Pastor Chris Brademeyer’s Podcast

Lost and Found

Before us stands a simple yet profound truth: God desires the salvation of every sinner. Our Lord Jesus says that He came to seek and to save the lost. And that includes you and me. Left to ourselves, we are indeed lost in sin, sorrow, suffering, and death. We are misled by the foolishness of this world and trapped in the limits of our own broken lives. No one enjoys being lost, and yet it is our natural condition apart from Christ.
Being lost is more than a passing feeling. While we could spend much time describing the loneliness and confusion that often accompany this condition, it is enough to say that “lostness” takes many forms. Some are outward, others inward. But at its root, it is a spiritual matter: the result of sin and blindness to God.
Find out more by listening to this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!

Blessed Are You Among Women

Mary arose and went with haste. That is how our Gospel reading begins. She had just received the announcement from the angel Gabriel: that she, though a virgin, would conceive and bear the Son of the Most High. She asked, “How can this be?” and the angel pointed her to a sign: her elderly relative Elizabeth had conceived in her old age. “For nothing will be impossible with God.”
And so Mary goes. Not out of doubt, but in faith. In haste, with joy. Faith is never content to sit still. It moves; it acts. It runs to the Word of God, clings to His promises, and seeks out the fellowship of the faithful. And what a meeting this is! Mary, newly pregnant with the Son of God, and Elizabeth, six months along with John the Baptist.
The moment Mary enters the house and greets Elizabeth, the child in Elizabeth’s womb leaps for joy. Already, John is doing what he was called to do: preparing the way of the Lord, pointing to Jesus even from the womb. The Holy Spirit fills Elizabeth, and she cries out with that beautiful confession we still confess today:  “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”
This is a Spirit-filled confession of faith. Elizabeth calls Mary “blessed” not because of anything Mary had done, but because of what God had done for her and through her. Mary is blessed because she bears the promised Savior. And she is blessed even more because she believed in the Lord’s promise. That is what Elizabeth says: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
To find out more, listen to this sermon for the Visitation from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!

One Gospel, One Church

St. Peter and  St. Paul are two names known to every Christian, or, at least, should be. After our Lord Jesus, these two men are among the most important figures in the history of the Christian Church. Such is their importance that these two men were given the title “pillars of the Church,” due to their strong faith and great work of preaching the Gospel to multitudes of people.
One, Peter, was a simple fisherman from Galilee, a working man of humble origins. The other, Paul, was a highly educated Pharisee from Tarsus. Peter followed Jesus from the shores of the Sea of Galilee to the Garden of Gethsemane. Paul met the risen Lord in a blinding flash of light on the road to Damascus. Peter was brash, often speaking before thinking. Paul was brilliant, eloquent, and often found in chains.
But Peter denied Christ on the night of His trial. And Paul persecuted Christ’s followers, even going so far as to hold the cloaks of those who stoned St. Stephen the first martyr while the mob murdered him.
And yet God used both as instruments to preach Christ crucified. Today, we don’t celebrate them as individual religious heroes. We honor them together because they, so different in personality and background, were united in one Gospel and labored together for one Church.
To hear the rest, listen to this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!

3P1S Episode 16: Loosening and Binding Sins? Taking A Closer Look At The Office Of The Keys

On today’s episode of 3 Padres and a Shepherd, we’re talking about the "Office of the Keys." What are these keys? What do they open? What do they close?  While this topic may seem abstract, it is much more practical than one might expect!  

The Dawn from on High

The birth of John the Baptist is not just a heartwarming story about an elderly couple finally receiving the child they always longed for. It is a loud and mighty thunderclap of God's mercy breaking four hundred years of prophetic silence. It is the opening act of salvation history’s final chapter. And it is a reminder that God's promises may seem delayed, but they are never denied.
Zechariah, once silenced for his unbelief, now finds his voice again. He does not regain his speech to talk about himself or even his son, but to sing of God’s mercy, His covenant, and His plan of salvation.
Find out more in this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!

