the hymn puts it, there’s ‘change and decay on every hand I see.’ To be apart from Jesus by being apart from what He has said is give yourself over into this change and decay, it is to be dying in a dying world, waiting only to enter into eternal death.
Jesus is telling you that He is providing your life and salvation, and He wants you to live in that eternal joy, and is warning you not to depart from it, neglecting His Word, hearing it, gathering together around it, and taking the comfort He gives for today and forevermore. Remember what importance Jesus gives His words. He is the Word made flesh, and His Word is truth and life. His word makes for your peace. His word is your forgiveness. His Word calls you from death to life. Jesus provided for His Word to be recorded and according to His promise has located the Holy Spirit in His Word to be active in those who hear it. That’s what ‘inspiration’ means: that the Word of the Lord is living because the Holy Spirit is abiding in it for your sake. And Jesus today tells you that His word is enduring. His words will never pass away. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Jesus is the Word. And so His words share His eternal validity, truth, authority, and power. To neglect His Word is to neglect the things that make for your life. Pay attention, see the world dying around you, and cling to Jesus’ words.
Jesus tells you that His words will by no means pass away. God’s Word is sure and eternal. That’s what you should know. And based on this eternal truth, you should receive a warning, and a comfort. You have heard His warning, and you see it validated in the signs all around you in your fellow man, in your own mirror every morning, and in the disaster befalling us on every hand both in the natural world, and in society too. Take the warning and heed it.
But do not be cowed by all the change and decay, disaster and calamity. Understand these things as the warning signs they are for those whom Jesus loves, and take comfort from the fact that Jesus’ words will by no means pass away. Pay attention to what Jesus says to you in His Word. He makes you promises; Wondrous promises! Behold, He makes everything new! He tells us that He goes up to Jerusalem to suffer and die on the cross, and to be buried, and on the third day to rise in triumph over your death, the sacrifice once for all of the Innocent One in your place. Jesus tells you that you are forgiven your sin, that it is removed farther from you than the depths of the ocean. Jesus comforts you in your dying, telling you that you shall be with Him in Paradise. Jesus tells you that if He goes, He returns, for in His Father’s house are many mansions and one for you. Jesus speaks peace to you, breathes His Spirit into you by His Word, delivers forgiveness, life, and salvation to you just exactly where He says: in His Word proclaimed, in the washing of Holy Baptism, in the bread He gives to you saying ‘This is My Body,’ in the cup He shares with you ‘This is My Blood, shed for you for the remission of your sin.’
Jesus speaks to your fear and self-doubting, not quenching out a smoking wick, not breaking off a bent reed, speaking healing, life, and peace to him who blurts ‘I believe, help my unbelief!’
Jesus’ words will never pass away. And as you see all the things He sets before you as signs of the coming end, take them no longer as dreadful ends in themselves to seal your doom, but as markers along the way, and cling to Him through His Word, through His Sacraments, through His Church, through His every promise, confidence gained not in your own quality or person, but in His Words, which never fail, and always uphold you by His Spirit and Grace. And live in such hope in things to come based on Jesus’ Words that it causes those yet in darkness to see His shining light through you and wonder to hear of it, that your neighbor, your loved one, may yet cling to Jesus’ unchanging, eternal Words, and not die, but with you in great joy live forevermore.
The peace of God which passes all understanding is keeping you, guarding over your heart and mind through Christ Jesus. Amen.
