Prince of Peace Lutheran Church- Crestwood, MO

Prince of Peace Lutheran Church- Crestwood, MO Worship Services: Sundays, 9:00 am.

Mondays, 7:00 pm
Sunday School and Bible Class: 10:30 am
Midweek Bible Class: Tuesdays, 10:30 am
Office Hours:9:00 AM - 3:00 PM

09/09/2026

A devotion on the Three Amigos and the glory of God: Philippians 1:21—2:11

In one of the best scenes in one of the greatest films ever made, Lucky Day, Dusty Bottoms, and Ned Nederlander, AKA the Three Amigos, are discussing what they’re going to do with the 100,000 pesos they’ve been promised for what they believe is a movie they’ll be filming the next day. Lucky says he’s going to get a big shiny car that he can rub in the face of the Hollywood producer who recently fired them. Dusty says he’s going to party in New York and Paris and be a big shot for a while. Then Ned says he’s going to use the money to start a foundation for homeless children, at which point, Lucky and Dusty feel ashamed and start mumbling about how they were obviously going to do their fancy things after they did something similarly charitable.

It’s a funny scene because it gets to the heart of greed. When we consider the idea of being showered in money or power, our first thoughts are always “how can I glorify myself with this” and never “whom can I serve with this?” We all know whose faces we’d want to rub in our newfound glory. We know the people we’d tell off or humiliate with our fresh riches or authority.

But in sweet little Ned Nederlander’s comic response, as unintentional as I’m sure it was, we see a reflection of how God himself views the concepts of riches and power and glory. Jesus Christ had more of these things than we could ever fathom. He is the eternal Son of God, the One eternally clothed in His Father’s glory. Every radiant burst of light and majesty belonged to Him. But, as Paul tells us, He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, meaning that He did not merely want to possess that glory, but He wanted to give you that glory. And so the God who had every right to rub His glory in your face took on your face. He took on the form of a servant, took on human flesh, suffered for you, bled for you. The glorious Son of God took on humiliation and scorn and rejection for you, the one who hated Him with your sins. And He did this all to forgive your sins, to wash you clean. He did this to wrap His arms around a homeless, lost, orphan child and to give you a home in His presence forever. All of God’s wealth and glory and power, Jesus Christ did not see these as things He could use to crush you. He saw them as things He could make your own when He made you His own.

09/08/2026

A devotion on job interviews and leprosy: 2 Kings 5:9-27

Why does Naaman get so irritated when the prophet Elisha won’t come out to see him and wave his hand all over the place before healing him? Because, in his pride, Naaman has everybody’s roles reversed. The powerful Syrian commander imagines that this whole exchange is like a job interview. He, the employer, has a position to fill, someone who can cure him of his leprosy and he’s heard that this prophet from an inferior nation has the skills. So he goes to interview the man and essentially says, “show me that you can do what I need you to do. Impress me and I’ll hire you.” And when Elisha refuses to come out to see him and make a big display, Naaman responds the way you would if you showed up to interview someone for a job and he refused to come in the room or tell you his accomplishments but demanded that you give him the gig anyway.

But Elisha doesn’t play along because he wants the general to understand how much he has misdiagnosed the situation. Elisha has nothing impressive in and of himself. The only power he has is power that comes from his God. And his God is not a god, but the God, the one true God, the only God. Elisha serves the God who can give and take away leprosy because He created and owns every cell of Naaman’s flesh and every atom in existence. So Naaman isn’t an employer demanding that the applicant stand before him. God is the king that Naaman must kneel before. And in the healing that he receives in the waters of the Jordan, Naaman sees that the King has done something better than impress him. He’s saved him, cleansed him, and welcomed him into His arms.

So don’t carry the pride of Naaman. You are not the one in power. You are not the one in a position of strength. God doesn’t need to impress you or sway you or prove to you why He’s worthy of your time. He created time itself and He knit together every cell of your skeptical heart. And yet, even when you treated him like someone in need of your approval, He responded to your hatred with love. He sent His Son into this world to wash you clean of the leprosy of sin, the pride within your heart. He sent His Son to Calvary where He shed the blood that ripped the evil out of your soul and made you clean, fresh, like a newborn child.

