Welcome to the Lightly Salted Podcast.

These are the readings and sermons of St. John's Lutheran Church of Park Rapids, Minnesota.
They are offered so that the Word of God would shape and strengthen you to be what He calls you to be, salt and light.
You can find us at stjohnspr.org.
Now, on to the Word.
Our Old Testament reading for this, the amazing grace shown to Paul, is recorded for us in the prophet Isaiah, the 53rd chapter.
It's part of the suffering servant prophecy.
Who has believed what he has heard from us?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no form or majesty that we should look at him and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men.
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised.
And we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.
Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our inequities.
Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace.
And with his wounds, we are healed.
We all like sheep have gone astray.
We have turned every one to his own way.
And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

Our Epistle reading is recorded for us in the first letter to Timothy, the first chapter.
The Holy Spirit carries Paul along as he writes to his young son in the ministry.
thank him who has given me strength.
Christ Jesus our Lord.
Because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service.
Though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, an insolent opponent.
But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief.
And the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance.
That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.
But I received mercy for this reason.
That in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience.
As an example to those who are to believe in him for eternal life.
To the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God.
Be honor and glory forever and ever.
Amen.
This too is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

I invite the congregation to please stand for the reading of the Gospel.
It's recorded for us in the Gospel of Saint Mark, the second chapter.
Jesus went out again beside the sea and all the crowd was coming to him and he was teaching them.
And as he passed by.
He saw Levi, the son of Elpheus, sitting at the tax booth and he said to him,
Follow me.
And he rose and followed him.
And as Jesus reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.
For there were many who followed him.
And the scribes of Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors,
said to his disciples, Why?
Does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?
And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, Those who are well have no need of a physician,
but those who are sick.
came not to call the righteous, but sinners.
This too is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
We are rescued from a wretchedness through the overwhelming victory of God's amazing grace through Christ.
Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Paul was well aware of his own wretched state in his life and in his struggles with his own weaknesses.
He learned to trust the power of the gospel of God's grace to give him peace.
But Paul's journey to that grace of Christ started when he was a Pharisee who persecuted the church of Christ.
In his religious zeal for the law, and for the traditions, he thought that the church was upending everything that was sacred,
everything that God had given to his people.
And so he was most proud of his role and his commitment to the law.
f anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more.
Circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews,
as to the law of Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
And so he engaged in practices, discouraged to ban, to excommunicate the Christians from places of worship.
Beginning in Jerusalem, he worked to destroy the church.
Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.
He was an eyewitness to the execution of Stephen, the first Christian martyr.
And while he was still breathing out murderous threats against the disciples in Jerusalem,
he was also deputized by the high priest to travel to the synagogues of Damascus.
And there, if he found anyone who belonged to the way as it was known, whether men or women,
he had the authority to take them as prisoners back to Jerusalem.
But it was on that trip to Damascus that Christ called out to him,
Saul, Saul, why are you, do you persecute me? And there in that blinding call from heaven, followed up with the grace-filled words of Ananias,
and with the refreshing water of baptism, Saul was overcome by the grace of God in Christ.
And he was converted, converted from being the first persecutor of the gospel to being one of its most adamant proclaimers.
For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God.
But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain.
On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.
In spite of Paul's many acts of animosity and violence, God had other things in mind for him.
The extension of God's grace to call Paul as an apostle of the faith,
well, it clearly demonstrates how far and how deep Christ was willing to go for the most wretched.
So Paul gave up his former life, he embraced the ministry to which he was called,
gladly giving up that which he had and sharing instead the message of God's amazing grace in Christ.
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ, my Lord.
For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as garbage,
n order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.
Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ,
the righteousness from God based on faith.
The suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ became Paul's new proclamation.
Instead of contributing to the sufferings of others as he had once done,
