Sunday, November 27, 2011

Discover Anger



Not what we would expect at all.  We are closing in on the final act of the gospels and Jesus has come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the greatest of all the Jewish feasts.  On Sunday he arrived in Bethany and from there he rode a donkey into Jerusalem fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah.  The crowds had flocked out to see him and waving palm branches, laying their coats before the donkey and singing his praises.  It was a great day.  That evening we are told that after he had visited the temple that he returns to Bethany, which is just outside of the city and then on Monday he makes his way back to the city and back to the temple.
And it is there he freaks out.  There are merchants in the temple courts selling animals for sacrifices and exchanging money so people from away will have the right currency to pay their temple tax.  It is a carnival atmosphere.  And it is like Jesus snaps. He was like a madman, tipping over tables, chasing animals, speaking in harsh tones.  Jesus was angry, angry!  And maybe some of you are thinking, “well maybe he was a little upset but I don’t think he was angry.” 
Nope, a little upset doesn’t tip over tables and chase animals, he was angry.
It is so out of character. Or at least out of the character that we hold so near and dear.  This isn’t the picture that comes to mind when most people think of Jesus.  They see him holding a lamb or holding a child, feeding the hungry or healing the sick.  They see his hands as gentle and caring.  I’m sure that in most people’s minds they would expect the hands of Jesus to be soft and tender and not the hands of a carpenter, who worked without the benefit of power tools. 
And while that has to be a part of the picture of Jesus is it the entire picture?  Most of us have a home page for our internet browsers mine is Canoe.ca  Goes way back to when most of the news sites were American and Canoe came along and they had bill boards up that said “Don’t surf the net canoe it.”  But that is a different story for a different time.  Part of the canoe site is a photo of the day and it shows a snippet of a photo in a box and it is remarkable sometimes when you click on the photo and it expands and it isn’t anything like you thought it would be.
It is the same picture but you aren’t seeing the entire picture.  And sometimes we are guilty of doing that with God and Jesus.  We are only seeing a part of his character and are basing our assumptions about him on that one part of the picture. 
And so for some people Jesus is only gentle and caring, he never raises his voice and never gets angry.  True, they see him as the good shepherd but a shepherd who only cuddles and coddles his sheep and never disciplines them and never corrects them and would never ever raise his voice in dealing with them.  He is a non-judging, non-demanding, non-condemning  and he lets the sheep do whatever it is the sheep want to do, and never says “You are a bad sheep”.
He is a Jesus who was always understanding, always accommodating and never correcting and certainly never condemning.  And so while we can see this Jesus as opening up a dialogue with those in the temple who were selling animals and changing money and perhaps coming to a meeting of the minds we find it really difficult to get our heads around this scene that is described in detail in all four of the gospels.
It is the day after the triumphant entry, the day after Palm Sunday and it is only four days away from Jesus eventual arrest, trial and crucifixion.  After his grand entrance the day before we are told that Jesus had returned to Bethany, where he spent the night.  Now Jesus has returned to Jerusalem and makes a bee line for the temple which is where our story picks up.
But before we look at the story let’s look at the back story.
The temple that is spoken of is Solomon’s Temple; it had been an integral of Jerusalem for more than five hundred years since it was built by King Solomon, David’s son until it was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70.  Understand that we don’t have anything in Canada that was built 500 years old. 
The temple occupied the top of the top of Mount Zion; it covered an area of almost 30 acres and contained several distinct areas.  Let’s pull up some pictures.  Here is where the temple sat in relation to the city of Jerusalem during Jesus ministry, as you can see it dominates the entire city, that site is now occupied by the Dome of the Rock Mosque.  Here is what it would look like if it was built out of lego and here is a replica that you can see in Norfolk Virginia, It was constructed over a thirty year period by Alec Garrard, which was 23 years longer than it took to build the original. 