He brought His Son out of the tomb, giving you the right to rise from the ground and see that the face of your God is not the face of a stern and unloving slavemaster who demands that you impress Him. No, the face of your God is the face of a loving father welcoming you into his arms. And because God the Father also sent His Son into the waters of the Jordan, then you have the promise that all of this became your inheritance on the day you were baptized into the triune name. God doesn’t need to impress you, but He has already done something far greater than this. He found you. He claimed you. He made you His own forever.

09/02/2026

A devotion on corpses and the love of God: Ephesians 2

A couple weeks ago, we heard David articulate his strange but beautiful grief at the death of King Saul. Despite the fact that Saul has been living as an enemy of God and has spent years trying to kill David, David grieves his death. When he imagines the lifeless face of Saul on the battlefield of the war Saul started, David ultimately looks at Saul and sees him according to what God called him to be and according to what he could have been. Saul was called to be a faithful king. He could have been that, but he lost his life warring against God instead of loving him. And David can’t do anything to change that now, so he grieves.

But God’s grief is not as powerless as the grief of Saul. And so when He sees the same thing that David saw, He can do more than sit in His sorrow. He destroys His sorrow by sending His Son into the world. Once God looked at your lifeless face. There in the wilderness, your Creator gazed up you and grieved because of what you were created to be. You were made to be His own forever, made to be His child who rested in His embrace forever. But Adam and Eve fell into sin and infected you with their transgression and you spread the disease. Through your sins, you warred against your God. You were made to be His own. You could have been His own. But your hatred of God left you lifeless on the battlefield.

And yet, the God who made you never lost His desire to love you. And so, amidst His grief, His compassion erupted and, in order to put life back into the lungs of His enemy, He sent you His Son who gave you the very breath from His lungs. In order to close your self-inflicted wounds, He gave you the wounds of His only begotten. In order to give you eternal life, He gave you the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His grace compelled Him to send that Son into the flesh. And through faith, you have received Him.

So, in the end, the lifeless face that God once grieved has now opened its eyes. And the mouth of that face is now free to cry out “Abba, Father.” The dead enemy is now a living son of God. The God who created you to be perfect and to live forever no longer weeps over your death because the God who created you to be perfect and live forever has made you perfect and clothed you with eternal life.

08/31/2026

A devotion on hating God by hating your neighbor: 1 Kings 12:20-13:5, 33-34

When man wars against his neighbor, he’s always warring against God as well. We see this when Adam tells God “the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” He’s blaming Eve for his corruption, but is ultimately blaming the God who gave the woman to him. We see this when Cain kills Abel, not because he wants to punish Abel for offending him, but because he wants to punish God for doing so. And we see the same thing with Jeroboam when he wars against Rehoboam. To prevent the people from returning to the son of Solomon, he entices them away from offering their sacrifices in Jerusalem. He builds two golden calves and declares, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”

You don’t have to know your Bible all that well to hear something familiar in this language. He’s echoing the words that Aaron spoke when he led the people into great idolatry in the wilderness as Moses was up the mountain, an act that stoked the furious ire of God. And so we see quite clearly what Rehoboam is doing. He could have picked a thousand different idols to craft to entice the people away from his rival king. But he chose the golden calves because he knew his true enemy was not the king of Judah, but the One who gave Rehoboam his kingdom. His enemy was God and he wanted to rub his rebellion in that God’s face.

So it is with all sin. We speak harsh words to people not just because we want to hurt them, but because we want to hurt the God who told us to love them as ourselves and to humble ourselves for them. We lie about others not just to tear down their reputations but to wave our knives at the God who refuses to love us more than such worthless souls. We betray people not just because we want them to feel the sting of abandonment but because we want God to feel the sting of us walking away from Him.