Paul takes Christ's sufferings into himself as the power to withstand his own suffering.
And he would experience much at the hands of others who were still themselves in their wretched and lost state.
But Paul would continue to share with them the love and the mercy and the peace that he himself had come to grasp in Christ.
want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death.
f somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
But Paul also knew there was more, that this power doesn't rest in us.
We have this treasure in clay jars so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.
And so Paul did face many sufferings and hardships in his ministry.
He himself would be persecuted.
He would be beaten.
He'd even been stoned and left for dead.
He would be shipwrecked and he would be imprisoned.
But there might have been something even harder to deal with than persecution.
Paul also struggled with the sense of weakness of his flesh to do what is right and good.
For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh.
can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
And it's out of that deep conflict that he cries.
Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
And we certainly know that Paul is not alone.
Because in our weakness, we cannot boast of much of anything about ourselves to make us worthy of God's love and mercy.
But along with Paul, we do trust in Christ.
We cling to his promise and his victory, which gives us peace.
And the centerpiece of that victory is God's grace in the cross of Christ.
Because on the cross, Christ suffered and died for us, bearing the curse of the judgment of our unworthiness of God's favor.
Jesus the Christ made our curse his own.
And he bore the cross for our sake freely and willingly.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written,
Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
But through Christ's death on the cross, the curse of our sin and the judgment of death is overcome.
We no longer live under the curse of judgment, anyone's judgment, not even the very right judgment of the law.
For we have Christ's victory over sin and death as our own.
And we get to claim a new title of our inheritance, Children of God.
For in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith.
When we were baptized, we put on Christ and the garments of his righteousness, a righteousness that is as far-reaching as the ends of the earth.
As many of you as were baptized into Christ, have clothed yourselves with Christ.
There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free.
There is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
The promising newness of God's grace in Christ trumps all that is old in our lives, including the depth of our sin.
That new peace, we have a reconciliation. We are reconciled with God through Christ.
And that becomes our new witness.
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away. See, everything has become new.
All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.
It's a shame that we spend much of our lives engaging in foolish acts and we try to blame other people.
It's a shame that we dwell on the past and oftentimes seek to try to find excuses for ourselves.
When we're doing that, all we're doing is sort of ruminating and stewing in some sort of false sense of righteousness.
In doing this, we're not escaping the deep scandal of our sin, nor are we finding any peace in our lives.
We're only bearing witness to how we, like Paul, are among the wretched.
But God in Christ has set us free from that.
Christ has blessed us with His peace, His peace that reconciles us to God and to one another.
So now we get to be bold.
We get to be bold and confess the truth that we indeed are sinners because we can be even bolder to embrace the promise that Jesus, the Christ, came to save us from the depth of sin
and to grace us with His peace.
So it was a little later in his life that Paul had no fear of admitting the truth of his status as chief of sinners, especially from all that he did to persecute the faith.
There was no reason to try to cover it up or conceal it.
There was no reason to say what was also in true of his life because of the surpassing grace and peace that he had received in Christ.
The saying is sure and worthy of full of acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
Our sin is conquered.
Not by any of our valiant or vain efforts, but through the amazing grace that we have in Christ Jesus who took the path to the cross for our sake.
Through Christ, we have peace with God and our wretchedness gives way to the promise of Christ's grace.
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
God proves His love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.
So with Paul, we get to be a bold witness to the amazing grace of Christ crucified for us for all of our lives and indeed for the lives of all.
There is no one who is too wretched that Christ's grace does not reach them.
But are we willing to risk that promise?
Through Christ's peace, we become willing participants in sharing in the sufferings of our world in order to love in the way that we have been loved.
Christ's grace frees us to embrace that peace in our lives and our hearts and to witness to that peace.
Even if that means sharing in the sufferings of others so that they too and anyone in this wretched world may have that great and wonderful last word of God for us.
Peace.
Amen.
And may that peace established in Jesus' death and resurrection direct our eyes to the cross, direct our eyes to that amazing grace of God, fill us, and from us be shared with others.
Amen.
Thanks for listening to Lightly Salted.
We'd love to hear from you.
You can contact us at StJohnsPR.org or look for us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Our thanks to Eric Medias at soundimage.org for "Morning Dew."
God's blessings.