8-12-2026

Good Morning!

      Isaiah 35:8; “And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it.  It shall belong to those who walk on the way; even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.”

     I was never the world’s greatest bowler.  I could keep it in my lane but only because the gutters stopped the bowling ball from going into the other lanes.  I seldom get more than 75 or so.  I am not much of a bowler but I did see a way to improve my score; there are blow up bumpers that they place in the gutters.  When you roll the ball, if it heads to the gutter, it bounces back into the alley and eventually has to knock some pins down.  I figure I could double my score if I bowled like that.

    There are times when it would be nice to have “bumpers” in life.  Maybe you are having a rough day and you snap at your spouse or children.  You regret it but it is out there.  It would be nice to bounce back into the regular lane.  Maybe you did something years ago and it just continues to fester.  Perhaps you have lived a life where you didn’t make the best choices; you want to get back; at times you think you are back but every once in a while, the thoughts creep back and put us in the gutter.  It would be nice to avoid this.  If only we had a bumper to put us back on track.

    As Christians, we do have a bumper.  God has made the “Way of Holiness.”  He did this through the death and resurrection of Jesus.  This cleared the path to God; it gave us the way to go.  God placed us on this path through the gift of Baptism.  At that time, he gave us the bumpers that we would need for life.  No matter what we did or do; God mercy keeps us on the path; he keeps us on the Way.  His grace brings us back.  Even when we, foolishly, try to go a different trail; God keeps calling us back to the right trail.  Our sins are forgiven and God gives to us the desire to follow and to do his will.

    So now our desire is to stay on this path.  Our desire is to stay on the Way of Holiness.  We don’t seek to hurt or destroy.  We seek to love and to honor God with our life.  We do not have to let the past pull us back into the gutter.  God looks at us and at our future.   His desire is that we are all brought to salvation, to life eternal with him.  We only need to trust in this great promise; we only need to know that God has placed us on the Way of Holiness and that it is his desire to keep us there.  Trust that God only looks to your future.  He looks to it with love and gives you hope to see his grace.

 Wonderful Father, as we wait for Jesus to return, keep us safe, keep us holy.  Purify us by your mercy.  Lead us to love only you.  Help us to leave the past behind us.  Keep us from falling into the pain and sorrow that the devil wants us to live.  Lift us up and put us back on the Way.  Be with those who feel as though they are off the path and cannot return.  Give them the peace to know that your love conquers all.  In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret

8-11-2026

Good Morning!

        Ephesians 4:24; “and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

      One time, as I was coaching high school age kids in baseball; I talked with a fellow coach who faced a unique situation.  He had a young man come up who could throw the ball pretty well.  He had decent speed and was fairly accurate.  The problem was that the way he threw the ball made it an illegal pitch.  If a runner was on base it would have been called a balk.  So, he had to set about to completely change.  He had to get rid of the old style of pitching and bring in a new style of pitching.

     This was harder than it sounds.  One of the first problems was that he wasn’t convinced that he had to change.  He had been successful at the younger level and no one had made him change.  His coach kept telling him that he was wrong but neither he nor his parents believed him.  He asked me what he should do.  I told him to go ahead and let the kid pitch.  The other coach asked, “what about a balk?”  I said, “so what?  He doesn’t believe you; let him believe the umpire.  The only thing I would do would be to talk to the umpire before the game and let him know that you know it is a balk and that he should call them, vigorously if needed.”  Needless to say, the young man’s first pitching appearance wasn’t what he or his parents expected.

    So, the young man swallowed his pride and worked to change his pitching style.  He was never as dominant as he was when he was younger but he was a competent pitcher.  In a way, our life is like that.  Sometimes change is needed but change is hard.  That is what has to happen in a Christian’s life; we need to change.

   When God calls us to faith, he makes us “a new creation.”  This means that we need to shed the old life and live the new life that God gives us.  This can be difficult because part of change is to recognize that the old life was bad.  It takes humility to admit that past failures have caused pain.  It takes humility to confess our sins.  Yet this is an important part of faith.  We humble ourselves before God.  When we truly recognize and confess our sin, God creates us as new creations.  It is out with the old and in with the new, the new that God creates in us.  We need to embrace it and to live it.  We need to shed the old.  We need to, through faith, embrace the new life, trust in God’s mercy and his will for our life.  This is the new life to trust in God over our own skill and knowledge.  Trust in God to provide and protect us.

