Matins Devotions: June 9-13, 2025
- Pastor Hans Fiene
- Jun 17
- 6 min read
MONDAY
“Pastor, I know I haven’t been in church for a while, but don’t worry, my faith is very strong.” That’s a line pastors often hear, typically when they call up members who haven’t been in the divine service in years. And while there are many ways to respond to this self-delusion, perhaps the most helpful can be found in our reading from Luke today.
“I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” So says Jesus on the night of His betrayal. And, of course, it’s important to remember that the Passover is not just a meal. It’s a worship service, a celebration of God’s promises of forgiveness, life, and salvation. Jesus earnestly desires to eat this Passover. He earnestly desires to worship. His heart compels him to gather with His fellow believers and find nourishment in the promises of God.
And Jesus is the Son of God. He is the sinless, spotless Son of God, the perfect God/Man. And yet, He still needs the nourishment of God’s word. So if His faith still needed to feast upon the word alongside His fellow believers, why doesn’t yours? Well, if your faith doesn’t hunger to receive the gifts of God with your brothers, it’s not because your faith is stronger than Christ’s. It’s because your faith is different, because it’s not the faith created by the Holy Spirit. It’s not faith in our Lord, but faith in yourself, in your own strength, your own goodness, your own glory that doesn’t need to draw near the Lord of salvation.
That faith can’t save you. Only faith in Christ can. So go where that faith compels you to go. Go to the Sacrament that Christ instituted on the same night He earnestly desired to eat the Passover with His disciples. Feast on His body and blood. Hear the word of the Gospel and feast upon the forgiveness, life, and salvation He won for you in His bloody death and glorious resurrection. Come gather with the saints. And the more you do, the more you will earnestly desire to continue feasting on the kingdom with them.
TUESDAY
“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.”
When Jesus speaks these words, He doesn’t tell us how Satan has issued this demand. How did Satan appear before Jesus and demand to have Peter? When did this happen? In what way did this happen? Audibly, visually? We don’t really know, and can’t really know. But all of this uncertainty should remind us that there is so much about Christ’s interaction with Satan and His rule over Satan that we don’t understand. Demonic forces are everywhere, howling demons are constantly hungering to devour us. The father of lies is constantly seeking to rip us out of the hands of Jesus, to sift us like wheat, to use whatever sins we commit to enslave and devour us. This much is certain.
But something greater is also certain–the love of our Savior, the love of the Lamb who commanded His angels to cast Satan out of His Father’s courtroom when He shed His blood for us at Calvary. At the cross, Jesus destroyed every sin that Satan could use to chain you, to enslave you and eviscerate you. As He was pierced for you upon the tree, Jesus stripped Satan of everything that dragon could use to pierce you. So let go of your sins. Don’t pick up the chains of iniquities and let the devil bind you again. Don’t cling to your sins and make yourself a grain of wheat easily plucked and sifted. Cling to your Savior and the devil who demands you will never get what he desires.
WEDNESDAY
When I was growing up, my grandmother lived in Cortez, Colorado, just a few miles from Mesa Verde national park, the famous landmark with the cliff dwellings built into a steep mountainside by an unknown group of American Indians called the Anasazi. So I’ve been to Mesa Verde a few times. It left a massive impression on me, perhaps due to my crippling fear of heights. And so, throughout the years, I’ve often thought that it would have been wild if you took one of the Anasazi who grew up at Mesa Verde and introduced him to a Lakota from the Great Planes. To make chit chat, the Anasazi says, “so, you guys ever run into that problem where you live on the side of a mountain so you don’t ever have any food and then your friend sleepwalks for twenty feet and falls a thousand feet to his death,” and the Lakota says, “no, we live in a place that has food and you can’t fall to your death anywhere around here.” It would have been wild for the Anasazi to learn that the prison-like existence he grew up with was not actually normal, and that the life of blissful freedom he couldn’t even imagine was just a normal existence for someone else.
There’s a sense in which this is what the Gospel must have sounded like when men like Barnabas brought it to those gentiles lost in condemnation. Isaiah tells us that Jesus came to open the eyes of the blind, to set the prisoners free. Prior to the Gospel, what was your life? Stuck in a prison on the side of a cliff, starving, a slave of rock that can’t grow any food, calling upon gods who don’t answer, constantly teetering on the edge of the abyss, utterly blinded from knowing where the rock ends and the deadly deep begins. Secluded, alone, unable to get close to the Creator, unable to know His embrace, uncertain of whether He even knows you or cares for you. That was regular, everyday life.
But then the apostle arrives and says to you, “starvation and plummeting to your death? Blindness and prison? No, we don’t have any of that. We have an abundance of food. We have the feast of salvation. We have the forgiveness of sins, the undying favor of God. Through the blood of Christ, our eyes have been opened to see that death is not looming ten feet away but has been cast away from us as far as the planes are from the mountains. Through the resurrection of our Lord, the prison that once surrounded us has been turned to rubble and we have been given an eternal home in the abundant wheat fields of salvation, a home in the arms of the Lord who created us. That’s regular, everyday life for those in Christ.”
So let us leave behind the life where suffering, confusion, blindness, and imprisonment are everyday things. Come rest in the arms of the Savior who has placed the vibrating glory, the undying majesty of His kingdom into your hands and called it normal.
FRIDAY
Moses was unworthy to lead the people of Israel into the Promised Land because he sinned, because he failed to uphold the Lord as holy, as Numbers ays. But how is this fair, since Joshua, the one who would lead them into the Promised Land, was also not sinless? Joshua was a sinner like all men. Why, then, was he allowed to be the deliverer? Well, one could argue that this is because Joshua doesn’t have a sin quite like that of Moses, a very prominent lack of trust that was manifest before the people. But, in the end, the answer is really this: Joshua was called to lead the Israelites into the Promised Land, not because of who he was, but because of whom he represented.
Moses, as the one who received the ten commandments, was a figure of the law, a figure of what God required of men, requirements that no man could keep. The law, God was showing through Moses, could not save you. Even sins of momentary frustration, like striking a rock twice when God commanded you to strike it once, made you unworthy to inherit eternal life.
But Joshua was a figure of the Gospel. He represented what God would give to man–the utter destruction of man’s enemies, and the salvation man couldn’t achieve with his own hand. This is why he shares a name, Yeshua, with Jesus, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. They both bear a name that means “savior,” Joshua because he represented the salvation of God and Jesus because He is the salvation of God.
Once you were enslaved to the devil, enslaved to your sin, under the power of death, lost in the wilderness, homeless and hopeless. But then Jesus Christ, the Savior, came into this world. He lived a perfect life. He perfectly kept the commandments that neither Moses nor Joshua nor any man kept. In the wilderness outside Jerusalem, He shed His blood, forgave your sins, and clothed you in His perfection. Through His resurrection, He declared you worthy to enter the kingdom of paradise. And through the waters of baptism, He brought you across the Jordan into your eternal home. Moses, the law, could show you the Promised Land and how to enter it. Only Jesus could clothe you in His righteousness and lead you in. And He has.
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