Allegiance

Transcript

I'd like to ask everybody to turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 12 uh this is a passage that will likely be uh familiar to us it's uh it's one that we hear quoted by many of the Evangelical churches um

and and I and I think that we're going to be and the reason I wanted to go here is because we're going to be talking a little bit tonight about what it means when we say that Jesus is Lord

so we we find in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 uh these words Paul writes to the Ecclesia there he says now about spiritual gifts Brothers I don't want you to be ignorant you know that when we were pagans somehow or other you were influenced and let astray to mute Idols then he says therefore I tell you that no one who is speaking by the spirit of God says Jesus be cursed and no one can say Jesus is Lord

except by the holy spirit so what does it mean when one is to say Jesus is Lord we find again we we find this expression uh appear again in Romans this time in Romans chapter 10 we're going to look at three passages uh one in Corinthians one in Romans and we'll go to Philippians 2 so in Romans chapter 10 we we find these words beginning in verse

9 says uh in verse 8 but what does it say the word is near you it's in your mouth in your heart that is the word of faith we are proclaiming that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved so this is a uh you know this is a very well-known passage that if we can confess in our heart that Jesus is Lord we'll be saved for it is with your heart it says in verse 10 that you believe and are Justified and it's with your mouth that you confess and are saved as the scripture says anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame for there is no difference between Jew and Gentile the same Lord is Lord of them all and richly blesses all who call on him for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved so again this thought that I want to try and explore tonight and and to um what we'll do is we'll look at some examples of people who really

live the idea that Jesus is Lord okay so the first first one was in Corinthians this one was in Romans and the third one uh that we'll turn to is in Philippians chapter

2 and in uh and this is this uh this is the attitude that Paul writes about this is the attitude that we should all have your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus who being in the form of God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing taking the nature of a servant being made in human likeness being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself and became obedient to death even death on a cross therefore here's the point we're trying to emphasize God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that's above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on Earth and under the Earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the father so those are the three passages that I wanted us to consider and I'm just going to pause here and ask a question to everybody and and I'd like some feedback here and I guess my question to you is what do you think it means when we say say Jesus is Lord what does Lord actually mean and I'll open it up so uh let's let's have some thoughts

here I mean St one thing that comes to mind Steve is um when Sarah called Abraham Lord and kind of being in a position of someone that uh is in control is a help meet but is off his Direction and guidance in a in a family unit in in the way that she would refer to Abraham as Lord okay yeah that's good so um you know she she looked up to Abraham that he was in a would you say in a a position of authority over her somewhat but as a provider and you know provider and as a help meet in in a way as well where he provided for the family and they worked together in that role good yeah ultimately that he was kind of the head of their family unit okay all right thanks so so that's an example from the Old Testament where Sarah looks to Abraham and refers to him as Lord thanks for that Jason who else Steve yeah hi David out here in Colorado yeah hey uh just just an observation or comment that especially relevant to the First Corinthians 12 passage okay all those teachings there in some way have to be uh contextualized to the Holy Spirit gifts okay yeah fair I'm not sure exactly where to go with with this one but all the statements about the uh the roles in the Ecclesia this gender roles uh the uh issues about uh hats all that stuff that all those instructions uh that Paul gives especially about the would say the the ecclesial Duty roles is in a in the context of the hly in the context of the H holy spirit so okay I just say yeah all right plug that into the equation so we throw that into the equation as it relates to the passage in Corinthians but in general when we're talking about Lord is there anything that like does that does that uh expression or that title mean anything to you

David like how would you describe what it means when we say Jesus is Lord we don't use you know and maybe it's you know self-evident but you know the the word Lord is not a a word that we use in in our English today you know back in the King James

version two levels we say I think of Jesus Lord is the uh World Dominion King

everything does that and and the uh the ideal of my life in the sense that this is I want to be like my more the sense of a teacher Master Lord yeah okay all right so to him as a as a rabbi as a teacher as a as a leader instructor um on one hand you also look to him as sort of the the king of King Lord of lords that and okay thanks for that Richard uh yes um there's a page I forget what it is where Jesus said why call me Lord Lord and don't do what I asked you to do um

yeah yeah and I and I think that's a big part of where I'm hoping to go tonight Richard so I'm glad you brought that up and and where I'm trying to go

is is to have us think about this theme of

Allegiance when when we call Jesus our lord we are pledging our allegiance to

Jesus one of the one of the words that is sometimes translated in our Bibles uh one of the Greek you know the Greek word for Lord that is uh the Greek word that's translated Lord in our Bible is often times translated in our English versions not as Lord but as as

