Thursday, November 6, 2025
Aki Tomita’s birthday
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
I know someone
Brothers and sisters:
None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself.
For if we live, we live for the Lord,
and if we die, we die for the Lord;
so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.
It was our Grace Church’s Pastor Matt Cassidy who helped us put our unpaid property tax panic into perspective. Preaching through Romans, we have reached Romans 5:1-11. In the midst of his exegesis Matt (as usual) got very excited about God’s power and God’s love.
“Am I going to heaven?” he asked us. “Yes! I’m gonna get in, and here’s why. When I get to those gates, and they’re locked …” He pounded the air in front of him with frustrated fists.
“Big signs. Access denied. Access denied! Access denied!!”
But then … there’s Jesus looking at Matt. “Oh, wait!” Jesus cries.
“Hold on, Peter!”
Matt pointed out at all of us, his left arm and index finger straight, just like Jesus was pointing at Matt.
“He’s with me.”
Long pause. Big smile.
“Because of Jesus Christ, I have access to good standing in the holiness of God.
“Yep. I know someone.”
Oh, yeah, knowing someone matters. In heaven and on earth. Before she could sleep on Sunday night, Margaret asked me if I remembered the guy who worked for her in Illinois during the 2010 census. Later he was elected auditor in Champaign County. I looked at the online list of officials, and there was a name I recognized.
“Was it George?” I asked.
“YES!” she pretty much shouted.
We knew someone! Someone who appreciated Margaret as a boss fifteen years ago and had asked her several times for favors (signs in our yard, etc). We found his phone number; she sent a text and as I wrote a couple days ago, he got back to her in less than fifteen minutes with news that we could rest on. They haven’t sold your house, only your taxes, he said. Relax, he said. And we did.
Margaret knew somebody!
Matt’s theology often seems beyond compare, and he outdid himself last Sunday. The justification Paul describes in Romans 5 “changes your very nature, and you can’t go back. A butterfly doesn’t/can’t go back to being a caterpillar. Martin Luther called Romans 5:1-11 a triumphant text.”
Matt continued, sorting out this gift called justification into seven smaller packages within the big one.
- Peace with God
- Access into God’s grace
- Rejoicing in the hope of God’s glory (each word requires definition)
- Rejoicing in suffering (Martin Luther again: “prayer, meditation and suffering are interconnected elements of faith”)
- The indwelling Holy Spirit poured out in us extravagantly, always in abundance
- Deliverance from future condemnation
- Present, immediate, constant reconciliation with God
Matt asked the rhetorical question one more time. “Am I going to heaven?”
And he answered it. “For sure. 100%. Yep. Seems like I’m bragging, but I’m bragging on God.
“I know someone, and you do too.”
He prayed, and his enthusiasm flashed like rays of heavenly sun. Like Paul, like Luther, Matt moved through theological argumentation to an expression of adoration and celebration of this amazing, absolute assurance that we are loved by God.
“Hallelujah, what a Savior!” Matt’s last words, and then the music started.
One thing I ask from the Lord,
   this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
   all the days of my life,
and gaze on the beauty of the Lord …
This is why Christ died and came to life,
that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
 (Romans 14, Psalm 27, Matthew 11, Luke 15)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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