This large outer court was called the court of Gentiles and anyone could come into the court of the Gentiles.  We are told that at the inner edge of the Court of the Gentiles was a low wall with tablets set into it and in theory if a Gentile, that is someone who was not a Jew passed that point the penalty was death.  The next area was called the Court of Women and that was as far as a woman was allowed to go unless they had actually come to offer a sacrifice.  Next was the Court of the Israelites, here was where the big celebrations were held and it was here that the sacrifices were given to the Priests to be made.  And that was the next area the Court of the Priests and within that was the Holy of Holys where we are told the High Priest went to commune with God.
And it was here in the Court of Gentiles that this entire drama took place.  Historically we are told that the businesses that set up in the court of the Gentiles were businesses of opportunity, especially at Passover.  This was the celebration that the faithful tried to be in Jerusalem; as a matter of fact we are told that even today the Passover celebration finishes with the words:  Next Year in Jerusalem.  And so the city was filled with pilgrims and the temple was alive with different dialects and accents.  And while it was really neat that people would travel from far off places to celebrate it was problematic in a couple of ways.  First of all if they were coming to the Temple for the Passover they would have to offer a sacrifice of a dove and secondly they would have to pay the temple tax of a half a shekel paid using a specific currency.  Not a problem if you lived in Jerusalem but if you were travelling any distance it would be difficult to bring a dove suitable for the sacrifice with you and the coin that was to be used to pay the temple tax was fairly specific to that area and so often times travellers would have to get their money changed.  That’s the short part of the story.  So stalls were set up where you could buy doves and where you could get your money changed, but if you’ve ever been in a market you understand that people are raising their voices and cajoling customers to buy their doves instead of their neighbors and people are jostling and laughing, haggling over prices and cursing what they had to pay.  People are now using the temple courts as short cuts to get to various parts of Jerusalem and the reverence has been replaced with convenience.
And it is into this scene that Jesus stepped the day after his triumphant entry and just four days before he would be arrested, tried in the mockery of a trial and crucified.  So let’s pick up the story in Mark 11:15-16 When they arrived back in Jerusalem, Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out the people buying and selling animals for sacrifices. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves, and he stopped everyone from using the Temple as a marketplace.
Listen to the verbs here:  Drive out, Knocked over, Stopped everyone.  Sounds like he was a little ticked off, a little put out, maybe a little angry with what was happening.  And that doesn’t sound like the Jesus that we are taught about.  The gentle, compassionate, never angry, never condemning Jesus.  And that is confusing, because we are told that we shouldn’t get angry, and that anger is wrong. 
Buddha said “Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.”
While Madeleine Brent wrote “Anger and worry are the enemies of clear thought.”  And Ralph Waldo Emerson   offered us excellent advice when he wrote “For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”  And here are words of great wisdom from Ambrose Bierce, “Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”   I’ve given those speeches. 
The bible even weighs in on the subject when Solomon wrote in Proverbs 22:24-25 Don’t befriend angry people or associate with hot-tempered people, or you will learn to be like them and endanger your soul.   And again in  Proverbs 29:22 An angry person starts fights; a hot-tempered person commits all kinds of sin.
And most of us think of anger as a “Sin”.  “Forgive me because I got angry” we pray or we tell the person on the other end of our anger “I’m sorry I was angry.”    And so now we have this dichotomy to deal with.  We perceive anger to always be wrong and to be sinful behaviour and yet we see Jesus acting in a way that seems to be angry.  And there are multiple instances in the scriptures with God being angry, and that is the word that is used “angry”  not a little put out or mildly annoyed but angry. 
Passages like Psalm 7:11 God is an honest judge. He is angry with the wicked every day. Or in the New Testament John 3:36 And anyone who believes in God’s Son has eternal life. Anyone who doesn’t obey the Son will never experience eternal life but remains under God’s angry judgment.”
Perhaps the truth lies in the words of Aristotle who said “Anyone can become angry -- that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way -- this is not easy.”
So here are some questions we can ask ourselves about Anger and perhaps we can find some answers in this story.
What makes you Angry?  And probably I could get a whole range of answers here.  Some would be appropriate and some would be wildly inappropriate.  I read a news story the other day about a guy who was in court in Ontario charged with Road Rage, actually he was charged with a whole range of things but bottom line it was road rage. 