But thanks be to God that all of our sins have been destroyed by the One who waged a war of His own, not a war against men, and not a war against His Father, but a war against the devil. Thanks be to God that Jesus Christ gave us peace with each other by giving us peace with His Father. With His blood, He melted our golden calves into nothing. With his dying breath, He destroyed the weapons of war that we held in our hands. By forgiving our trespasses, He gave us peace with God. And through that same forgiveness, He gave us the right to be at peace with each other because every spear of sin that we hurled at each other has now been erased from existence.

08/24/2026

A devotion on the Lord who always overdelivers: John 1:43-51

There’s a beautiful symmetry in our text from John this morning. Philip finds Nathaniel, also known as Bartholomew, and tells them that they have found the long-awaited Savior. Nathaniel is a man of low expectations, essentially saying, “oh, ok. You’ve found the Messiah, and He’s from that hick town Nazareth. Sure, we’ll see.” But then, after Nathaniel is flabbergasted by this rather meek miracle where Jesus tells him where he was sitting a moment before, Jesus tells the once skeptical man that he will see far greater things than this. He will see the fulfillment of Jacob’s ladder. He will see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. He will see the fulfillment of the promise given to their father Jacob where all the nations of the earth are blessed through Him. He will see the very salvation of the world, heaven come to earth and earth come to heaven in the cross of our Lord.

So there’s the beautiful symmetry. Nathan underexpects. Jesus overdelivers. The Savior from Nazareth, the Son of Joseph the Carpenter, He has given us everything. And because of this, we can expect everything.

Do you expect Jesus to give a little peace to your life? Expect more. Because through the ladder that He built to heaven in His cross, He has sworn to give you a day when every sorrow, every grief, every ounce of confusion and fear and worry will melt away forever as your heart of fallen stone burns up and puts on an imperishable heart of flesh that will live forever, beat forever, and never again know the sorrows of this life.

Do you expect Jesus to give you another chance to turn your life around? Expect more. Because the One who went to Calvary did not give you every drop of His blood and every beat of His heart and every breath from His lungs to simply wipe the slate clean and let you try again to make yourself worthy of heaven. He gave you His own worthiness. He gave you more forgiveness than you had sins. He gave you endless mercy, endless devotion, steadfast love that will never expire or run out. When you could not make yourself into a child of God, He reached His nail-pierced hands in the wilderness, found you, and washed you clean. In His resurrection, He cradled you in His embrace. And in the waters of your baptism, He carried you up Jacob’s ladder to His Father in Heaven who looked at you and said, “this is my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.”

Raise your expectations of Jesus. Raise them to the most absurd levels imaginable. You still won’t be within five thousand miles of the paradise our Lord has promised to give you.

08/20/2026

A devotion on clever parables and repentance: 2 Samuel 12:1-25

Nathan’s little parable in our reading from 2 Samuel this morning is obviously of great benefit to King David because it brings him to repentance over his sins. But these words are also a great blessing to preachers.

Nathan most certainly understands that you can’t necessarily walk up to someone cold, and call him an adulterer and a murderer. In the case of the king, he might have you put to death, but in the case of regular folks, they’ll just close their ears to the important words of condemnation you have to speak. Rather, what Nathan recognizes is that, if you stoke a man’s outrage at someone else’s sin, it’s too late for him to bottle that anger back up when you reveal that the someone else is actually him. He either has to defend the indefensible in himselfor acknowledge that the evil he was just screaming about three seconds earlier is, in fact, still evil when it’s born from his own heart.

And so, my advice for preachers is to avail yourself of the Nathan trick. Stoke your people’s anger about the evil in the world, and then show them how that same evil has been bursting out of their own hearts. Get them cheering as you condemn the persecution of Christians throughout the world, then show them the ways they persecute the faithful with their own sins. Win their applause by condemning the licentiousness and mammon-worship of the world, then show them how their hearts are brimming with the same lust and greed. Let the people know that they’re right to be repulsed by the sins of others, but once they proudly announce themselves as Team Repulsed, show them how they must now be repulsed by their own manifestations of those transgressions.

