Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, Pastor Wolfmether here. Thanks for tuning into the Q A podcast. Pastor Packer's coming on with some. Oh, we got four good questions today, including what do we think about charismatic gifts? Can you sell your soul to the devil? What is a lutheran church? What about using wine for grape juice? Before we get started, I want to. This is Wednesday. This Friday, pastor will Whedon on the word of the Lord endures forever is going to start a new bible study on James. So that's a good, good time to check in. 15 minutes. Every day, Pastor Whedon walks through the text. It's a marvelous gift for you, for your family, for your commute, for your friends. It's a great way to introduce our lutheran doctrine to those who don't know it. It's joyful exposition of the scriptures. So if you're not in the habit of the word of the Lord endures forever, check it out. Give it a chance. Maybe on Friday. James, chapter one. Hope you enjoy it. All right, here's a Q and a. Two theologians welcome to the Q A with Pastor Brian Wolfmill. That's me. Pastor at St. Paul and Jesus deaf lutheran churches in Austin, Texas, and also Pastor Andrew Packer of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Collinsville, Illinois. I heard a rumor about you, Pastor Packer, and that is that you are no longer the associate pastor, but you are the senior pastor there at Good Shepherd, Collinsville.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Technically true, but not fully true yet, because technically I'll be installed on Sunday.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: You're like the language. No, you're the senior pastor elect, correct?
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: So you are currently your own associate.
That's weird.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Just boss yourself around a little bit in the meantime.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: I've never thought of about that way, but now I need to meditate upon that.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: You're entering the matrix. All right, what do you got for us today?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: It's like inception or something. Okay.
How do I explain spiritual gifts in charismatic churches? I'm a recent college graduate, and my roommate goes to a charismatic church. He talks about speaking in tongues, prophecy, et cetera. I've seen what he calls speaking in tongues, and it does not seem like what's described in acts. But I'm looking for some resources to understand what's happening when they are speaking in tongues or prophesying or doing healings.
Thank you for all your hard work.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: I'm really recently starting to realize how the charismatic movement, the destructiveness that it has caused in the church, especially because it's totally redefined how we read the scriptures as if what is happening in the charismatic church is what is happening in the early church. And that has made. Did we talk about this, the language of cessationism? I even realized that that language is conceding too much to the charismatic doctrine, because it's saying, like, oh, we still have the gifts, and we're saying, no, the gifts stopped. We have to say, whatever it is that you're doing is not what was happening in the early church. Just to take, for example, the gift of tongues. It was speaking in languages that people could understand, and it was so obviously required that Paul lays into the corinthians that they were speaking in tongues without an interpreter. And he forbids it, absolutely forbids it to happen in the church like that. Here's, I think, our main verse to bring a critique against the charismatic church, and that is that the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. So that wherever you see a lack of self control, you are not seeing the spirit. And insofar as tongues and all the other ecstatic utterances of the so called charismatic movement are being demonstrated in a lack of self control, then you know that it is not of the Holy Spirit.
God is a God of order, and the spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet.
This has to be top of mind when dealing with whatever's happening in the charismatic church. So when you see the charismatic church working against the spirit in the name of the spirit, you have to say, okay, what is that that's going on? It could be demonic. It could be the sinful flesh. It could be that you build up the expectations of these things by the culture that you're in. So world, flesh, devil, some combination of all three. There's a way that the human soul is impressionable, and it can be kind of carried along by these various different contexts that are being constructed by the charismatic worship. But that's the best guess. So the questioner is 100% right in saying that whatever's happening there in the charismatic church is not happening in the Bible. It's very, very different.