Convinced

There’s an old saying: “Seeing is believing.” But in today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus flips that completely on its head. A man begs for a miracle from beyond the grave to convince his family to repent and Abraham says, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.” In other words, if the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, won’t convince them, nothing will.
Jesus gives us this story not to alarm us with visions of the afterlife but to convince us now, in this life, of the truth: that God has given us everything we need in His Word, that is His Law and Gospel, to prepare us for eternity. And to ignore that Word is to risk eternal ruin, even condemnation
So today we listen to this teaching from our Lord with open ears not just to learn about heaven and hell, but to be convinced. Convinced of what? To be convinced of God’s purposes in giving us wealth, convinced that salvation comes by faith alone, and convinced that God’s Word is more powerful than even great miracles.
Hear the rest in this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!

Three in One

Why is it necessary for our salvation to believe in the Holy Trinity as the One True God? It is sadly common today that doctrine, teaching from the Bible, is dismissed as unnecessary. It is not uncommon for those of us who care about what the Bible says about God to be dismissed as being legalistic, unloving, uncaring, and the like. Truth is set up as an opposition to love; indeed, it is seen as opposed to love in many situations.
Find out more in this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!

A Life Laid Down

Dear friends in Christ, today we lay to rest a dear woman, a sister in Christ, a grandmother, mother, and friend: Janice Wagner. And this is a day marked by a number of mixed emotions. There are remembrances about her life: her time as a teacher, her love of her family, and her deep Christian faith. And with all of this is a grief, a sense of loss, that, as St. Paul notes, is characterized for us Christians as one with hope.
Janice led a hard life and had more than her share of hardships. Toward the end she struggled with her declining health and the loss of her beloved daughter, Terra. And this great suffering might tempt us to dismiss our loss of her as a good thing, since it brought to a close her grief and pain. But a woman like Janice also leaves a hole in our lives because she is a great gift to us from God our Creator. And for this reason it is good and right for us to grieve her, to miss her, and to soothe our loss with memory and recollection.
But if this is all we have, then we do not have any real hope in all of this. Memory fades. Recollections only give us what was, they do not give us what is or will be. And, despite all the good intentions of well-meaning people, those who have departed before us do not live in us, our hearts, or any other such thing except in the form of memories. But these are not the person, no matter how much we might wish them to be.
This all seems very hopeless. Death is not something that we have the power or ability to roll back or do something about. And yet, St. Paul tells us that we Christians do not grieve as those without hope. And how can he say something so bold, so seemingly foolish in the face of a great enemy like death? Because of Christ Jesus, the Lord, the One who has overcome death and defeated sin and overthrown the rule of the Devil.
To find our more, listen to this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!

Peace

     Today marks the Feast of Pentecost, one of the principle and most important celebrations in our liturgical, that is church, calendar. This day commemorates that giving of the Holy Spirit to the Christian Church. And as you may have noticed in the last few weeks, we have spent some time working through readings in John’s Gospel that focus on Christ’s own promises and teachings about the Holy Spirit. To keep it brief, Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit will come and be present in and among His Christians, that is, in His Church.
    What is interesting about this reading and those we have read from chapters fifteen and sixteen in the last few weeks is that they record what Jesus taught on the night of His arrest, that is, on Maundy Thursday. In other words, this all takes place back in Holy Week. Jesus, knowing that He is going to be betrayed by Judas, wants to prepare His disciples both for His death and His ascension. He wants to assure them that even though He will be take from them, they are not abandoned or cut off form God. He wants them to rest assured that they will be kept in God’s good grace. Therefore, He promises them that the Holy Spirit will come.
     Find out more in this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!
 

Resist

We human beings are prone to overestimating our own abilities. Specifically, I mean in spiritual matters. That is to say, individual humans may be prone to self-doubt in skill, ability, competency, social abilities, and the like, but even relatively un-confident people tend to be rather assured of their own spiritual knowledge and insights. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing if the spiritual insights and knowledge that one possesses are true. But the unfortunate side effect of this is that we have something of a hard time being under authority of others in spiritual matters.
What I am trying to say is that we have an inborn assumption that our spiritual insights are good and trustworthy. But this is not what Jesus says. He tells us her we need a Helper, One who will come and give us the truth. In other words, we cannot simply trust our own ideas and perceptions about spiritual things; doing so ends in confusion at best and unbelief at worst. We need to have a Guide, an Advocate, a Helper. We need to be led and sustained in truth and faith.
This is why Jesus here promises us the Holy Spirit.
Find out more in this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!