Father of all that is good and gracious.  We give you thanks for the new life that you give us.  Strengthen us by your Spirit.  Give us the humble heart to live according to your divine will. Guard us from all evil and keep us safe within your loving arms.  Be with those who are struggling with the cares of life and give them the certainty of hope in you.  Save them by your mercy.  In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret          

8-10-2026

Good Morning!

       Genesis 2:7; “then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”

      When I was a kid, I got a box of clay one time.  It had four different colors blocks of clay.  It kind of looked like sticks of butter.  You could take it and then you had to “warm it up” that was to roll it in your hands until it became pliable.  Once it was pliable, then you could form it into different shapes.  It was fun to work with but my actual shapes were not quite as good as my imagination.  I had visions of being a Michelangelo but I ended up more like the turtle than the artist.

    It takes talent, patience, an artistic flair, and a passion to be a good sculptor.  It takes an eye that sees what this blob of clay can be.  Michelangelo once said that “he saw an angel in the block of stone and chiseled til I set him free” That is quite the skill and it displays a little of what God does for us through his creative process.

   In this process we see two things about God.  First, we see him as the God who is willing to get his hands dirty in our life and secondly, we can see this creative process as an ongoing event.

   In the creation of the rest of God’s works; he spoke and it was.  Yet here we see God taking his time to mold and shape you to be the creature that he wants us to be.  With the creation of Adam, he had the perfect creature.  It was shaped right and it filled its role in creation perfectly.  Then Adam sinned and he began to add extra clay to his existence.  He padded this perfect creation with excess selfishness, excess jealousy, excess greed, with excess hatred.  All of this excess went to block his vision of God and Adam lost sight of all that God had done for him. 

    So, God sent Jesus to return us to the creative process.  We see when Jesus told his disciples that he would “make them fishers of men.”  Here, “make” can be thought of as molding or shaping or fabricating.  It is taking a lump of clay and shaping it into a piece of art.  We can see God doing this when we think of times when the excesses of our lives are stripped away until we see that our only source of hope and security is God.  All of that padded on excess sin needs to be shed.  We need to stop clinging to our old sins, our old sinful desires and to our old sinful hurts to be the creation that God desires us to be.

   Yet we sin and we sin daily so God must continue to shape us and mold us daily.  He does this through the forgiveness of sins which he tells us to remember.  We call this the confession and absolution cycle.  Through this process God continually molds and shapes us.  He gets his hands dirty because he loves us.

Gracious Father, you have wondrously made me and you continue to mold me into the disciple that you want me to be.  Lead me to trust in your loving arm.  Lead me to be your holy child.  Lead me to be the light in this dark ad lonely world.  In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret      

8-9-2026

Good Morning!

      John 1:14; “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

      The young wife was crying, almost inconsolably.  Her husband, wanting to ease her pain and be the hero, began the process.  She had taken her wedding ring off while washing some glasses in the sink.  As she pulled the plug and the water went down the drain; she reached for her ring to put it back on.  Her hands were still wet and slippery so the ring slipped and fell into the sink and went down the drain.  She put the plug back in and screamed and cried.  Her husband came and they did want most newlyweds do; they called dad.

    Dad told them to get a bucket and take the trap beneath the sink loose and drain it into the bucket.  As the mixture of grease, food bits, hair, and soap poured into the bucket, the couple hoped that the ring was in it.  So, the husband reached into the gooey mess and felt around until he retrieved the ring.  He gave it to his wife and all was well.

     In the past, we looked at how God “got his hands dirty” by forming man out of the clay of the earth.  Today we read where God does even more.  When the Apostle John first wrote this verse in the original Greek, he was making a play on the words.  Where we write “Word” he wrote “logos.”  This conveys the thought of pure logic, pure thought, total reason.  So, we see God on the purest form possible.  At the creation, God spoke and all occurred.  Where we use the word “flesh” John used the word “sarx.”  Here we can think of the dirty and grimy part of human existence, the sweat, the smell, the grittiness of human existence.  You can think of the “gunk” in your sink trap. 