Do that and then you can show them God’s beautiful answer to our hideous iniquities. Just as David was spared death as his innocent son died in his place, so we too are spared from death from another Son of David, the greater Son, the Son born not of adultery, but of a virgin, the Son born to bear not just the sins of David, but our sins as well. The blood of Jesus has washed you clean and given you the right to live forever. May we always hate the repulsive sins of the world. May we always hate the repulsive sins in our hearts. And may we always rejoice to receive the beautiful love of Jesus Christ that has made us pure.

08/19/2026

A devotion the unworthiness of David and the worthiness of Jesus: 2 Samuel 11

Shortly after God promises David that a Son from his body will rule from his throne forever, David shows us why he himself is unworthy to be that king. When David sees a beautiful woman bathing upon the room, he doesn’t cover his eyes or seek to cover her nakedness. He lusts after her. He summons her. He gives her no commitment, no promise of protection. He takes her for himself. And when she conceives a child, he murders innocent men to cover up the evidence of his guilt.

But in David’s unworthiness, we see the worthiness of Jesus Christ. When Jesus saw His bride, she was not a beautiful woman cleansing herself. She was a hideous woman covered in nothing but the filth and corruption of sin. She was naked and exposed through her own wickedness. But in that moment, Jesus ran to her side, not to defile her, but to cleanse her, to heal her, and to clothe her. Where David lusted, Jesus loved. He came to the side of His bride the church. He pledged Himself to her. And when protecting her meant spilling blood, Jesus didn’t offer the blood of someone else, someone weaker and under His charge. No, Jesus spilled His own blood, gave up His own innocent life to make His bride His own, to clothe her in His righteousness, and to welcome her into His embrace forever.

David took life to conceal his sin. Jesus gave His life to forgive your sin, and to make you worthy of His kingdom, the kingdom first promised in the reign of his father David, the kingdom that will never end because His love for you will never end.

08/17/2026

A devotion on the house David wanted to build for God and the house God built for and from David: 2 Samuel 7:1-17

When our Lord is put on trial, the final nail put in His coffin, so to speak, is that Jesus claimed He could destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. This is not, of course, what Jesus said nor what He meant when He uttered the words, “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” Jesus spoke of His own body as the greater temple. But despite their misunderstanding, the men who sentence Him to death still understand the greater point that Jesus is making. He has claimed to be greater than the physical temple. And that’s the claim they’ll use as proof that He needs to die.

But in all of this, these men who are supposed to know the Scriptures better than anyone reveal their pathetic ignorance of them. As we heard in our reading from 2 Samuel this morning, David tells Nathan the prophet that he wants to make the tabernacle permanent. He wants to build an immovable structure for the Lord. He wants to build God a temple. But God responds by promising David that He will be the one to build David a temple. He will build him a house, not a house of cedar or stone that can be torn down, as the temple of Solomon would be, but a house crafted from the very flesh of David himself. And that house would be established forever when David’s offspring was disciplined with the rod and stripes of men, when David’s Son died and rose again.

This wasn’t an obscure verse of an obscure book, buried under layers of complicated nuance. This was a direct prophecy spoken in the middle of a very foundational story that all these men certainly knew. But this is the danger of pride. It doesn’t just obscure the edges of the faith. It blots out the very center of it.

So turn from your pride. Don’t boast of what you have to offer God. Don’t trust in all the good you can do for Him. Before you promise to build Him a house, look at the house of salvation He built for you. See how the Son of God, the Son of David, revealed Himself as the true temple by suffering death at the hands of those who condemned Him by twisting His words about the earthly temple. There, at the cross, when He received the rod and the stripes of men, Jesus Christ built the true temple with the bricks of His flesh and the mortar of His blood. There He destroyed your sins and erased your transgressions for existence. And with His resurrection, He gave you the right to enter the very house of God and live with Him in His kingdom forever.