And it makes us Lutherans and other confessional churches afraid to talk about the Holy Spirit. Because whenever the spirit is brought up now, we bring all this charismatic baggage, which is anti spirit, anti order, anti calling, anti vocation. We don't understand that when the Holy Spirit comes upon someone, now he comes upon them with the gift of the office, with the laying on of hands to increase faith and love, that the Lord is in the callings that the Lord has given to us. And so we rely on the spirit to be filled with the Spirit, to be led by the Spirit, to be taught by the spirit. We rely on all of these things in our offices, but we're afraid to talk of them because the whole conversation has been hijacked by this charismatic nonsense.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Do you remember the laughing revivals of the 90s? Do you remember those? There were, I think, Florida, and then there were some up in Toronto and a few other places where they would laugh uncontrollably and roll around on the ground laughing. And they were trying to convince everyone that this was the Holy Spirit. And if you ask, okay, where in the Bible do we see any, the Holy Spirit working in this way where people are laughing uncontrollably, rolling around on the ground, unable to control themselves, at know they would point to verses that talk about joy or something like, that's not. That's not the same thing. Like, having joy is not the same. As I watched some of those videos because I was in high school at the time when those were really popular, and I would watch some of those videos and see some of the clips from some of that stuff, and it did not look like anything christian at all.
And if you look at some of some other religions, you can find similar things in pagan religions, this kind of like, uncontrollable laughing or whatever, rolling around on the ground.
But it was used to say, if you're not on board with this, you're fighting the spirit. And I realize that's kind of an extreme example, but it's the same kind of thing, just a different level, right? It's the same kind of, like, if you don't have this, you don't have the spirit like we do. Therefore, you're lesser than us. You're not as christian as us. When I was in high school, too, I went to a charismatic church with a friend.
They had these Friday morning prayer things, and I went with one of them, and this one was the last one I went to because they laid their hands on me to try to get me to speak in tongues. And the whole time I was praying, like, just leave me alone. It was very weird. And I had a friend in college who said he had that happen to him, and he just started repeating the names of various japanese sounding words, like car companies, Toyota, Hyundai, things like that, really fast. And they yelled at him, you've got it. You've got the spirit. And he said from that moment on, he was just done with that stuff because he was so turned off by one them trying to force him. And then two, him making it up, but them telling him, hey, you've got this gift, that he abandoned that altogether. It was very eye opening for him. So I've been on the receiving end of some of that, and I've never seen anything again. To me, that looks like you said, the work of the spirit being self control or being a God of order, not a God of confusion. And always, in my experience, it's been the opposite of that.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Right. Especially, I mean, just when these churches make the speaking in tongues a mark of salvation, when Paul says, not everyone speaks in tongues, it's so clearly anti biblical. You realize, oh, wait a minute, the whole thing is anti biblical. The whole business of the charismatic church is built on a denial of the sufficiency of scripture, that we need another word, that the Bible is not enough. And so the whole thing is an anti word, anti Bible rejection of the gifts of God, this terrible disservice to the rest of us, because now we are fearful to think of the Holy Spirit. So we did, like, in the worldwide Bible study back before I got Covid. So this must have been right. In 2019, I think we did a 19 week study of the Holy Spirit and just looked at all the office and work of the Holy Spirit all through the New Testament, so we can refer people to that. It was a great study because I think it's true that people will say, well, the Lutherans don't talk about the Holy Spirit. And we say, well, the Holy Spirit talks about Jesus. So when you're talking about Jesus. Okay, fine. But also, I think there's some truth in that, that we are hesitant to talk about the Holy Spirit because the conversation has been hijacked. And I want to get it back because it is important. The work of the Holy Spirit is the church, and it is our life. And so it's part of the fight that we're fighting.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: I don't know if you've noticed. You had mentioned the difference between what the Bible pictures it and what's going on. But in acts, we're told that the church in Corinth is next door to a synagogue. And the book that talks the most about speaking in tongues is Paul's letter to first corinthians. And it's interesting because it seems like in Corinth, that sign was given as a sign against the Jews. Like, they were next door, they could have heard this stuff going on. They're literally, like, right there. And it seems like perhaps part of the reason it's such a big deal in Corinth is because of the way God was using that. As we've seen throughout the book of acts as evidence, the spirit was among the work among these gentile believers in Corinth. Despite what the Jews not thinking they should be part of the church at all, or that they could be saved or whatever, it was a very clear evidence to them of the work of the Holy Spirit. And you don't see that everywhere in the New Testament. You see it in very specific times and places to convince others that the work of spirit is present, which isn't. We're fighting different battles today.