Someone had cut him off in traffic, I don’t know if it was intentional or not, and buddy forces him off the road with his truck, rams the offending vehicle a couple of times and then grabs a chain saw and threatens the other driver with it. 
Do you get angry in traffic?  In the Parking lot?  In the supermarket when someone cuts you off with their cart?  Do you get angry because of the way people treat you?  Because of some slight, either real or imaginary? 
Why was Jesus angry here?  I think there are a couple of reasons, the most obvious is found in   Mark 11:17 He said to them, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves.”
He was angry because people were disrespecting God’s temple and making a mockery of God’s rules.  What was supposed to be a Holy place had become an everyday place, what had been set aside as a place to worship God had become a place to worship money.  And because of that people’s relationship with God were in jeopardy.  And that made Jesus angry.
That was why Jesus was upset with the Pharisee, they were putting religion ahead of people and putting roadblocks between people and God.  Once when Jesus was teaching some parents tried to bring their children to him to be blessed and his disciples scolded them for interrupting Jesus while he was teaching and then we read in Mark 10:14 When Jesus saw what was happening, he was angry with his disciples. He said to them, “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children.”
When people and churches stand between others and God that should make us angry in the same way it made Jesus angry.   When people are more concerned with their preferences and their comfort rather than reaching out to those who need Jesus, that is a reason to become cranky and when people and churches that call themselves “Christians” do a disservice to Jesus’ name and nature by being rude and bitter, that should make us angry.
But there was a second reason that isn’t as obvious but just as valid, and I understand that this is speculation but I think Jesus was upset over the fact that those who were supposed to be leading people to God were taking advantage of them. 
These were pilgrims who had travelled a long way to be able to worship God in the temple and they were being ripped off.  Historians tells us that the same dove that was being sold in the temple court yard could be purchased outside the temple for a fraction of the price, but coincidently the same people who benefitted from the sale of the doves inside the temple were the ones who had to inspect the ones from outside to make sure they would be suitable.  Can you say “conflict of interest”?
And the temple tax had to be paid in a certain currency, the principle had been laid down that the tax was paid for the upkeep of the temple, and that was a good principle the temple needed to be maintained and that needed to be paid for by those who used it.  But then the principle was distorted and became a burden.  Because now it wasn’t enough that the right amount be paid but it had to be paid in the right currency.  So while other currency was used outside the temple the priests insisted on a certain type of currency.  When the pilgrims came they had to get their money changed.  And if it was a straight exchange then the rate was about 20% but if you needed change back the rate doubled.  And so Jesus was angry because people were being taken advantage of.
What was happening was legal, but was it right?   Personally I think Jesus would be a little cranky over what happens in the name of business and commerce in our society today.  When companies ask the rank and file to make wage concessions and give up benefits and then give their executives million dollar bonuses, I can understand the anger there.   And I don’t think it would be billion dollar bailouts that he would have had in mind for the big banks and wall street, just saying.
But here is a rule of thumb, If you are getting angry over your feelings or over your stuff, you are probably getting angry over the wrong things. 
Understand that Jesus didn’t lose his temper, he got angry.  Which leads us to the next question.
How Do You respond In Your Anger? This is a matter of time and degree.  Sometimes people get angry and their response is way over the top.  If you lash right out you have probably reacted the wrong way.  Which is why  Thomas Jefferson cautioned people “When angry, count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.”
There was something in this account that I just picked up last week.  At the end of the scripture that I spoke on last week was this line:  Mark 11:11 So Jesus came to Jerusalem and went into the Temple. After looking around carefully at everything, he left because it was late in the afternoon. Then he returned to Bethany with the twelve disciples.   And then we pick up the story the next day Mark 11:15 When they arrived back in Jerusalem, Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out the people buying and selling animals for sacrifices.  Wow, he must have seen what was happening, left and figured out what his response should be and then came back. 