Master sometimes as owner so for example you know the the crumbs that fall from the master's table we might be one uh Jesus speaks in parable about the owner of a Vineyard the Lord uh I remember Doug Eagles uh once talking about when Jesus went and and asked his disciples to take the the the cult that he would uh use as he went into Jerusalem and if anybody asks you tell him that the master or the owner desires to have this and the idea here is that Jesus is has ownership rights that our Allegiance should be to Jesus as a slave might give his allegiance to his master but of course we have a loving Master Romans I think speaks really really uh eloquently about the difference between Earthly Masters and Heavenly Masters we have a loving master and our baptism brings us you know frees Us From Slavery to sin and now we are slaves to righteousness right so the the big picture that I'm trying to get across here is one of

Allegiance our Allegiance is to Jesus and when we are baptized and when we claim Jesus Is Our Lord we are saying that everything we have is to be committed to Jesus that he is you know he is our head so that's where I'm going and again I'll open it up for comments or or or questions or discussion so Jump Right In if you'd

like Steve when you say um Allegiance the first thing that comes to my mind is I just remember in grade school you know the pledge of allegiance to this country and my dad was always you know he was would always tell me that I he would rather I not say the Pledge of Allegiance but rather stand respectfully with my hands at my side because our Allegiance was not to this country but it was rather to God and to Christ and so that's where the the word alleg

uh kind of brings my mind yeah so that was allegiance to the flag right I how many of you remember sister Pat

Sabian a number of us remember Barbara raises her hand you know pat pat came to the United States as a a young adult um she came from the UK and as a child uh she lived in uh I I believe it was London or one of the suburbs that was under constant bombing by the

Germans uh she told stories about about that about living under the bombs hearing the bombs explode

Etc and uh later on she she uh began to correspond with a brother uh Sabian out out our way and they eventually married and she moved to the states Pat died

probably I'm going to guess she was in her late 80s early

90s but she was never a citizen of the United States even though she lived here almost all her adult life and the reason she lived uh in the United States not as a citizen but as a resident alien be was for her

conscience um when one becomes a citizen of the United States at least back then they had to swear allegiance to the United States and Pat was not prepared to do that and consequently she lived freely as a resident alien and you know obeyed the laws of the land but never became a citizen so that's that's a a thought that I think goes along with Allegiance her Allegiance was to Christ first and so too is ours we live freely in the in the United States but we truly live as strangers and pilgrims here

right now I'm going to um what I'd like to do next any any other comments before we move

on I want to tell you a little bit about how this uh this theme came up in my mind you know why it was that I wanted to present this and the reason is because as some of you know Sandy and I just came back from having

visited Switzerland and Germany and when we were in Germany we had an opportunity to go to the Christadelphian Ecclesia in eslington

um how many of you remember do do are any of you familiar with this uh Ecclesia in eslington

yeah Steve yeah go ahead um if you if anybody's ever met brother horse Trad and sister Jean Trad they um they used to be members there many many decades ago really I had no idea okay that's pretty cool yeah I had no idea well let me tell you a little bit there too say again Chris s's daughter Faith goes there as well yeah yeah so unfortunately wa when Sandy and I went uh Faith was away on on as they say over there on holiday uh but what a terrific experience it was for us and this eclesia has a long history and I wanted to talk a little bit about this Ecclesia and as we go through this I think you'll start to see how it was that this Ecclesia got me thinking about the concept of Allegiance so what you see here is uh the sign board that they have right on the street in in the town of eslington uh or it's just outside of stutgart