You don't usually have to convince me if someone in a different country believes the gospel, I don't have to see them speaking in tongues to believe they have the Holy Spirit. I take their confession like, I'm not struggling with, oh, well, I don't know they're from that country. I don't know if they actually have the Holy Spirit. We don't struggle with that.
I think it's another issue that we neglect to talk about.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: I think the four times we have tongues in the book of acts is also. It's connected to the office of preaching, so it's connected to ordination and the laying on of hands.
There's a couple of times in acts, chapter ten, when the Holy Spirit comes upon them and they start speaking in tongues before baptism. So that Peter, it looks like Peter's looking at these gentile christians and he's not going to baptize them. And the Lord's like, whoa, Peter, bring baptism. So the Lord reverses the order in order to pull Peter over this hurdle. The gospel is going from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth. So the Lord is dragging the apostles over these hurdles so that the gospel is going forth, and he does it in acts, chapter ten, acts, chapter 19, same thing. They lay on hands. And so that what happens is the guys are ordained, and so they begin speaking, and the Lord gives them the gift to speak in the language that the people need to hear. But it's connected to the office. And that's the problem, is that we currently have a disconnect between the work of the spirit and the to. We want to join those two together. The spirit and the office are bound up together. So when Jesus is baptized into the office of Messiah, the Holy Spirit comes upon him. When the apostles are set forth to be apostles and preachers, the Holy Spirit comes upon them.
When Paul puts Timothy in the office, he prays that the Holy Spirit will come upon him for the work of the office so that the Holy Spirit is there accompanying the work of the office, not apart from it not overcoming the charismatic. Church has no place for office. Well, I shouldn't say that. They always have bishops and know it's husband and wife Bishop pairs and everyone's a bishop. But how do you get that? Bishop Rick is by the unique outpouring of the Holy Spirit, not on some sort of orderly putting it in place. It's all backwards. And it is particularly dangerous.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: I think it's Judas's little book on this that I thought did a great job of showing that whenever you have these spiritual gifts given in this way, it is connected to the apostles laying on of hands. It's an apostolic gift given.
So it shouldn't surprise us that after the age of the apostles that we don't see those gifts because it's something the apostles specifically was bound up with their office that they could give. But we don't see anyone else giving that gift to others like it's just them.
And I thought he does a good job of laying that out. I found that extremely helpful. As you look at this to be like, oh, yeah. Like you were saying, it's connected to office.
These aren't just people randomly getting zapped with, speaking in tongues.
This isn't just random things happening.
It's bound up with the office of the apostle. And they're giving of these gifts an.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Evaluation of claims to the charismatic gifts. I think that's the name of the title.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I couldn't remember the exact title.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Doug. Judas. You can find it online.
You can order it from the print shop of the Concordia Theological Seminary bookstore. That's probably the best way to get it.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very inexpensive. I think it's less than $10.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: 499, say less than five.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: All right, next question.
My 17 year old son asked me why some musicians say they sold their souls to the devil. Is this really a thing? Is it reversible? From a lutheran perspective, what are your thoughts? And perhaps their son is seeing there's been several things going around that certain people, because they have so much fame and money and power that they had to have sold their souls to the devil to reach those heights and that.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: One day that they'll have to pay.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Him for all the success.
I know there's even been some television shows that kind of dive into that.
The hounds of hell then come to get you. If you've made this deal with the devil, eventually they come and get you, and you get fame and money for a limited time and it's taken from you. I think they're seeing some of that and perhaps asking if that's a legitimate thing that actually happens.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: Well, so maybe there's three things if we can pull them apart. There is certainly a great danger in fame.
I think if you just looked at the actuary table, like, what age do you die?
