Sermon Transcript
Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, transitory though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that brought condemnation was glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts! Therefore, since, since we have such a hope, we are very bold.
We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the Old Covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.
Well, good morning, friends. We are at week 3 of a summer sermon series in which we are hearing from different ones of our lay leaders, our elders and staff, and we’re calling it This Is My Story. If you’ve missed any of the previous messages, I encourage you to go back. Last week we heard from Alba Collegian about her faith story, and then before that, Pastor Dan. And all summer you’re going to be hearing faith stories and faith journeys from people that you’ll see around church.
And the reason why we wanted to do this— one of the reasons why we wanted to do this message series is because God still works in similar ways today than he did in Scripture. And so we are privileged today to get to hear from one of our elders, Al Krueger, who many of you know. He’s going to share a bit about his faith journey. Happy Father’s Day, Al, by the way. You have some family that’s here.
That’s right. Can you help us to welcome Al Krueger as he shares his faith story? And then whenever he’s done, I’ll come back up here and, uh, yeah, we’ll just have, uh, perhaps brief conversation. But we hope that you’re encouraged. I know that you’re going to be encouraged.
I’ve already been encouraged by hearing this faith story. So please welcome Al. Thank you, Steve. What a thrill and an honor it is to be here today in the church that meant so much to my spiritual journey. And today I have the honor of telling you the story of that journey that played a great part in me coming to Christ, in me stop fighting with Christ and finally bend the knee to him many years ago.
Now that I am a believer and having done so as an adult, I get to look back on my life and look what I call mileposts or milestones in that journey on the road, and I can see where God was now working, even though at the time I was completely unaware of him seeking to reach me. Just like the verses that we just read, or some of the verses, I needed to have a spiritual veil removed from my spiritual eyes which was blocking my understanding of who Jesus is and what he had done for all of us. So let me begin. My story began in 1947. Boy, that’s a long time ago.
I was born at the beginning of the baby boom when, when millions returned from World War II. And my dad got discharged from the Navy in ’46, married my mom, and in the middle of ’47 I arrived. We lived with his parents, my dad’s parents, in a little tiny Archer bunker-style house in Queens, New York, just outside of New York City on Long Island. Since I was named after my dad and he named after his dad, there were now 3 Al’s in the household and something had to change. So Dad became Buddy and I became Sonny Jim.
I guess I was pleasant at certain times of the day as an infant. But anyway, I’m still Jim to my family back east to this day. Sometime around age 5, we moved to our own house further out from the city, and here my first sister arrived. And it was in that house in the 1950s when my parents decided that some kind of spiritual component was important to our family. I doubt if their motivation was really deeply spiritual.
My mother, my mother came from a Swedish family, so they picked a Lutheran church. It was here during my elementary school years that I was introduced to God, and what I remember about the time was taking communion classes when I was around 11 or 12, and later, having graduated, being asked by the pastor to serve as an altar boy. Boy. Now, an altar boy is the little boy who helped the pastor in the worship service. I would light candles, or I would move the, the Bible on the altar from one side to the other, or I would help the pastor with communion.
The reason I think I remember it today is because I actually went home and practiced all these tasks in my bedroom. So apparently I was serious about it. But once And again, there was no particular connection to God in any of these events. But milestone, I do count this as the first milestone of God in my life. Fast forward to my high school years.
In junior high, my parents’ standard of living had improved quite a bit, and we moved about 10 miles north to the North Shore of Long Island. And there my parents decided— my second sister arrived. And there my parents decided that this time we would attend attend a congregational church. This was a really big church. It had a big youth program, a big children’s program, a big choir, and also a big youth choir.
And so I joined, and this is where I began my love of all kinds of music. This was also the time when Ed Sullivan was— had the Beatles on TV. So what did I do? I had to get a guitar. I had to go learn to play guitar.
But church for me and, and for a lot of people was more of a social event. It was, well, a great place to meet friends and certainly to meet girls, but it lacked a real component of any spiritual dynamic in my life. Yet a lot— number 2, the second time in my life that I really see the beginning of God My high school experience was pretty average. I went to a very strong academic high school, but I wasn’t much of a student, and my SATs and grades were just okay. I was definitely not headed to the Ivy League.
I was definitely unsure of what I wanted to do with my life, and like everybody else, since everyone else was going to college, I applied to college. And so I went to— I applied to about 5 or 6 colleges that my guidance counselor said, you can get into those. So I remember taking a trip with my dad and visiting several of them in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and I picked one in Ohio, 1,400 students, mostly because the campus was pretty. But God was in all this. It turns out out the school had a historic attachment to the Presbyterian Church, so weekly chapel was required, and chapel was the place where the choir sang.
So I auditioned for and joined a really good a cappella choir, which I enjoyed all 4 years of my college experience. The choir did a lot of really strong classical music of the church. And it went on a multi-state tour every year. But just like high school, I think I was singing about God rather than experiencing him. My other college activities pretty much centered around living at the college radio station and playing in a rock band my roommate and I founded and played in every weekend my last couple of years at college.
Once again, music was around me, but no real impact in my life.