John’s account of Jesus in the temple comes at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and there has been debate over whether it was the same incident or a separate incident, and I can say categorically it could have been the same incident or a separate incident.  But there is a neat line there in John’s account.  John 2:15 Jesus made a whip from some ropes and chased them all out of the Temple. He drove out the sheep and cattle, scattered the money changers’ coins over the floor, and turned over their tables.   I wonder in that account if the taking the time to braid the rope together was his way of counting to ten.
If you find yourself reacting immediately in anger, you are probably in the wrong.  You are letting your anger control you instead of controlling your anger, which is why the bible tells us in Ephesians 4:26-27 And “don’t sin by letting anger control you.” Don’t let the sun go down while you are still angry, for anger gives a foothold to the devil.
Ephesians 4:26-27 NIV “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.
It was Phyllis Diller who said “Never go to bed angry, stay up and fight.”  I’m not sure that is what the Bible had in mind.  Because if you aren’t controlling your anger then your anger is controlling you.
And then find out how you deal with what makes you angry.  Remember when the disciples wouldn’t let the children come to Jesus and he got angry?  What did he do?  He taught the disciples what their correct response should be and then he blessed the children.
What can you do about what makes you angry?  How do you correct it, how do you deal with it?  Can you be part of the solution?
The other thing to note is that there was no personal violence in Jesus’ response, granted he set animals free and scattered coins but there is nothing to indicate that he struck anyone, that he hurt anyone.
Martin Luther King Jr. was angry, Mahatma Ghandi was angry, Timothy McVeigh was angry and Osama Bin Laden was angry.  Two will go down in history as heroes two will always be villains.
The scriptures don’t tell us not to be angry but they do warn us in Ephesians 4:26-27 NIV “In your anger do not sin”
Do You Understand The Price Of Your Anger?  There is an old saying that there is only one letter difference between “anger” and “danger”.  The guy in Ontario who responded in anger to being cut off in traffic, you remember the guy with the chain saw?  He’s going to jail.
I can’t count the marriages that I have watched dissolve because of an angry spouse.  Sometimes situations where there was abuse but often just times where the other partner just got tired of the anger and venom that was being spewed. 
Jesus got angry over what was happening in the temple, and he responded after thinking about it and without violence.  And the result?  A lesson was taught, not just for that specific point in time but for the next two thousand years.  The temple courts were cleared at least temporarily and I’m sure that some of those who were chased out examined their motives.  But what else happened?  Mark 11:18 The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.
This was the tipping point in Jesus ministry.  The lives of African American’s was changed irrevocably for the better because of the anger of Martin Luther King Jr.  India’s future was changed because of the anger of Ghandi and they paid the price with their lives.
You get angry over abortion, or poverty or social injustice, or people disrespecting God and his name and voice your anger and there will be a price to be paid.  Chances are that you won’t be killed, but it might be the way people view you, or it might be a promotion or it might be contempt.
But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get angry about those things, it just means that you need to be aware that there is often a price to be paid.  Remember the words of Edmund Burke who wrote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 
Anger has been the catalyst that has changed our world for the better.  Agree with them or not it might be the anger of the “occupy movement” that causes people to take a closer look at corporate greed and what big corporations are willing to do in the name of profits.  After all the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley got angry over child labour and the founders of the Wesleyan Church go angry over Slavery.  But it can’t be repeated enough: Ephesians 4:26-27 NIV “In your anger do not sin”

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Discover the Name

Do you like your name?  And if you do now did you always like your name?   As a teenager how did you feel about it?   I heard two Jr. High girls talking in a mall once and one asked “Do you like your name?”  To which the other replied, “No I hate my name” and the first girl said, “Yeah I hate mine too.”  I think it's a fact of life that most of us hate our name at some point in our lives, probably because of the way our parents abuse it, “Dennison Vance you get in here right now you have some explaining to do”  

Yep my first name is indeed Dennison, I was named after my father’s uncle.  But I have never gone by Dennison and other than times when we had a supply teacher in class or when my parents thought I had misbehaved I have never been called Dennison.  That’s not a hundred percent true, Austin White called me Dennison when he was little.