The more famous you are, the younger you are. And especially, it's a strange thing that if that fame is connected to music, it seems really dangerous. And a part of it, I'm sure, is just the lifestyle of a musician. It's disordered. You're working at night, you're always on the road. You have this disproportionate amount of people who think that they know you and are adoring. And so you have all the temptations of drug sex and rock and roll. These kind of all go together and you end up.
I think it's hard to be a musician and to be chaste and to be good and so forth. And so this is all very troublesome.
So that's one thing.
There's another thing which is this selling of the soul to the devil.
It seems like this is not a new thing either. This goes back. You go back to Faust and all this old literature stuff about making a deal with the.
So I think people are tempted to do this to make a pact with the devil, either informally or even informal ritual ways.
And there is a danger to that. In other words, there's different things that will open up our conscience and our heart to demonic influence.
Occult practices is obviously one of them.
Drugs, and especially psychedelic drugs seem to be another one.
Ritual abuse. So abusing a ritual or being abused in a ritual form seems to do it. It seems like illicit sexuality, and especially in a disordered way also is a way to open yourself up to demonic influence.
Along with those practices, there can be this occult practice of kind of a ritual exchange of the soul with the devil.
From a christian perspective, we'd say the whole thing is completely illegitimate. In other words, your soul is not yours to sell, your soul is not yours to give.
I'm talking about this a lot lately with young couples. Because this is what happens if you're sleeping together before you get married. You're assuming that your body, for example, is yours to give. It's not. You were purchased with a price. So we glorify God with our bodies. So also our souls were purchased with a price. They don't belong to us. They don't belong, so we can't give them away.
It's like a kid trying to sell the parents house.
Your name is not on the title, so we cannot sell our souls to the devil. They belong to the Lord Jesus, especially for the baptized. It's doubly true that we belong to Jesus via creation and via redemption, but that doesn't mean that the devil won't try to enforce a false compact.
And it's particularly difficult to unravel this in the conscience.
So the devil will use justice, the strength of a promise against us. He'll never be held to a promise, right?
He'll never keep a promise that he makes, but he will try to hold us to a promise that we make. And it becomes haunting and very difficult to escape that in our own conscience because the devil will just on the, on the kind of common, everyday example, the devil will tempt us to sin and then he'll come along and accuse us of sinning. Well, the accusation is right, but it's being used in a wrong way because the law is not meant to condemn us, but to show us our sins so that we know the blood of Jesus. And so the same thing with this kind of compact with the devil, if it's formal or informal, ritual or casual, the devil will come back and haunt the conscience with, well, now you're mine. No, I belong to Jesus, and you can steal what's his. But look, he is the stronger man that comes and loots the house. And that whole picture of Jesus, the parable that he tells of Jesus, the strong man who overcomes the stronger man who overcomes the strong man and loots the house. This is the confidence that we have that Jesus will steal his stolen goods back.
He's the rescuer of sinners. So I don't know what's going on with all this kind of weird kind of elite culture being drawn to.
Mean, I don't know how much of that is.
Know all these weird stories about the Hollywood elite and all the goofball satanic ritual that involves. I don't know if any of that's true or not, but we don't even have to go to the crazy stuff to know that the devil and the world and the flesh are always trying to make a claim on us that they can't and we belong to Jesus.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Do you think maybe to add to their question, thinking about this as you're talking, do you think there's any sense in which the devil, I don't want to use the word bless, but can give them stuff, can make them wealthier, more famous, whatever? Because that seemed to be part of their question, like, can this actually work? Right? Can someone do this? And actually, can that contribute to their rise to fame, their wealth, whatever?
That seemed to be their kind of question within the question. What do you think about that?
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Probably. I think the devil will do whatever he can to distract us from the word of God. And so sometimes it's the rocks the devil brings about suffering, and sometimes it's the weeds. He gives us pleasures of life to distract us. So can the devil kind of give success so that we are distracted from the word of God? Yeah, 100%. So he has those two, I mean, kind of three strategies. It's the snatch the word strategy, the choke the word strategy, and the wither the word strategy, and he'll use them, as best he thinks to try to destroy the word. Now, the amazing thing is that the word of God is that the devil attacks is the thing that overthrows him.
