Christopher Gillespie

by Christopher Gillespie Sep 6, 2026 · Edited

Two Sermons Were Preached That Day

All ten lepers believed Jesus, and all ten were cleansed by nothing but His word on the road. Then the priests preached them a second sermon — only God cleanses leprosy, your obedience did this, don't you dare give the glory to a man from Nazareth — and nine believed that preacher instead, praising God with their tongues while blaspheming Him in Christ. They had a Bible verse, and they thought they did well. "Your faith has saved you" is Christ's ruling handed down against theirs: not the going, not the offering, but faith alone, because Jesus alone was already cleansing before they had walked ten steps.

by Christopher Gillespie Sep 6, 2026 · Edited

Jeremiah Chapter 20

Last week Jeremiah smashed a jar in the garbage valley. This week we find out what it cost him: Pashhur, the chief officer of the temple police, beats him and locks him in the stocks overnight, and Jeremiah opens his mouth and says the worst thing anybody says to God in the Old Testament — O LORD, You induced me, and I was persuaded (Jer. 20:7). Then watch one word walk through the next five verses: God prevailed over him, his friends expect to prevail against him, and they will not — because nineteen chapters back the promise was already standing, they shall not prevail against you (Jer. 1:19). His enemies cannot win against him precisely because God already did.

by Christopher Gillespie Sep 2, 2026 · Edited

Strive to Enter but Only through Christ

Jesus commands you to agonize your way through the narrow door, and in the same breath says the many who try will not be strong enough. So the striving He commands cannot be strength. Luke uses that agony word exactly twice — once here, where Christ commands it, and once in a garden, where Christ does it. He did the agonizing, and He heard “Depart from Me” at the shut door, so that the sentence over you is that He knows where you are from: the font.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 30, 2026 · Edited

He Had Compassion On You

The lawyer answers rightly — love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself — and then negotiates the second table: Who is my neighbor? Jesus tells of a man stripped, beaten, and left half dead, seen and passed by priest and Levite, and found by a Samaritan whose guts turn with compassion, who pours oil and wine, carries, and leaves a blank check with the innkeeper: whatever more you spend, I will repay when I come again. You are the man in the ditch, and He had compassion — He came where you are, bound you in oil and wine, brought you to the inn, and paid it all.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 30, 2026 · Edited

Jeremiah Chapter 19

Last week the Lord sent Jeremiah to the potter's house to watch wet clay wadded up and made again. This week He sends him to buy a finished flask — fired, narrow-necked, the kind that cannot be mended — and to carry it through the Potsherd Gate to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, where Judah burned its sons to Baal, a thing God says never came into His mind. Before the elders and the priests he smashes it on the ground, and the word with the shards is that it "cannot be made whole again" — the Hebrew is healed (Jer. 19:11).

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 26, 2026 · Edited

Capernaum Needed to Hear ‘For You’

Jesus pronounces woe on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum — and says it will be more tolerable for Sodom on the day of judgment. Capernaum was His own town, the place He moved to and lived in; nearness to Christ is exactly what condemned it. What makes that same nearness a mercy at the altar rail is not proximity but the words attached to the bread and the cup: given and shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 23, 2026 · Edited

The Sigh of God

Of everything Jesus does for the deaf man — the fingers, the spit, the word of power — St. Mark writes down the sigh. A sigh is the sound the curse makes coming out of a human being, and ours do nothing: we can't sigh a tumor out of a body, or our dead back to life. Jesus takes the whole weight of it into His own chest and breathes out one word. It cost Him heaven's silence on the cross to say it.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 23, 2026 · Edited

Jeremiah Chapter 18

God sends Jeremiah to a shop near the clay pits — a wheel, a kiln, and a heap out back of the pieces that didn't come out right. The Hebrew word for that tradesman is yotzer, the one who forms. It is the same word God uses in verse 11 for what He is making now: a disaster. The Potter is still at the wheel, and the vessel is not fired yet — which is why He says, "Return now every one from his evil way" (Jer. 18:11).

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 21, 2026 · Edited

Dan is a Son and He is Home

A fourteen-year-old stood at this altar fifty-eight years ago and was handed a verse to carry home: “If you abide in My word.” Fifty-eight years later, you watched that verse get tested — and learned it was never Dan’s grip on Christ that held him, but Christ’s grip on Dan, sealed in his Baptism as a one-month-old. A slave doesn’t get to stay in the house forever. A son does. Dan is a son. Dan is home.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 19, 2026 · Edited

Where the Eagles Gather

The Pharisees want a date. Jesus won't give one — He takes the question apart and rules out both places we look for the kingdom of God: out there in the headlines, and inside your own chest. So the disciples finally stop asking when and ask the right question: "Where, Lord?" And the answer is wherever the Body is — on this altar, in a piece of bread you couldn't tell from any other.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 9, 2026 · Edited