Had I been born 32 days later my name probably would have been Stephen because a month and a day after I was born my Grandfather Stephen was killed in an industrial accident. 
But my name hasn’t been static, for the first 18 years of my life I went by Denny, when I went away to college I thought it was time to grow up so I started going by Den.  D.e.n.  just one “n”. 
I had an interesting conversation with a person in Australia just before we moved home in 1994, they asked what Den was short for and I told them, they asked me how Dennison was spelled and I told them.  And then they asked “well shouldn’t Den have two ‘Ns’?”  To be truthful I had never thought about it before.  So when we arrived in Bedford to start Cornerstone in August of 1994 I became Denn with 2  “ns”. 
When I went to work at my first church in 1981 I discovered for some people my name was simply “Pastor”  in 1984 we added an addition to our home and the name he called me was “daddy”  a year and a half ago I got a new name and it was “grampy” as opposed to the times Angela simply refers to me as “grumpy”.  A pastor friend of mine was asked if he ever woke up grumpy and he replied “sometimes and sometimes I let her sleep in.”   But that is a different story.
But I am really not defined by my name, I like it now, it’s different, kind of like me.  But I think that the Bard was right when he said William Shakespeare   “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”    Which might be why Gertrude Stein wrote “A rose is a rose is a rose.”
Some people are very proud of their names, in particular their surname, I have a friend in Truro by the last name of Wallace who lays claim to a relationship with William Wallace of Brave Heart fame.  But that is really outside of our control isn’t it.    It was the Czech author Milan Kundera who wrote “We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
And that was all said to lead into our message this morning.  Our scripture begins with an interesting story.   Jesus and his apostles have come to Capernaum and Jesus is teaching them a lesson about the Kingdom when John suddenly bursts into the room let’s pick up the story there.  Mark 9:38 John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone using your name to cast out demons, but we told him to stop because he wasn’t in our group.”   Remember a couple of weeks ago I spoke about the 12 Apostles and mentioned how Jesus had nicknamed John and his brother James “The Sons of Thunder”?   It was John who wanted to call down fire from heaven to burn up a village in Samaria that didn’t welcome Jesus and his followers and now he is forbidding someone from doing good in Jesus name. 
And we really don’t know what the issue was.  Maybe John thought he was doing the right thing, he might very well of thought that the guy was out of line, he didn’t know him so he assumed that Jesus didn’t know him and that he didn’t know Jesus.  John may have thought that when Jesus said “Follow me” that he was only talking in the physical sense, that you could only follow Jesus if you could see him and be with him in the here and now.  If that was the case then Jesus’ followers would never have been able to expand past that a few hundred people isolated in a particular point in history.
And really we don’t know who the guy was.  Some have suggested that he might have been one of John the Baptist’s followers who heard John talk about Jesus and call him the “Lamb of God” and took John’s words to heart.  Others have speculated that he may have been one of the seventy-two that Jesus sent out in  Luke 10:1 The Lord now chose seventy-two other disciples and sent them ahead in pairs to all the towns and places he planned to visit.   Because apparently the Demon thing fell in the job description because when they came and reported back to Jesus we read Luke 10:17 When the seventy-two disciples returned, they joyfully reported to him, “Lord, even the demons obey us when we use your name!”   So maybe John just didn’t recognize the guy, or maybe he was just some fellow who had heard Jesus speak bought into his message and laid claim to it. 
Or maybe there was a darker side to John’s comments because it was only a couple of dozen verses before that we read Mark 9:17-18 One of the men in the crowd spoke up and said, “Teacher, I brought my son so you could heal him. He is possessed by an evil spirit that won’t let him talk. And whenever this spirit seizes him, it throws him violently to the ground. Then he foams at the mouth and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to cast out the evil spirit, but they couldn’t do it.”
So maybe John was stinging a bit,  that this guy was doing what he hadn’t been able to do.   Just saying.   Or maybe John was like a some churches today, he had drawn a circle around his group and assumed that anyone outside the circle was wrong. 