I was reading this morning just in the worldwide Bible class a few minutes ago, getting ready for that. We didn't actually get to it, but Luther is talking about the visit of the angels and Jacob to Jacob in chapter 32 of Genesis, and he's talking about how the demonic works are everywhere apparent according to the rule of God. Because if the Lord just let the devil loose, then there would be nothing. I mean, it would scorched earth, there'd be no people, no life, no nothing. So that everything good that we see is the Lord, through his angels, withholding the extreme wrath of the devil, but that he lets him on a leash for his own purposes. The problem is that christians see that all the evil flourish and the wicked do seem like they're prosperous.
And Luther says, at that point, we have to simply shut down our reason and trust the Lord's governance of things because we can't understand it.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: That's. What is it? Psalm 72. Right. The struggle there that the psalmist sees the wicked rich and fat and happy, and here he is as a Christian, struggling. And he says he almost abandoned the faith until he went into the house of God. And then it was in worship that he realized that that stuff is fleeting, it's temporary, and that God will punish them forever. So even if it seems like they're wealthy and rich and famous now and have everything going well for them, and even if they die rich and wealthy and famous, whatever, that they're going to suffer the judgment of God for all eternity apart from him, and that that's where he confesses at the end that if he has Christ, he has everything, right, that if he has Christ, though his heart and flesh may fail, that the Lord is what matters to him, that if he has him on earth, he has everything.
73. I knew I was one off. 72 has to do with the kingship of Solomon. But, yeah, 73 there, that great struggle. It's a great psalm that deals with that. We see others being blessed and the evil especially. I always use example of that abortion doctor in Philadelphia that's making a million dollars a year killing babies. And you look at him and you think, man, I'm struggling to get by and this guy's murdering babies and making tons of money. But the appearance, we have to just trust what the word of the Lord says, that the end for them will not be good. This life is a blink of an eye, right? And it'll be over. So even if you gave everything to the devil to get all of that, it's a bad deal in the end because it's very short, right? It's very short lived.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Jesus says, what does it profit a man if he gained the whole world and loses the. This is the point. So whatever bargain we make, the only exchange that really matters is that Jesus exchanged his life for hours on the cross, and that defines everything else. And it shows the devil to be a liar. So even when he tells the truth, he's lying because he's doing it for the wrong purpose. Very good.
Hopefully we got to that question. I think we did.
Maybe to answer it very quickly.
Do the rock stars sell their soul to the devil? Answer. You can't sell your soul, but the devil can act like you can sell your soul and get you to play along.
It's always for his own end, and we have to reject the whole thing. And we have to remember also that the devil is this joker.
When James tells us, resist the devil and he'll flee from you, we have to remember that not only are we not authorized to be afraid of the devil, that's idolatry, but that when we're clothed in the armor of light, as Paul calls us in Romans, we become fearful to the devil himself.
So the devil, not only do we resist the devil, but when we resist, he runs from us.
We cannot forget this because I think we're tempted, especially in our kind of naturalistic culture. When things go really weird, we're like, oh, this is really weird. Strange things are happening. Well, there must be some benevolent power. Well, yeah, of course there's a benevolent power, but that's like, we have Jesus on our side. So though devils all the world should fill, I mean, it's like, we never even sing the hymn. Though devils all the world should feel all eager to devour us, we tremble not, we fear no ill, they shall not overpower.
Mean, scowl fierce as he will, he can harm us none. One little word can of him. And you remember at seminary, Pastor Packard, when you're like, well, what is that little word? This is like that seminary fight. The word is Jesus or no, the word is is from the Lord's supper wrote against. No, it's not like Luther had, like, one word, like one secret magic word that was going to fail the devil. It's like, look, you don't even need two words from God. You just need one. Like, the smallest word from God overthrows the whole demonic charade.
It's like flipping on the light when the kids are telling a horror story and all the ghosts are gone. That's the word of God.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: We just know that even from natural explanations. Right? Like you said, flipping on the light. What happens when light enters into darkness? The darkness mean, again, things we sing that we don't apply to our daily lives. Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the light that no darkness can overcome. Right? No matter how dark it is, it doesn't matter because we have the one who's victorious over the darkness. So no need to be afraid. Do you have time for questions?
All right.
You recently were talking with Dr. Schultz. In part one, video of anatomy of an implosion, you mentioned that the lutheran churches should be lutheran versus trying to be evangelical. Could you describe what makes a church Lutheran?
[00:28:28] Speaker A: That's a really good question. I should be able to describe that, shouldn't. I don't even remember what we were talking about. But all these kind of church growth gurus are all into marketing, but they don't. So if you would just pretend even to pay attention to marketing, what you realize is that there's a supply and demand problem, and what the world does not need is more evangelical churches. So we're in this weird place where the Lutherans are like, I should act like an evangelical so I can have evangelical success, and they end up destroying themselves because they're not even paying attention to the. Well, you know, what the world does not have is a lot of good lutheran churches that are really lutheran. And if there's anything that we're good at, we're not even good at that. But the only thing we're good at is being Lutheran. I mean, that's the only good that the lutheran church is. We're not good at being cool or fancy or whatever else we're just good at being Luther. So what does it mean to be Lutheran? I would say that the essence of the lutheran church is it is the place where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered according to the word of God. Now, there's a lot more that goes into that, in the background, in the foreground, et cetera. But those are the marks of the church by which we can identify the church, the place where the gospel is preached, not confused with the law, not muddled with our own decision or our own good works, or all the other things that are confused. But the gospel of Christ Jesus, the savior of sinners, who by his death and resurrection, wins for us salvation, and he brings that salvation to us in the promise of the forgiveness of our sins. The gospel rightly preached and the sacraments, baptism and the Lord's supper, absolution is. These are practiced according to their institution. So baptism for the forgiveness of sins, where the Lord delivers life, salvation to the sinner, and the Lord's supper, where we confess the body and blood of Christ and receive it in the unity of faith, that is what it means to be Lutheran. And all the other stuff that grows into that and grows out of that is also to be understood, including our doctrine of the scripture, our view on tradition, our practice of worship, our understanding of the office and vocation, all that is surrounding that. But that's the essence of what it means.
[00:30:58] Speaker B: It's interesting, too, right? Luther, with his marks of the church, the last one he adds to those you've listed, the 7th mark, is suffering that the church bears up the holy Cross, because if you're preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments in accordance with God's word, then the devil, who were just talking about a moment ago, is going to be vigorously attacking those things to disrupt it from being rightly done. And so as you strive to do those things, one of the marks that the church, Luther says, is that we suffer for it. We bear the cross as we try to do those things and bring those gifts to the world.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. So, I don't know. What do you think most people think of when they think of Lutheran? Do you think the definition that we presented here, which is from the Augsburg confession, articles, what? Six and seven, right? Seven and eight. Seven and eight articles. Seven and eight of the.
Do you think. What do you think most people think of when they think lutheran church? I don't know.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: My last call was interesting. When I first got there, there was kind of a view around town. That Lutherans, because I was out in the west, in a mountain rural area where there weren't a lot of Lutherans. So I should preface it with that. But they thought we were just like a weird cult. Honestly, I know in the midwest it's different. Like where I'm at now, there's a lot more. So. But that's an interesting question to ask others. Perhaps when you hear the word Lutheran, what do you think of?
Because my guess is for some people, they would think of Martin Luther King Jr.
Like there was even that cup during the 500th anniversary, right, of the reformation that had Martin Luther King Jr's picture on it.