Jeremiah Chapters 13–15

God made His people to cling to Him the way a sash clings to a man's waist (Jer. 13:11). A sash that stops clinging rots in a hole by the river and is good for nothing. Then the prophet who preached that ends up praying his people's own words back to God — they say they are called by Your name, and so does he; they say there is no healing for us, and he says my wound is incurable (Jer. 14:9, 19; 15:16, 18) — and he accuses God of being a stream that runs dry. God doesn't defend Himself. He answers with the very thing Jeremiah has been preaching: "If you return, then I will bring you back" (Jer. 15:19). Our Confessions file that line under the Gospel.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 9, 2026 · Edited

The Tears of Your Savior Settle It

Jesus cries twice in the Gospels — once at a grave, and once outside a church. The grave we understand. The other one is worse, and it is the only thing in that whole city worth crying about. You can read God's oath that He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked and still lie awake wondering whether He meant it about you — but the tears of your Savior settle it.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 5, 2026 · Edited

Without Leaving the Others Undone

Jesus comes to dinner and will not wash His hands. The mint was never commanded — grain, wine, flock, that is what God said to tithe — but a tenth of the mint costs nothing, and being seen to give it is worth a great deal, so justice gets stepped over on the way to the herb garden. Christ does not cancel the mint; He keeps the weightier matters and the little ones both, and leaves not one undone. He keeps none of it for Himself: the hands He would not wash at that table are the hands they nailed down.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 2, 2026 · Edited

Jeremiah Chapters 11–12

This week the preacher becomes the sufferer. Jeremiah announces the covenant curse (Jer. 11:3) and then learns that the men of his own hometown have marked him for death (Jer. 11:21). Three handings-over run through these chapters: Judah handed over to the curse she chose, Jeremiah handed over like a docile lamb brought to the slaughter (Jer. 11:19), and God's own dearly beloved of My soul handed over into enemy hands (Jer. 12:7). When Jeremiah asks the oldest question, why do the wicked prosper, the answer isn't information. It's a warning that the running gets harder, from the God who has run it Himself.

by Christopher Gillespie Aug 2, 2026 · Edited

He Was Faithful the Whole Time You Were Not

Jesus tells the parable of the unjust steward immediately after the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. Johann Gerhard saw why: Christ knows how easily we misuse that teaching for carnal security, taking the sweetest thing God ever said and turning it into a permission slip. Paul answers that man with a desert full of graves. Israel was baptized into Moses, ate the same spiritual food, drank from the Rock that was Christ, and two of them reached the Promised Land. The warning lands on the man who thinks he stands. So does the promise: God is faithful, the way of escape has an address, and the door behind you was never bolted.

by Christopher Gillespie Jul 29, 2026 · Edited

Holiness Runs Down from God and Never Back Up

The men haggling in the temple courtyard knew which oaths could be collected on. Swear by the gold and you're bound; swear by the temple and you can walk away. Jesus calls that blindness: holiness runs down from God to the thing and never back up, and the temple is holy only for Him who dwells in it. We do the same arithmetic with our years and our giving, wanting a righteousness we can audit. But the altar was holy before you got here, and the gift on it is Christ's own body and blood.

by Christopher Gillespie Jul 26, 2026 · Edited

You Were Carried Through the Door Before You Could Walk

Two cries stand side by side in this Sunday's readings: "Lord, Lord" and "Abba, Father." The first belongs to an applicant outside the office door with his accomplishments in a folder; the second to a child who never wondered whether he was allowed in the house. Jesus doesn't dispute the applicants' resume. He disputes that it ever mattered. What every false prophet wants is to turn sons back into applicants.

by Christopher Gillespie Jul 26, 2026 · Edited

Jeremiah Chapter 10

This week's class takes up Jeremiah 10, the prophet's longest satire on idols: a god cut from a tree, dressed in silver, nailed down so it will not topple (Jer. 10:4), a scarecrow in a cucumber field, carried because it cannot walk. Over against it stands the true God, the living God and the everlasting King (Jer. 10:10), who needs no carrying but carries His people (Isa. 46:3–7). Which direction the carrying runs is the whole difference between idolatry and the Gospel.

by Christopher Gillespie Jul 22, 2026 · Edited

They Kept the Husk and Threw the Kernel Away

On the Sabbath, the Pharisees found a rule to keep and lost the mercy it was meant to carry — husk without kernel. James diagnoses the same disease in the church: zeal that hides self-seeking envy. Christ, the One greater than the temple, was Himself crushed like the grain, so that guilty husk-keepers might be fed with mercy instead of judged by the letter.

by Christopher Gillespie Jul 19, 2026 · Edited

You Have Come from Afar

The four thousand Jesus feeds in Mark 8 are Gentiles — outsiders with no claim on the God of Israel. Paul says the same of us: once strangers, far off, until brought near by the blood of Christ. What Christ did on that Gentile shore, He does again in the Sacrament, filling those who have no right to the table with more than enough.