We don’t do that do we?  I hope not, I hope our circle is big enough without being too big.    It was Edwin Markham who wrote  He drew a circle that shut me out--  Rebel, heretic, thing to flout.  But love and I had the wit to win-- We drew a circle that took him in.”  And if you are older than dirt you might remember the song called “Circles” by the Captain and Tennille which had the opening line “He drew a circle that shut me out He was afraid of what life was all about.”   Toni Tennille said the song was inspired by Markham’s poem.  There don’t say you didn’t learn anything today.
So maybe whoever the stranger was he was outside the circle that John had drawn.
Now if anyone had the right to be cranky that someone had been using his name it should have been Jesus.  But listen to his reply in Mark 9:39-40 “Don’t stop him!” Jesus said. “No one who performs a miracle in my name will soon be able to speak evil of me. Anyone who is not against us is for us.
And if we just had that one scripture we would have to understand it to mean that anyone, that is anyone who lays claim or has ever laid claim to the name of Jesus should be considered a Christian or a Christian church.
Recently in the news in the US a prominent Pastor made a statement that caused an absolute furor in the media, he said that the Mormon Church, or Latter Day Saints as they prefer to be called weren’t Christian.  The secular media was aghast, how could that be, the Latter Day Saints profess to follow Jesus so how could another Christian say they were a cult. 
Actually the context of why the discussion was even happening was outside the scope of Canadian thinking, it was in relation to Mitt Romney possibly running as President and whether or not Americans would vote for a Mormon.    I can’t even imagine that would be a consideration about who would be President.  Oh well, different strokes for different folks I guess.
But there were a lot of people who condemned the Pastor who said the Mormons weren’t Christians.    And I’m sure that at least a few of those were thinking of this passage.
But like any other scripture it can’t be taken in isolation.  Because there are other scriptures that come into play as well, like when Jesus warned people in  Matthew 7:22-23 On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’ But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.’
Or his warning in Mark 13:6 for many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah.’ They will deceive many.
So it appears that on one hand you have Jesus saying “if they use my name they are one of mine.”  And on the other hand he is saying “Be careful not everyone who uses my name is one of mine.”
So how do we balance this dichotomy?
We Need to Realize that His Name is Descriptive  Shakespeare said that if you called a rose by a different name it didn’t make it a different thing.  But by the same token calling something a rose will not make it a rose.
When the Gospel Writers talk about the name of Jesus they were talking about a very specific Jesus.  Jesus who always was and always is.  Jesus who is not only the son of God but is God.  Jesus who was born of a virgin, Jesus who lived a sinless life, Jesus who died on the cross, Jesus was raised from the dead and Jesus who will someday return.  That is the Jesus that is named in the Bible.  And churches around the world embrace that Jesus. 
If someone handed you a tulip and said it was a rose, you would know right away it was not a rose.  But only if you knew what a rose looked like.  However if you had never seen a rose it is conceivable you would think the flower you had been handed was indeed a rose and you might even tell other people it was a rose.
But would that make it a rose?
And so we have churches and those who are part of those churches who say “Here is Jesus, but he’s not the Jesus who was born of a virgin, because we don’t believe that.  And he’s not the Jesus who was the Son of God because we don’t believe that.  And he’s not the Jesus who was raised from the dead or who will return again.”   Then I would tell you that you are looking at a tulip and not a rose.
And so when Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, called Mormonism a “theological cult” he was correct.  Because the Jesus of the Latter Day Saints is not the Jesus of the Bible.  On the other hand I think Jeffress was over the line when he went on to declare “Evangelicals ought to give preference to a Christian instead of someone who doesn’t embrace historical Christianity.”   
I think history has shown that you just because you are a good Christian doesn’t mean that you will make a good national leader.  And vice versa.
Lifeway Research a Christian research firm in the states did a survey and found that among Protestant pastors 75 % disagreed with the statement that Mormons were Christians.    But hopefully most of us would agree with the president of Lifeway Ed Stezer who stated “Though pastors believe overwhelmingly that Mormonism is not Christianity, their opinions should not be confused with personal scorn for Mormons, A person can respect a religious group and even appreciate their commitment to traditional moral values without equating their beliefs with Christian orthodoxy.”