Or if maybe they've heard of Martin Luther, they just think, oh, they're just guys that follow Luther. But I don't think Lutherans who have kind of grown up in a lutheran bubble, if, you know, I don't think they realized how little people outside our circles actually know about us or how we would define ourselves or what we would be like Herman Saucer said, right, Rome looks at us and we're too evangelical, and evangelicals look at us and we're too Roman Catholic, and neither of them know what to do with us.
But I don't know. Today, though, if you ask average person or even another Christian from another church, if you had to define Lutheran, how would you understand it? I don't know if any of them could or would, outside of maybe pockets in the midwest where they're familiar with lots of Lutherans. So all I have to say, I don't know.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: What do you think? I don't know. They see like, some sort of grumpy German and a bunch of old people sitting around in a church that smells funny with styrofoam coffee cups laying around and. I don't know. I don't know.
It's like an impression of something irrelevant.
I think that's what it is.
It's like a smell of something stale. It doesn't smell good. It doesn't smell bad. It just smells like I don't like it. That's how I think most.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: Like a dead orthodoxy.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: They see us as like, living in the past, perhaps, or irrelevant to current situations, probably. You guys can tell us, because you can comment and let us know if you're not Lutheran. If you're not Lutheran and you've made it this far in this video, you can tell us. When you hear the word Lutheran or Lutheran church, what thoughts does that bring to your mind?
[00:34:24] Speaker A: And if you got this far too, someone remind me this book that Pastor Packer mentioned where Luther talks about the seven marks of the church is on the councils on the church, and it's at the end of that where he has the seven marks. I bet you you could just search Luther seven marks of the church and that excerpt will come up. But I republished that book. I think you can buy it for like $6 on Lulu, but you can download the PDF for.
So I'll try to remember to put it in the. I'll try to pin that in the comments on the chat, but someone will have to remind me because I'll forget by the time I get this posted up.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: I'll try to remember.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Good.
One more? Or are we at the end?
[00:35:06] Speaker B: Do you want one more?
[00:35:07] Speaker A: Yeah, let's do another one. Why not? We haven't done this in a while, so we're going to clear out the email.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: Yeah. You build twice. I build twice. We have been negligent of our answering of questions. This is a long one. I'm going to sum it up, especially because I don't want to perhaps accidentally mention the churches involved.
Basically, their question is this.
They are going to an LCMS church, but they do not use wine in the Lord's supper. They use grape juice. So if they're going to this church, she wants to know. I think it's a she.
She wants to know, should she take the Lord's supper if they're using grape juice and not wine, would it be better to refrain and just wait until they're apparently where they live? There's just no, they can't find a church close by that's administering the sacrament with bread and wine. It's grape juice. So they want to know what they should do.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: That's a good question. So here's the general advice.
If you are at the liturgy and you are unsure if you should commune for whatever reason, something you heard in the sermon, something about the practice, if you're unsure, then I think it's just best to refrain. And this is if you're going to any different place or visiting somewhere and you see something and you just don't know, and maybe afterwards you find out, oh, that wasn't a thing. But if there's a question mark there, I'd say just refrain for that week. Okay.
The problem is, if you're in a place where that is week after week, where you find yourself refraining, then now that's a troublesome thing. So this could be because of communion practice, because of doctrine, because of something that's preached or whatever. So the way to address that is to first go to the pastor in a generous and gentle way, say, hey, pastor, I have these concerns about this. Could you help me understand it? It could be that for whatever weird reason, the church somehow came into this bad practice of juice. And the reason why it's bad, let's say this, is because it steps away from the instituting words of Jesus and therefore introduces a question. Jesus took wine. Whatever would motivate us to take wine and make it into juice is maybe it's good motivation, maybe it's foolish or whatever, but it moves us away from the institution and therefore introduces a question into what Jesus has given us to give us certainty. And so that's a bad deal. So whatever has caused this? I don't know. Maybe there was a huge group of people who were alcohol sensitive, or maybe there was a huge, I don't know, whatever. Maybe there's some reason that moved in this way. Go to talk to the pastor, and he's like, we're working on fixing it, et cetera, et cetera. That could be the thing. It could be that he would say, well, what's wrong with it? What's the problem? And then you can engage, hopefully, in a peaceful and helpful theological conversation.
