King David explains, “The earth is the LORD’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1). That word “everything” doesn’t leave any wiggle room, does it? That word “everything” means that your home and all its furnishings, your vehicle and all that’s in the trunk, your bank account, the twenty-eight dollars in your wallet, the wallet itself, and the pocket in which you carry your wallet all belong to God. Everything you have was given to you by your good and gracious Father. We need to understand that.

But it is just as important that we understand why God provides for our physical needs. As we have seen throughout this worship series, God has called us to ministry. He asks us to reflect his love in meeting the physical and spiritual needs of others. Believers want to serve others in those ways. By providing for us, God meets our need to meet others’ needs. This week Jesus promises that he will provide the resources necessary to conduct meaningful ministry.

Support the Show.

Messages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.

To find out more about King of Kings...

• Please visit VisitKoK.com
• Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok)
• Email us @ info@visitkok.com

Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!

In the ancient Middle East, a shepherd needed certain skills to do his job well: knowledge of edible grasses, ability to trim hooves, capacity to fend off predators, competency to birth lambs. However, the greatest qualification of a shepherd is much simpler. A good shepherd needed to care for his sheep. Without that, none of those other skills would be fully utilized.

In Scripture meaningful ministry is often pictured as a compassionate shepherd caring for his sheep: Jesus’ care for us; a spiritual leader’s care for his “flock.” Certainly, gospel ministry requires specific skills: ability to actively listen to people, aptitude for applying the gospel to someone’s situation, etc. But ultimately, meaningful ministry requires a compassionate heart—a profound caring for others. An individual might know God’s Word backwards and forwards. But if they lack compassion, they will not fully perform meaningful ministry. Today, we ask the Spirit to see how Jesus models a compassionate shepherd’s heart so that we might be filled with that same compassion.

Support the Show.

Messages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.

To find out more about King of Kings...

• Please visit VisitKoK.com
• Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok)
• Email us @ info@visitkok.com

Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!

If ministry involves serving others with love and compassion, you would think that people would respond only with glee and gratitude for the help they received. Sometimes, but not always. If you offer to help a family member who is having trouble paying his bills, he might be offended, wondering if you are implying that he is not a good provider. Likewise, if you try and share the gospel with someone, he might resent the message that he is a sinner in need of salvation. You are trying to minister to this man’s greatest need. Your intentions are loving. Yet he responds with rejection and resentment.
When our ministry efforts are met not with glee and gratitude but rejection and resentment, we are in good company. The prophets, apostles, and even Jesus himself all had those who responded negatively to their ministries. When that happens to us, it doesn’t mean our ministry is no longer meaningful. For if others do not appreciate our efforts to serve them, God still appreciates our efforts to serve him.

Support the Show.

Messages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.

To find out more about King of Kings...

• Please visit VisitKoK.com
• Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok)
• Email us @ info@visitkok.com

Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!

Most people fear death to some degree. Some fear death because they assume it is the end. Others fear death because they assume it isn’t the end at all, but that there is some sort of reckoning after death which might not go well for them. And have you seen what happens to a dead body? It is far from pretty. So, it is understandable that most people would fear death.
Not so for those to whom God has given a top-down faith. Christianity teaches that for God’s children death is not discipline but deliverance. The living Lord gives Christians such a radically different view of death that they can have confidence to face death in their effort to give Christ glory. They understand that death does not cut us down, but only raises us up. Finally, the Christian has been given the top-down faith that believes Jesus can wake us from death as easily as we can wake a sleeping child from his nap.

Support the Show.

Messages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.

To find out more about King of Kings...

• Please visit VisitKoK.com
• Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok)
• Email us @ info@visitkok.com

Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!

As another chapter in the life of our King of Kings family comes to a close today, we find encouragement, comfort, and even joy in Christ, as he calls us to go and carry out the gospel work he has entrusted to his Church. This is our God-given task, our labor in the Lord.

Yet such mission and ministry work can be difficult, tedious, even frustrating. People reject the gospel or close their ears to what God says to them in his Word. Growth, whether spiritual or physical, comes slowly or at least not at the pace we expect. The devil, the world, and our own sinful natures can make labor in the Lord’s harvest fields toilsome or laborious as we strive to spread good gospel seed or reap what seem like a meager crop. We could easily grow weary of our mission and ministry labors and give up, especially in the lowest of times.

…But remember who has sent us out into his harvest fields! Remember who has given us the gospel that is the power of God for the salvation of all who believe! Remember who promises to never leave us nor forsake us so that our partnership in the gospel with brothers and sisters near and far will come to completion! Remember who rejoices when he sees Satan fall like lightning as the gospel goes out, but rejoices even more because our names are written in his book of life! Remember that our labors in the Lord are not in vain!

The Bible reading for this message is 1 Corinthians 15:56-58.

The video for this worship service can be found here.

This is the third and final message in Pastor's farewell series: Encouragement for the Family of God.

Support the Show.

Messages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.

To find out more about King of Kings...

• Please visit VisitKoK.com
• Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok)
• Email us @ info@visitkok.com

Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!

What does life in the family of God look like? What did Jesus intend for us while we live with one another as blood-bought brothers and sisters in Christ? On the night he was betrayed, Jesus commanded his disciples to “Love one another.” (John 13:34-35) What does that mean? Why love one another? What does that look like?

Loving one another in the family of God means understanding how and why God loves each of us. God does not love us because of anything we have done or deserved or decided. Rather God loves us with a self-sacrificing love called grace that was willing to give up the life of his one and only Son. God himself is love incarnate, in the flesh, and nothing could prevent his love from saving us from sin and death.

Yet that same Son of God calls us to love one another. We do so not out of fear or duty or guilt, but because he loved us with his boundless grace first. We love every soul that God puts in our path to serve. We love them as holy, priceless, precious, blood-bought souls and live in love—humble, gracious, forgiving—toward them, seeking to love them as Jesus loved us. Little children, let us love one another!

The Bible reading for this message is 1 John 4:7-11,16-21.

The video for this worship service can be found here.

This is the second in Pastor's farewell series: Encouragement for the Family of God.

Support the Show.

Messages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.

To find out more about King of Kings...

• Please visit VisitKoK.com
• Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok)
• Email us @ info@visitkok.com

Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!

Are you ready for what’s coming? The forces of darkness are arraying against us—the devil, the sinful world, even our own sinful natures within us, and their goal is to win the war for our souls. There is no compromise, no peace treaty, no negotiations with these enemies arrayed against us—only an expectation of unconditional surrender and enslavement to their control. These forces of darkness threaten to overwhelm us on every side.

What do we do? Through his Word, our Lord readies us for battle. He provides us with the full armor of God and the firm ground of his holy Word as our foundation. He strengthens our faith and opens our mouths to make a good and faithful confession of our allegiance to our Savior-God and him alone. How will we stand firm against the dark onslaught that only seems to worsen? Christ our Savior stands beside us on the field of battle. As Martin Luther once wrote, he holds the field forever. We depend on him and him alone. We have no need to fear with Christ by our side. Instead, we stand firm to the end until eternal victory is ours.

The Bible reading for this message is Ephesians 6:10-18.

This is the first in Pastor's farewell series: Encouragement for the Family of God.

Support the Show.

Messages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.

To find out more about King of Kings...

• Please visit VisitKoK.com
• Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok)
• Email us @ info@visitkok.com

Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!

No Christian teaching demonstrates that we have a top-down faith more than the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Scripture teaches that there is only one God. Yet that God exists as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Incomprehensible! It is the type of teaching about which the psalmist declares, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain” (Psalm 139:6). We believe in the Triune God without fully comprehending his existence, simply because the Spirit has given us the gift of faith. Our belief in the triune God came from the top down.

Not only is the concept of the Trinity itself something unique to the Christian faith, but what the triune God does for us and offers us is also completely unique. Our triune God invites us into the blessed relationship that is part of his very nature. The members of the Trinity share with us an intimacy that they have enjoyed with each other from eternity. Our triune God makes us not servants or subjects but blessed members of his family.

Our guest preacher was Pr. Em. Lee Kuhns.

The Bible reading for this message is Romans 8:12-17.

The video for this worship service can be found here.

Support the Show.

Messages from the King is produced by King of Kings Lutheran Church in Maitland, FL.

To find out more about King of Kings...

• Please visit VisitKoK.com
• Like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/visitkok)
• Email us @ info@visitkok.com

Remember your Savior Jesus loves you! May he bless you with his grace!