    Yet rather than just immerse his hand into this gunk, God sent his Son to completely immerse himself, his entire body and existence, into the cesspool like world of humanity.  God did not choose the easy way or the simple way and certainly not the clean way.  He did it this way because of his love for you.

   He hears your cry, he knows your pain and he brings about healing.  He doesn’t avoid the mess.  He doesn’t expect you to be “mostly clean.” He picks you up out of this muck and grime in order to give you live, in order to bring you to the purity in which we were created.  This is what the birth of Jesus really means to us; God, in his purity, enters into the depravity and sadness that makes up the human existence.  Into this pain and sorrow, Jesus brings healing and hope.  He brings God’s mercy and his love and comfort.  He enters into our existence and heals it and takes us into his existence.  He came as a child to grow and to live a human life in order to die for your sins.  He comes to us today, in his Word and sacrament, to bring you healing and strength; to bring you new life.

Gracious Lord, you give us new life.  You lift us up and take us from the dredge of sinful existence to holy life with you.  Help us to know your love and mercy.  Help us to trust in your promise.  Be with those who are in pain and sorrow at this time.  Lift them up by your grace.  In your precious name we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret   

8-8-2026

Good Morning!

        Matthew 2:18; “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

    This is a verse that refers to what the Church calls “The Slaughter of the Innocents.”  This is where Herod, in a fit of anger and rage, tried to kill the king that the Magi sought.  When King Herod realized that the Magi weren’t going to return to tell him where Jesus was, he thought he would solve the question by killing all the male children 2 years and younger.  This event is commemorated on the first Sunday after Christmas as the day of the “Holy Innocents.”

    Much lore has been built around this event.  Scholars have no real clue as to the number of children who were killed, most guess 20 or less not the hundreds or even thousands that some legends portend.  Many also read this story and assume that Jesus was about 2 years old when the Magi came to visit.  This is possible but not for sure; the fact that he had the male children who were 2 and under, may have simply showed how cruel King Herod truly was.  We don’t know a lot about this event but it serves a purpose.

    First this story points to the very clear fact that Jesus laid aside his power and glory to live the humblest of lives.  He was endangered from hatred of others from his birth on.  We also see God’s protective and loving arm keeping Jesus and his parents safe from harm.  We also see an event that shows just how painful and evil some events in this sinful and broken world can be.  What can be crueler than to yank a baby from a mother’s arms and run them through with a sword?  Is this right or fair? No, but our life in a sinful world is rarely fair but often painful.

    It becomes very clear here that we cannot ever understand everything in life.  In fact, we actually understand very little.  Yet God does not call us to know everything; God calls us to have faith, to live in faith.  We can never fully understand all that occurs or how it interacts; only God can fully comprehend life.  We can only trust that God, who is by nature loving, to provide for us.  God works to good for all those who love him and whom he has called for his purpose.  This ultimate good is our salvation.  Even if the world takes all of our earthly goods, even if we surrender our life, God has promised to save his children and then to keep us comforted with this knowledge that nothing will ever separate us from God’s love.  We are always safe in God’s protective arms.

Father of all mercy, there are so many things that we do not understand.  Help us to keep them from hurting our faith. Keep us steadfast in our desire to trust you.  Guide us by your light and strengthen us by your Spirit that we may remain faithful to you.  Help us to always trust your promises.  Be with those who are like Rachel and weeping without hope.  Bring them the certainty of their salvation which is Jesus.  In his precious name we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret           

8-7-2026

Good Morning!

        Luke 12:7; “Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

        “Was it worth it?”  This question is often asked and not always in the best circumstances.  It often is asked by parents of children who get into trouble for something they did.  It is asked by teachers and coaches for the same reason.  Sometimes friends ask it as a way of conveying that there was a cost, perhaps a high cost, for some perceived benefit.  It may have been the breaking of a date with one person in order to go with another.  It might have been trying to take something we weren’t entitled to have.  Whatever the event, eventually the facts would come out and someone will inevitably ask that question; “Was it worth it?”