08/14/2026

A devotion on how to love those who hate you: 2 Samuel 1:1-27

If you’ve ever struggled to love those who have hated you, there’s a very valuable and simple lesson that King David gives us. How does David keep loving Saul, the mad king, who spends years trying to murder him? How does he find the strength to defend the honor of Saul and give him justice when all Saul wanted was to give David the opposite? Throughout the war, and again in our text for today, David gives us the answer. Despite having multiple opportunities to kill Saul, and despite having the chance to rejoice in Saul’s death at the hands of this young Amelikite, David refuses to do so because David still loves Saul. He doesn’t believe that he, or anyone else, has the right to, as he puts it, “put out his hand against the Lord’s anointed.” In other words, David preserves his love for his enemy by viewing him not according to his behavior, but according to his office.

So Saul may have been a faithless king. But God still made him a king and David will view him according to that office. David doesn’t view Saul as the man who failed in his duties, but as the man to whom God gave those duties. David refuses to see Saul according to his sins, but according to his holy vocation.

And this is how you can forgive those who have sinned against you. When your children hurt you, when they turn away from you and burn with unjust anger at you, don’t see them according to their sin, but according to the holy vocation of “child” that God gave them. When your friends, your employers, your pastors, your neighbors do things that hurt you, don’t see them as the ones who spit foolishness or inattentiveness or indifference at you. See them as those occupying holy offices that God gave to them.

And you can do this because, when you were a wicked sinner, rebelling against your God, God didn’t see you according to your sins, but according to your vocation, your office, according to the very purpose of your creation. You were created to be God’s own child forever. You were created to be His precious son redeemed by His blood. And so, when you, like Saul, deserved to have the final breath extracted from your lungs, Jesus saw you according to your created purpose and not according to your evil. He saw you as what you were supposed to be, not what you became in your corruption. So He gave up His own final breath to kill your sins, to wash you clean in His blood, and to give you eternal life with Him. And because of this, when He lifts you from the grave on the last day, you will no longer be a failure in your most important vocation. You will be an eternally faithful child of God.

08/13/2026

A devotion on dying an honorable death: 1 Samuel 31

Throughout his days as king, Saul has been obsessed with preserving his own, refusing to let God take it away from him by giving his throne to David. And now, pierced with the arrows of his enemies, Saul is still consumed with the same thing. He demands that his armor bearer kill him so that the Philistines won’t have an opportunity to humiliate him. Then he falls on his own sword to prevent his enemies from giving him a very unblessed death, abusing and defiling him in order to strip him of his precious honor.

But in the end, the Philistines aren’t the problem. Saul is the source of his own dishonor because he doesn’t want to be clothed in the honor greater than earthly acclaim. He doesn’t want to be clothed in the honor of God’s forgiveness. He doesn’t want the greatest honor of all, the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

And so, there’s something valuable for us to learn in the dishonorable death of Saul. If you want an honorable death, a blessed death, the most honorable and blessed death of all is the one where you’re clothed not in your own honor, but in the honor of Christ. When you die trusting in Jesus, when you die knowing that He has taken away your sins and made you worthy of eternal life, that’s the most blessed death.

So it’s a wonderful thing to die surrounded by your doting children. But if you never had children and die with precious few people surrounding your bed, you still die with the greatest honor of all if you had Jesus Christ dwelling beside you in love through faith. If your children resent you and won’t draw near, you still die a blessed death because the Son of God who drew near to you upon the cross is drawing even closer as He takes you in His arms. If you die a violent death, destroyed by wicked men, you can rejoice even if the last thing you see is your own blood because the blood of Jesus Christ has clothed you in the honor of God and made you worthy to live forever. If your enemies rejoice at your death, triumphing over you, you can still die a blessed death because you will wake up in the arms of the Savior who has made and will make those enemies His footstool.

So whether you die in a comfortable bed or on a bloody battlefield, every Christian can die a blessed death because every Christian has been clothed in the honor of Jesus Christ, the honor that ensures you will never die alone because the Son of God will always be by your side.

Address

8646 New Sappington Road
Crestwood, MO
63126

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 3pm
Tuesday 9am - 3pm
Wednesday 9am - 3pm
Thursday 9am - 3pm
Sunday 9am - 12pm

Telephone

(314) 843-8448

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