um it was a a fantastic experience for us it was something i' had never experienced before in the sense that the entire service was conducted in the German language of course and one thing that was really really welcoming when we arrived was that the exhorter had typed out his

exhortation and he put it into a

program um open L I think he said it was and he translated entire exert from German into English and then he printed out the exert in English and as uh there were I think six uh English-speaking brothers and sisters that were visiting that day Sandy and me Jeff and Kelly gelano and a couple from Australia and he he knew that we were coming and so when we arrived he handed us a copy of his exhortation which I have right here um on I think they call it A4 paper it's a little bit different in size than than the paper we use uh and it was on uh oil of the Olive Tree and it was really a great talk and of course I couldn't understand anything but I could follow along and as you see here uh on this picture on the left you see the words of our hymns which are the tunes that we know but the lyrics are in German and so that was kind of fun for us to try and sing in German uh not so well but we were able to carry a tune I guess because we were familiar with it uh the picture on the top right is a picture inside the building the building was built in

1974 and that uh art uh sculpture that you see there is made out of wood and it represents Daniel and his friends in the fire in the fiery furnace um and in the bottom you see the Cornerstone on the building showing that it was built in 197 4 but also showing the Star of David and sort of the the Jewish roots that this uh that this Ecclesia has so

um this Ecclesia actually started in

1922 thereabouts and it was started by a brother by the name of Albert

mayor he was a uh he was a young man in his 20s who learned the gospel El out in uh Oregon he was uh he worked for a guy who was a Christadelphian and he learned the gospel through this man and this this man Albert Mayer was from German descent his mother died and he went back to Germany and when he went back to Germany he formed an Ecclesia there and he he called the Ecclesia I and I I mean I I can't speak German but it's it's ER Christan which stands for early Christian it was the early Christian Church it was it was a church that was different from all of the churches that had developed layers of tradition and layers of uh extra biblical teachings he was trying to go back to the early Christian Church sort of foundational Christianity and that's what adelphian are all about and so this now is the largest eclesia in Western Europe we were there I think there were 60 to 80 people who were in attendance but since

1922 there this has been a continuously active Ecclesia with Services every week even throughout World War

II and and this I think again you're going to get hints now as to why I'm think thinking about this subject of Christ is our lord Jesus Is Our Lord we owe our allegiance to him because in

1934 there became a requirement for all Germans as Hitler came to power to uh to offer an oath not just to the country but to the man so on August 2nd 193 for you know Hitler is is the chancellor at this point in history and he requires now that all military members of the of the army swear an oath and I've got it written out here I swear by God this holy oath that I will render to Adolf Hitler furer of the German Reich and people supreme commander of the Armed Forces

unconditional obedience and that I am ready as a brave Soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath

okay so we're talking about Allegiance now brothers and sisters and I want you to put yourselves in the shoes of a young German man I want you to think about what it would be like to be living in Germany under Nazi rule as Hitler comes to power and as he's promising these people who have been going through great economic difficulties that things will get better that the you know and he starts uh he starts trying to create this Coalition around him and soon Nazi Germany becomes the you know the problem that we know it to be and as he began drafting individuals into his army he was requiring this oath so when we talk about you know Jason when we talk about pledging allegiance to the flag or we think of our sister Pat Sabian saying you know she's not going to pledge allegiance to the

country can imagine Now sort of how how that's been escalated it's no longer about an object or you know a country at large it's about elevating a specific individual above all it has real real consequences now and there's real meaning behind what you're saying yeah uhuh isn't that amazing

so what you see here is a picture I think it's in the late 20s maybe early 30s no I guess it's in the early 30s of this ER Christian Christadelphian Ecclesia in esington uh Germany outside of stutgart

um these are some of the brothers from that Ecclesia and after the war one of the brothers a brother by the name of Carl walner this is in a book by the way uh that was written by a brother Graham Jackman uh about the Mertz brothers so I will uh if anybody wants information about this I've ordered this book on Amazon you can find it on Amazon and I'll send you information about it but um this brother walner had this quote which I thought was fascinating you know so you think about what it what must be like you know as as Nazi Germany is is sort of

you know becoming you know the constant threat that it was

um and these brothers and sisters would go to

meeting and the you can see the quote here the constant

exhortation was who are we going to be

christs or Hitlers there can only be one answer we're the richest people in the world right I mean so you see this quote here and and this is the this was the life that these brothers and sisters lived under and this was the exhortation that they heard week in and week out who is going to be your lord to whom will you show your Allegiance is it to Christ or is it to Hitler think again you know let's put ourselves in the shoes of these brothers and sisters it's

1933 and the

Gestapo comes to a Brother's home brother Johannes the book says and the Gestapo warns this brother and says

look you have to stop

meeting you should not be meeting together as a as a as a group this

1933 year later the Gestapo shows up and they confiscate a bunch of the

literature written in German about our

faith and now the Ecclesia knows that this is really a

problem and what they start

doing is um they obey God rather than man you know Jesus says do this in remembrance of

me and so the Ecclesia did not disband but instead they met

quietly they met at

night they met in

homes they sometimes met in

restaurants they always met with a limited number of people so that they would be under you know under the rule you know they could obey the law of the land which says groups no larger than such and such so they always they always always met but at the height of the war they talked about how brothers and sisters would get together in restaurants in the public and they would share a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and to any other German that was observing them they were Simply Having a meal but to these brothers and sisters they were remembering Christ in the way that he had asked

so they try and go under the radar they try and uh go

undetected at one point um one of the brothers was told that the Gestapo was about to raid their homes and so the brothers one this this one brother uh told about taking all the literature and hiding it in his garden so that when the raid came they wouldn't find it

there were three brothers from one family that were members of this Ecclesia the Mertz Brothers M

RZ there was uh Albert August and Rudolph they were uh Three

Brothers From a very large Catholic Family from what I understand they were were nine brothers in total in the family and three or four sisters so it was a very large Catholic

Family and um The Story Goes that these that one of these brothers discovered a Bible that was actually floating in a in a river or a stream they fished it out they dried it off and these Catholic boys began reading it which was something that they had not had access to

and then Albert MZ was working for a man who was a member of this ER Christian this early Christian Christadelphian

Ecclesia and in the height of the war November 17th

1935 three of these brothers were baptized on the same date into the name of Jesus Christ their parents didn't want them to but they were

Allegiance was not to their parents but to Christ so I guess the question I ask is what verse does that remind you of but when these brothers were baptized against the wishes of their parents you know Jesus talks about the need to leave father and mother and brother and sister right it's about Allegiance our allegiances to Jesus Jesus is our Lord and these three men and there are many members of our Ecclesia who have been baptized uh against the wishes of their family sometimes right and so this is an example of that with these three men but you know being baptized in a free country like Canada or the United States is probably very different than being baptized in Nazi Germany in

1935 yeah David I just share a a talking about family I'll share a personal exper experience yeah please my brother uh when we were in our early 20s married a Catholic and he asked me to be an attendant in the wedding and so we did the rehearsal at the church and the priest says well you'll all come up here and then you'll kneel at the front of the church so I had to tell my brother I said I I can't do that I can't kneel down in in a Catholic church and he says you know and we had a discussion about it then he said to me well maybe it could be the M Master of Ceremonies and I said yeah he says you'll just have to introduce father so and so I said well I can't call him

father so in the end I compromised and uh referred him as Reverend there you go yeah but you know so it's it can be a challenging you know challenging thing for folks who who you know discover the gospel uh outside of their family history right and yeah I was the only one so yeah okay all right so here's the Merz brothers and uh three of them Rudolph August and Albert are baptized on November 17 1935 uh I don't know if that was uh in a stream in a river uh but it must have been pretty cold anyway um Nazi Germany was rolling along and the pers ution at this point

begins uh Rudolph is the first one that's that's called

up and he refuses to take the oath like we looked at that oath before right you know that that Adolf Hitler is you know that our Allegiance is to to him above all and uh Rudolph says no I'm not going to do it and this young man his boy is sentenced to 18 months in prison

and while he's in prison um it it appears from the records that he disc that that he experienced some sort of mental

breakdown um and he was uh sent to a an insane asylum and he was there for a number of years before he was released and then later on he was called up as the war was progressing he was called up again and he was uh again sentenced to prison and uh was put in an insane asylum a second time

um so again you know we're trying to relate to these guys and this was uh I believe he was the youngest of the

brothers and then uh shortly after that the second brother who's seen his younger you know his younger sibling Go off into a prison he gets called up and the same thing he refuses to take the oath and what you see here on the side is um is some correspondence and in this book you can actually see the letters they brother Graham Jackman has copies of all of this uh information you know in the original so it's all written in German this is a translation and this is about August so it was uh dated March 25th 1939 he says the accused who has no criminal record did not obey the command to report to the regiment in we in ver

and instead sent the order back that took some guts don't you think Return to Sender right um he had to be fetched from his home on February 6th in the barracks he repeatedly disobeyed the orders of his commanding officer captain petzold and put on uh to put on an army uniform and to take the oath of loyalty to the fur to the father Chris right he St hat as his reasons that he's a

urist and his religious convictions forbids him to kill human beings even in case of war and that he cannot act contrary to this Divine command however severely he's punished his brother Rudolph refused to obey on the same grounds so these are the first two of the Mertz brothers that are called up into Hitler's army they both refuse one is sent to prison August is sent to the uh you know to to a work camp now let me tell you brothers and sisters when Sandy and I were in Germany two weeks

ago we went to the DA the the DACA concentration camp this was the first of the work

camps and to to be

there it was uh it was grim you know there were there were thousands of people that were executed in some of these places but it didn't start out as an execution Camp it started out as a place where they would take you know though the opponents the political opponents of of the Nazis and they would sentence them to work as unpaid labor hard hard work and um the guides that that we were at daau told us that these men would come in and they would be just physically abused mentally abused from the moment they got there well the the sausen Work Camp is where brother August was sent and he was there for a number of years and uh as the Western forces began to uh come in closer and closer to the camp uh they say there were 33,000 people at this Work Camp

and they began a death march the German guards gathered everybody at the camp and made them March hundreds of miles north northwest away from the from the Western allies so that uh they they wouldn't be discovered and if people began to uh fall back they would be shot and killed on the side and uh The Story Goes that as uh as the Western forces got closer the German guards began to panic and run away and when that happened uh brother August and a number of others he tell later told the story they were able to escape uh they ran from the Death March and they escaped um that brother August died I think uh in

1960 um remained a faithful brother all his life but this was his

experience and then the third brother was brother Albert um brother Albert's story might be a little more widely known among the Christadelphian Community but Albert was um he was sentenced to death uh on April 4th he was executed at uh at the Brandon uh Berg

prison um we'll talk a little bit more about brother Albert but I wanted to sort of pause here and I wanted to remind us all about the history we have as a

community um we refer to ourselves as the christadelphians and and our story you know our name began as a result of conflict in the United States this time where brothers in Christ you know looked at each other and said how can we go to war against one another our you know our allegiances to Christ first not to the North or to the South and so we obviously know the experience of the early christadelphians and how the name came about and and how as a result of that we were allowed to file for uh religious conscientious objection in the United States we're able to do that brother Roberts uh once wrote these words where he said you know it's impossible for a Christadelphian to be a patriot or a soldier and the United States census used to take take a census of religious bodies the last you know now they take individual censuses um but in the 1930s they used to take a a census of religious organizations and these words are amazing you know the christadelphians have consistently maintained that their faith prohibited participation in the army or navy of any country whether in time of peace or times of War until the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to the Earth okay this is what the United States government said about our community and it's because of people like Albert Merz and Rudolph MZ and August MTZ in Germany and because of the many brothers and sisters that we know who served as religious conscientious objectors in Vietnam or in World War II or in Korea you know these people who stood up and showed their allegiance was to Jesus are the ones that sort of have given us this privileged view in the eyes of the United States government that christadelphians have have been consistent in their faith World War I guess it was the Vietnam War the the individual who was in charge of selective service was this Vietnam no this was uh um after World War II right

um this is Lewis General Lewis B Hershey that'd be Korea Steve this is Korea okay um but this is what he said I mean he is the one that started and was responsible for the the draft and he said members of the Christadelphian Church followed more closely than any other denomination ation the doctrine as it related to conscientious objection and their refusal to enter the Armed