     Was it worth it?  There may have been times in your life when you asked that question of yourself.  Maybe you placed a great value on that promotion at work, that piece of land to own, that “extra” loving relationship.  Was it worth it?  Was the pain and suffering worth it?  In the long run, it never is.  Not only does it cause pain to those around us, but it can also destroy our self-image and our self-worth.  Sometimes events in the past can cause us to decide that it wasn’t worth it and now we aren’t worth it either.  We are at that point where we have no value to anyone, anywhere.  At least this is what the devil, the world and our own sinful nature wants you to feel like.  They want you to think that you are worthless so that any decision that you make from now on will be based on your own poor self-worth.

    Yet you are worth it.  God values you deeply.  He values you enough to send his Son to die for you in order to redeem you from the price of sin and to remove the guilt that the devil and the world can hold over you.  Jesus died for you; was it worth it?  It is according to God and his love.  You are worth it.  God values you enough to leave behind his glory and power to be born into a world of pain and poverty, to live and die as the payment for your sins, for your failures.  He rose from the dead and left the tomb empty as a sign that we will do the same someday.  All because God says you are worth it. 

    The devil and our sinful nature will try to keep you down; to try and drag up past failures to make you question your value, your value before God and your own personal value.  Yet never doubt how much God values you.  Never doubt how much God loves you.  Are you worth it?  The spread of arms of the loving Savior says so.

Gracious God, to you alone belong all glory and honor.  We give you thanks for the blessings of today.  We give you thanks for the value that you place on us.  Help us to know this value and to hold that value for ourselves and for each other.  Help us to lift up our brothers and sisters through your grace and mercy.  Use us to show the world just how much you truly value your children.  Move us to bring others to the knowledge of the value you place on them.  In the precious name of Jesus, our risen Savior we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret    

8-6-2026

Good Morning!

     Romans 9:16; “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.”

   We like things that we can count on, that are dependable.  You may be someone who relies on your cell phone.  It has all your important upcoming dates on it, it may have notes for grocery shopping, you may use it to record portions of a meeting or a class, you may use it for all your reference information using the search part of it for all the information you may need.  We rely on it almost entirely but we understand that there are limits.  There are places where we do not get a good signal so our phone doesn’t work or perhaps the battery is dead so it can’t be turned on.  We rely on our phone; we even depend on it but there are times when we know it won’t work.

    Most of us realize that we can depend on someone only up to a point and after that we cannot depend on them.  We can depend on the mail, or FedEx, or UPS, unless the weather is horrible somewhere in the shipping channel.  I won’t be late for an appointment; unless I have a flat tire or am delayed by a train.  Most of us realize that reliability is still only a percentage of the time.  It might be as high as 90-95% of the time but there still is a point where we can no longer depend on the other person.

   So, we often feel that, at some point, we need to rely on our own skill and wit.  This can be a source of fear and worry; what if we can’t provide the rest of the material or strength of idea that is needed?  This is what can keep us from sleeping at night this is what can cause us to worry about tomorrow; who can we depend on at times like this?

    It is at times like this that we need to remember that our salvation, our hope, and our comfort depend on God, wholly and completely.  We can rely on his wondrous grace and mercy at all times and in all conditions.  There is nothing that can ever stand in the way of God’s love for you.  There is nothing that can prevent God from giving his grace to you.  There are no weather problems, there are no reception troubles, there are no flat tires or road obstructions; nothing can prevent God’s mercy to you.

    This is because God’s mercy, poured out on you, depends on God and not on you.  God’s love for you is the result of his loving nature and his desire to love you.  It does not depend upon your actions or words.  It does not depend upon how much you give to the church or how often you attend.  It depends upon God and the love that he has promised you.  We do not deserve God’s love but we always receive it.  Trust in that love to sustain you and to give you peace.

Father, your grace for us carries us through all we need.  Your grace supplies our comfort in times of trial and in times of sorrow.  Your grace gives us hope.  Keep us safe in your loving arms.  In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret