Text: Matthew 4:12-15 | Liturgical date: Epiphany 3 A | Calendar Date: January 25, 2026 | Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County serves Sturgeon Bay and other areas in Northeast Wisconsin.

Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County
316 W. Main St.
Forestville, WI 54213
920-856-6420

Text: Matthew 4:12-15 | Liturgical date: Epiphany 3 A | Calendar Date: January 25, 2026 | Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in Door County | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson

Transcript

Opening Invocation

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Introduction to Spiritual Renewal

Today we’re taking up this passage spoken by the prophet Isaiah in our Old Testament lesson today, and recorded as well in the Gospel of Matthew: “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them the light has dawned.” And on the basis of these words, we’re going to be talking about spiritual renewal.

Personal Story: The Gift of Glasses

One of the most important experiences of my life happened in third grade. I actually think that it was a turning point in my life, and had it not happened, there’s a good chance I might not even be your pastor today. What was that turning point? Already in third grade, I got glasses. Yeah, that was significant. I couldn’t see the chalkboard at school. That’s how bad my vision was.

So yeah, maybe my grades wouldn’t have been very good. I wouldn’t have learned. Maybe I wouldn’t have been qualified to go to seminary. So there you go—third grade, transformative event. A big renewal in my life. And just to give you a sense of what kind of renewal this was, it really opened up the world to me.

Oh, I fought against getting glasses. I didn’t want them at all. But after I got them on, the drive home—it was like the whole world had opened up to me. Did you know trees have leaves? Of course you all have. I didn’t know that until I got glasses. To me, trees were just these big, blobby things.

I knew they had leaves when I got close up to ’em, but I couldn’t see them unless I was standing right up next to the tree. I couldn’t see my pastor’s face. I couldn’t see what was being written on the chalkboard. Huge renewal in my life. A major transformation. And it happened through three things.

The Need for Community in Renewal

First of all, it happened in community. I needed people to rally around me. I needed my parents and my teachers and others to say, “I’m not sure you can see that well, Chris.” I needed people to rally around me for that, and I needed people to give me the formal diagnosis. I needed people to manufacture those glasses, and I needed the nice lady to fit them to my face, right?

I needed people. I needed a hard diagnosis. Oh, I fought against that diagnosis. I tried to trick the eye doctor into thinking that I actually could see when I couldn’t. I fought against that, but I still got that hard diagnosis, which I didn’t want, but I got it anyway. And finally came the gift—a blessing, hard-won, not by me, but by my parents and by all these others: the gift of the glasses.

And as I said, major transformation, major renewal.

There come times in all of our lives where it seems that our eyes are not dim, but rather our faith, our hearts. Perhaps we have doubts. Perhaps we’re not making progress like we would like against some besetting sin. Maybe our confidence is wearing a little thin. The need for spiritual renewal can take many and various forms, but I think it comes for all of us.

And in these lessons that we just read, we see the formula for spiritual renewal, which is God blessing us through community, through the church; through the hard diagnosis of the law; through the blessings of the gospel. And that’s the formula. That’s the route for spiritual renewal, which we’ll be taking up today.

Isaiah’s Prophecy and Its Fulfillment

This prophecy of Isaiah, reiterated by Matthew and fulfilled by Christ—it’s all about spiritual renewal, by the way. What does it mean that the land of Zebulun and Naphtali was dwelling in darkness? What does that mean?

Zebulun and Naphtali were the very periphery of the people of God, of Israel, in multiple senses. They were on the periphery of the people of God geographically to begin with. Why? In what sense? The heart of their life—politically, culturally, especially religiously—was Jerusalem. Jerusalem was pretty far south in Israel. Zebulun and Naphtali, however, were the tribes which settled at the very northern edges of the domain, all the way up at the border of Syria. So they were at the very periphery of the life of the people of God physically, and that led to them being on the periphery spiritually as well.

That’s probably the more important thing here, because they were up in this region bordering on these Gentile nations’ areas, which eventually came to be called by the name Syria. Because they were up in this area, they had a great deal of influence—a lot of cultural and religious pressure—on them by these nations. In fact, the border sometimes seemed to be a little bit porous, and these nations would set up little communities, sometimes sanctioned by their imperial powers over them, sometimes just happening by themselves. And with them came their religious beliefs and their religious customs: belief in the foreign false gods and goddesses, and religious customs to go along with them—idolatry, worship of these false gods and goddesses.

This led to something, first of all: weakening identity among those peoples as being God’s people, as being Israel. And even among those who still did identify as being Israelites, false belief, false practice, false trust crept in among them. They were beset by spiritual darkness, by being led astray by falsehood.

And Isaiah here is saying something downright shocking, utterly baffling. Isaiah is saying, this region—marked by idolatry, marked by casual adherence to the law of God and belief, marked by not the most identification with us—that’s where renewal is going to begin. That’s where spiritual renewal for the people of God is going to kick off. Big surprise. You might expect it to happen in Jerusalem. You might expect it to happen in Judea, the area around Jerusalem. But no. Isaiah says it’s going to happen in these hinterlands, in these borderlands, in this place beset by spiritual darkness.

Jesus’ Ministry and the Spread of Faith

And that’s why Jesus withdraws to Galilee there, by the way—to fulfill that prophecy, to begin his ministry there, to begin the renewal of God’s people in the place least expected, as prophesied by Isaiah. And something interesting happens, by the way: this renewal begins to creep out from there. As Isaiah foresaw, people begin to follow Jesus, not only from Galilee, but also from Judea, from Jerusalem, from across the Jordan—another place where idolatry was known to be practiced—and even, get this, Syria.