Forces that's pretty High Praise coming from this man and brother Richard I'll tell you that uh when he retired um there was a a press conference and um he retired I think after the Vietnam

War and one member of the press asked him you know what are you going to do about the problem of these conscientious objectors and Lewis Hershey said you know that I I could never get beyond the five words from Acts chapter 5 must obey God rather than man

um so you know there are

courageous there's a history of courageous men and women who have stood up in the face of real difficulty to Proclaim Jesus as Lord and to show their allegiance to him so this brings us back now to Albert MZ he was uh he was tried he was sent to prison and he was tried for his reusable his refusal to offer this oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler the fur he refused to become a Rifleman in Hitler's Nazi army

this is a picture of him at

trial his uh

attorney wrote him a letter after the trial this is the translation and it's powerful brothers

sisters it said yesterday's proceedings ended with the death penalty for you there was no alternative outcome as you remained indifferent to all

propositions it turned out exact ex actly as I told you this is the lawyer talking to him yet your case is not entirely lost though the harsh verdict has been pronounced against you it might still come to a lifting of the sentence if you so to say at the last hour were to owledge the incorrectness of your previous

View in other words look Albert you're GNA be killed but if you curse Christ

you can live if you will no longer give your allegiance to Jesus as your Lord but instead give your allegiance to Adolf Hitler you can live this was the

choice as the officially appointed Council for the defense I thought it my duty to admonish you to think this over once more should you come to a better judgment you have to ask for another hearing and make an appropriate declaration to this end but it's very urgent and you only have a few days at your

disposal that's pressure on a young

man that evening brother MZ wrote this letter to his to his

Ecclesia you know imagine the recording brother reading

this on a Sunday morning

my beloved all I find it hard to write to you today not for my own sake but rather as I know this letter will bring you much grief you know my faith and My Hope Christ is my life and to die is my profit when my time has ended and I have to part I want you to remember that man is destined to die and afterward to undergo judgment I want to close now trusting in God and His Kingdom and I send you all my

love and he wrote a letter to his

parents day before he was

executed on Friday the 4th of April at 5:30 in the morning my time will have expired and my struggle will thereby come to an end it's my last wish that you may live in peace together

and take care that none is

lost and The Story

Goes that this

Ecclesia remained active throughout all of the TR travails and turmoils in Germany that they met quietly they met undercover they broke bread in restaurants where two or three are gathered together there am I in your midst and today this is a an act of

Ecclesia to God's glory to the glory of Christ and to the benefit of brothers and sisters today so many years later brother Merz concluded and he said send my love to all the brothers and sisters who are well disposed to me our Lord's mercy be with you amen

so here's the rest of the story brothers and

sisters in the Brandenburg

prison they had um an execution

chamber where they had a

guillotine and uh this young man was brought into that room and within 30 seconds he was K K

executed because of his commitment his

allegiance to

Jesus I'd like to uh

conclude by uh reading a passage from

Revelation um see if I can find it

here um

Revelation CH 20 verse4 I saw Thrones on which were seated those who had been given Authority

to

judge and I saw the souls of those who had been

beheaded because of their testimony for

Jesus and because of the word of God they had not worshiped the beasts or the image that had not and had not received his mark on their forehead or their hands they came to

life and reigned with Christ

a thousand

years and so brothers and sisters we conclude our class thinking about this young man who had such great

courage his brothers who had such great courage and who really shows us who show us what it means to Proclaim Jesus as Lord one day and perhaps one day

soon the dust outside of Brandenburg

prison will likely

stir and this boy this young man will be raised to

life and he'll

meet his Lord

and he'll be I'm sure

rewarded for his

faith so let us brothers and

sisters live lives like

him let us um Proclaim Jesus as our Lord so thanks for your attention