But understand that it’s not enough to claim the name of Jesus without claiming the Jesus of the name.
His Name Is Holy  This goes back to what we believe about Jesus, if we truly believe that he is God then his name deserves the same respect as the name of God.  And that takes us back to Exodus 20:7 "Do not misuse the name of the LORD your God. The LORD will not let you go unpunished if you misuse his name.   and we’ve talked about this before.  To misuse God’s name is to use it in a frivolous manner, to misuse Jesus’ name is to use it in a frivolous manner.  It’s not an exclamation, or a statement of surprise or anger.  It is a holy name and deserves to be treated as such. 
It’s not just a command about the way we speak, it’s also a commandment concerning the way we live.  When you call yourself a Christian then you are calling yourself a follower of Christ, you are in effect taking his name his name and attaching it to yourself and to your behaviour.   And when your life does not reflect your commitment as a Christian then you are misusing his name.  So, when you call yourself a Christian then live like the devil what does that say?  What are you doing to the name of Christ with the way you are living?
Not only is his name descriptive his name is holy, but more than that:
His Name Is Powerful  If you read through the book of Acts you discover that the early church depended on the name of Jesus.  It was in the name of Jesus that the message of the Gospel was preached, it was in the name of Jesus that people were healed, it was in the name of Jesus that tyrants were rebuked and it was in the name of Jesus that people found the strength to be martyred for their faith.
And there are great scriptures that we claim and hold unto to, scriptures like John 14:14 You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.   How often have we heard that promise, and how often have we claimed that promise?  You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it. Wow!  But did Jesus actually mean that you could ask for anything in his name and it would be yours?  That you and yours would never be in want, that you would never be sick that you could ask for anything in Jesus’ name and it would be yours?
That’s how it is preached sometimes and that is a heresy and a mockery of the words of Jesus.  Seriously you can’t just cherry pick verses like this and let them stand on their own.  You can’t just take a sentence out of the bible and look at it in isolation.  The very least that you can do is look at the verses that immediately surround that verse.   In this case we need to look at John 14:12-13 I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.   What is it talking about here?  It is talking about doing what Jesus did.  That your prayers and your life would bring glory to God.  And you are thinking “Well sure Denn, but if I won the lottery that would bring glory to God.”  Do you really believe that? 
This goes back to the line in the Lord’s prayer that says “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  There is power in Jesus name and that power is living in Jesus name and means that we live in such a way that our requests are requests that Jesus would honour.  John 15:16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.   We like the last part.  Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.   But you can’t isolate that from the first part of Jesus statement and that is that you will bear fruit that will last, because that is what your requests are supposed to lead to.  When you pray for the power and desire to live the life that Jesus would have you to live, that power is there.   When you pray for the strength to resist temptation, that strength is there.  When you pray that you will be better able to bear the name of Jesus and that your life will produce the fruit that Jesus wants you to produce, that request will be answered.
As a young Pastor I thought that praying “Your will be done” was a cop out, that if we were truly to pray in faith, believing that whatever we asked for in Jesus name would happen that we were just given ourselves an out by praying “your will be done” because if our prayers weren’t answered then we could just say “well I guess that it wasn’t in God’s will” 
But what if we truly believed that God is smarter than us, and ultimately that God wants the very best for our lives, even if at this point in our lives it doesn’t seem that way? 
Sometimes we are like children who feel that we need every shiny new toy that captures our imagination and every cone of ice cream or candy bar that tickles our fancy and that doesn’t bring glory to God. 
But have you ever wondered what would happen if every prayer you ever uttered had been answered in just the way you wanted it to be answered? 
The power that is in the name of Jesus is the power to live as a new creation, the power to be a witness to his name, the power to bear the fruit that he would have us to bear. 
Paul wrote these words to the believers in the Colossian church, Colossians 3:17 And whatever you do or say, let it be as a representative of the Lord Jesus, all the while giving thanks through him to God the Father.   Now listen to how it is said in the New International Version,   NIV Colossians 3:17 And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.