This land of Gentiles, which had been this negative pressure, this negative religious pressure on Israel—it starts to go the other direction. Now true faith is seeping out from Galilee into these Gentile lands. Syria—Gentiles who adhere to false religions, the Decapolis, this region of people of Greek culture who worship these false foreign gods—believers are being recruited from there.

How did this happen? First of all, this spiritual renewal—it wasn’t individual. Now, individuals did have a greater sense of the knowledge of God, a greater faith. That much is clear. But it didn’t happen alone, and it never happens alone, by the way. It was communal. What happened in community? In what way? We can see this in several ways.

First of all, we see that the prophecy itself is communal. What does Isaiah say? “For those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them has light dawned.” And what does Jesus do in order to, you might say, increase the reach of his movement? He recruits a community around him. He recruits the disciples to join him in this joyful work.

We read about how he commissioned here Simon, Andrew, James, John—and that’s just the beginning. He recruits them to be his disciples and his eventual apostles so that they might join him in being fishers of men. This is a work which is accomplished amongst the community, and it is a work which is accomplished through community, and it is the absolute same today.

Many people, when they want to give a formula for spiritual renewal, they say you have to draw into yourself. You have to do this, do that. And it’s all individualistic. It’s really just, in a sense, they put the Lord—this idea: it’s just you and God. But that’s not how God works. It’s not how Jesus works.

The Role of the Church in Spiritual Renewal

God desires to do his work for us through the Christian Church. And we here at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church are an outpost of this movement, which already began in Galilee. Jesus is using St. Peter’s Lutheran Church to build one another up in faith and to call those who have no faith to the faith through the message of law and gospel, which we’re going to get to here in a moment.

And this should cause us to realize two things. First of all, I want this to cause us to make use of, thank the Lord for, be grateful for the blessings that the Lord offers here at St. Peter’s. Jesus does his work here. We don’t need to wonder how the Lord intends to grow our faith, to make us trust more in Him, and to reflect his love.

All the more, if we want to receive these gifts, you know where to find them: from the people of God. And the people of God are here, receiving God’s gifts and blessing each other with God’s gifts.

This brings us to our second point: that the Lord calls us to lift each other up in mutual faith and mutual encouragement. We see this all over the scriptures, by the way. St. Paul, for example, says to build each other up through—what example does he give?—singing the scriptures to each other in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Just one of the many examples, by the way. When you come and you worship here and you sing the word of God in the hymns, and you speak the word of God in the psalms and the creed, you are blessing one another. You’re blessing one another as well—and the support of my ministry so that I can preach the gospel to your neighbor.

This, brothers and sisters in Christ, should encourage us to come to worship. If you’ll come to worship, not for yourself—come to worship for the sake of your neighbor. If you’re so strong that you don’t need worship (but you aren’t), but even if you were, come so that you might bless others.

And along the same line, the Lord has blessed us all, each uniquely, individually. We’re all different. We all have different gifts, different abilities. And as we are getting ready for our annual meeting, in which there are elections, by the way, to our various boards and offices, I encourage you to think about how you can serve—how you can participate in this movement of renewal, which Christ kicked off in Galilee.

So there’s the who of it. Now, what’s the how of it? How does Christ bring about renewal? God does it. Christ does it in community. And he does it through law and gospel.

The Law and the Gospel: Diagnosis and Cure

The law’s the diagnosis. It can be hard to hear. We need it, and Jesus does it.

What was Jesus’ message that we heard—the very first word? “Repent.” What does this entail? That we need to repent, and that entails that we are sinners. That can be hard to hear. It can be hard to hear that we have failed to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind. That can be hard to hear.

We have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves—just as it was hard for me to hear back when I was eight years old: “You really don’t see very well, Chris.” That’s the first step: the diagnosis. It comes through the law. When as we hear the Ten Commandments, the righteous expectations that God has for us, we understand that we have failed. We failed to live up to God’s righteous expectations. It’s through this that we are brought to repentance.

But Jesus doesn’t end there. He continues. He says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And Matthew reiterates this about that part of the message. In verse 23, Matthew says that Jesus went around Galilee proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, even as we hear that hard diagnosis, Jesus, the great physician, also gives us the cure in the gospel: the message that heaven is ours, not by our work, rather by his gracious work. I did not do the work to receive those glasses. They were given to me as a gift. My father earned the money for them through his job. My mother took me to the doctor. The doctor diagnosed me. Someone manufactured them for me and fitted them to my face. It was all 100% gift.

And so also spiritual renewal is ultimately the gift of God in Christ. Jesus comes to us as we understand that we are God’s holy and precious people—not by anything that we have done, but rather by what Christ has done for us: fulfilling our righteousness in our stead, taking the punishment for our sins that we have deserved for us upon himself from the cross. And understanding that through the word proclaimed, through the sacraments given to us, that grace, that mercy earned for us on the cross comes to us individually now.

And as we receive that grace and mercy, the Holy Spirit uses that gospel proclamation, that gospel message, to turn our hearts to God—so that where once we had hearts that were cold and dim, now they burn with heartfelt love for God and they reflect his love for the sake of the neighbor.

Conclusion and Final Blessing

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, my prayer for you this day is that if you desire spiritual renewal, that you not seek all the various dead ends that people put in front of you, but rather that you find it where God offers it: by means of his people, through the hard word of the law proclaimed to us, and above all, the message of the forgiveness of sins, the work of Christ.