For that, I would see this article called elemental certainty by Pastor Tim Pauls up in Idaho. It's a discussion of the elements in the Lord's supper and what happens when we move further than what Jesus uses.
So that's there.
And see if you can have a conversation with him in that way. If the church is not moving toward a more orthodox and sure practice, then now you're at a bit of a kind of tough spot. Do you stay and fight? Do you leave? Do you look for something else? What do you do? But I'd say before we assume that we're at kind of threat level seven or whatever, and we're ramping up the nuclear war, let's see if we can have a peaceful and helpful conversation in every way and assume that you can be helpful in this, because if the pastor is trying to move toward a more orthodox practice and you get angry and leave, then that doesn't help either. So that would be my advice. You want to contradict that or give some different thoughts? Pastor Packer?
[00:39:28] Speaker B: No, I thought that was great. I think trying to work patiently at first, like you said, you don't always know if they inherited a really bad practice that maybe should have been dealt with sooner but hasn't been dealt with or whatever. If you could at least go and talk to them, at least you can know what's going on and how you can proceed prayerfully and patiently and make your decision after that.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: We have this situation now where you're at a tough spot because you have to either not commune where Jesus has said, do this often in remembrance of me. So you know that Jesus wants you to come to the supper, but that doesn't mean you have to commune every time. But you have to know that if you're not communing, that cannot be a permanent arrangement. So you have that on the one hand. On the other hand, you have the grape juice practice, and that troubles your conscience. So either way, your conscience is like, this is not right.
Here's the main thing is we don't want to come to peace with a conscience that's not at peace.
So the fact that your conscience is not at peace in this thing is helping you, to spur you on to love and good deeds, not to destructive actions, but to acts of service, so that there can be a good practice there. If you do come to the point where you realize that the pastor and the elders or whatever are recalcitrant in this practice, then you have this question, well, am I going to war with them, or am I looking for another place to go? That's a tricky and difficult question.
Unfortunately, it's one to be handled in the context of pastoral care.
But when your pastor is the one who you're fighting against, it makes it very difficult. So you go to your pastor and you say, pastor, I'm troubled because I'm fighting against you.
You have to help me fight against you in a helpful and godly way. You can do that, but it's kind of tricky.
But that's down the road. I'd say you have a few things to do before you get there.
[00:41:38] Speaker B: All right, I think that's all our questions for today.
[00:41:41] Speaker A: Perfect. Thank you for your. Hey, let's see. People can send the questions. Wolfmuller Co. Slash contact. While you're on the website, look at the events page because there's a lot of cool stuff coming up. Jordan Cooper is coming down for our men's retreat in April, so that'll be interesting. We have a singles. Oh, I haven't even announced this. We have a singles cruise on August the first through the fifth. Carrie and I are going to host that for lutheran singles, age 21 to 41, getting all sorts of grief on the Internet for being ageist.
Do you know about that?
[00:42:13] Speaker B: No, I just saw jokes about you leading a singles cruise.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: People should realize that it's Carrie who's going to be doing.
So far, I think we have 50 or seven. It's between 50 to 70 signed up, which will be great. And I think we might have 150 or so. So this will be a cool opportunity for people to meet each other, have friends. Who knows? Someone said, I hope this is the last singles cruise I ever go on. So that would be nice.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: Are you offering marriages on board the ship?
[00:42:46] Speaker A: The last day?
Call the captain.
Our final mattens service will be mattens and the rite of holy matrimony.
No. I thought about it, but I didn't want to tempt. Some of the kids were like, oh, okay.
You're going to have to take the people you meet home to meet your mom and dad before we do the marriage. But so that's coming up August 1, so people can join us for that. So that'll be cool and a good time.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: I think that's all great.
[00:43:16] Speaker A: So send the questions there, and we'll see you next week. Thanks, Pastor Packer.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: Blessings in your day.