Following, following college, I moved back home, went to work as an on-air engineer at a big radio station in New York. But the problem was the shift was always graveyard, midnight to 8:00 a.m. So I would come home and I would sleep all day. It was a really disjointed, very lonely part of my life. But now I look back and see that God was rescuing me from that.
This was now the year 1969. At graduation, my college deferment from the draft had ended, and in the fall I got the letter, you know, the one that everyone dreaded. Greetings, You’ve been hereby ordered to report for induction into the Armed Forces. Well, being that this was the peak of the Vietnam War, I decided that my options were better if I signed up for 3 years in the Army rather than the required 2, hoping to avoid the dreaded infantry. I’ll never forget reporting to the induction station in New York City.
York. A whole bunch of us were seated in a hallway, and a Marine Corps NCO came up to us and counted off 10 guys, 1 through 10, and said, follow me. And I was number 11. Those guys were drafted into the Marine Corps, and I knew where they were headed. I see a real milestone of God reaching out and protecting me.
Basic training in the Army turned out to It was winter, but winter in South Carolina wasn’t too bad.
Additionally, I missed a lot of the real physical stuff because they kept taking some of us college grads out of basic to interview for, of all things, the White House Communications Agency. Well, I, I wasn’t finally chosen, but I know I missed a few 20-mile hikes.
Following basic training and a short clerical course, most guys did get sent to Vietnam. A few got Germany. I got sent to Sam Houston in San Antonio for 8 weeks of training, this time as a hospital administrator. This was now mid-1970. I finally got sent overseas, but this time it was to Vietnam.
It was to Seoul, South Korea, in what turned out to be a great experience. After my initial assignment as helping patients get admitted to a base hospital, I discovered that AFRTS, Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, was right down the street. So I auditioned with them, and they actually transferred me to the job that I was dreaming to get in the Army. My college experience in radio had finally paid off. That year I got to experience a lot of the Korean culture, which was terrific, and I even got to visit many countries on leave in Southeast Asia.
With the year in the Army overseas ending, but with a year left to serve, the Army sent me back to the States, and this time it was to Fort Ord in Monterey. The Army obviously forgot that I was a radio announcer because they sent me to the new hospital at Fort Ord where I became a director of patient recreation. You see, there were a lot of guys at the time returning from Vietnam with injuries that required multiple surgeries And in between the surgeries, they were fine and they were bored. So I got to do really difficult things like take them to the US Open at Pebble Beach or Laguna Seca Raceway. Anyway, the job was really rough, and I even used the Army’s time in the morning to get a pilot’s license.
But God was still in my ear because at that time, I even I even joined a church in Carmel to sing in their choir. It was now 1973, early in January of ’73, I was discharged from the Army. I briefly worked for Macy’s as a department store trainee, and that got me transferred to Stanford here at Palo Alto to work in 2 departments that are no longer there. Well, I think I know why they were no longer there, released from the job after about 4 months.
Then began the task of looking for another job and how to afford rent. At the time, I had 2 roommates who were into a lot of, well, I would say weird stuff. They were interested in the Rosicrucians. They got me reading a lot of Eastern spiritual Stuff like hypnosis, reincarnation, past lives, books by Edgar Cayce, some even written by people who claimed to be Christian but still with this flavor of religion wrapped up in it. It was all portrayed as being deeply positive and spiritual, but I think God knew I was headed down a dark path, and he said enough, and he intervened to lead me into light, and the light took the form of a new job.
While looking for work following my departure from Macy’s, my father back in New York suggested I look into the industry he was in, which was printing paper, the graphic arts. And amazingly, he knew Christy Cole’s dad, Fred Montgomery, Brad’s father-in-law. And Fred and his sales manager attended this church, Ed Brunzell, and both were believers. God was finally opening the door to my heart.
Ed and I would meet to learn the business, and even over lunch he would try to find out the kind of person I was. And he knew just how to ask the right questions and, and not get discouraged when I told him about the weird religious stuff that I was reading. And he managed to find out about my background in music, and that was the key. Ed said to me, you just have to come and check out the great choir at my church. God was opening a door.
I came, I joined the choir, I sang the music, I listened to the sermons. Well, I didn’t listen to all of them. Some I ducked out after singing in the choir. I go to my car and read the paper. You see, I— this was the era when Bob Deal was leading our music, and Bob never ceased to faithfully tie the message of a new life in Christ with the music we were singing.
But I was cautious about this Jesus, about all these weird people carrying Bibles around. All my experience portrayed a Jesus who just lived 2,000 years ago and taught us good things. Wasn’t religion all about just trying to live a better life? And what’s this about being a sinner? Needing Jesus to pay some price, or the worst thing, asking me to turn my life over to him.
To say the least, there was a battle raging in me. Yet I hung around. I sang, I listened, I even attended a Bible study. I met my future wife, Terri, here in choir, and later I asked her out, and— but she could tell I wasn’t ready to make the all-important decision. And she was one of many who knew I was close but not quite there.
But people were praying for me and including me, and the words I sang in the choir were all around me. And God, in his creativity, then used music in a different way to finally seal the deal with me. The year was now 1975. It was a time when many young people were discovering Christ through what we call the Jesus Movement. It was a spiritual awakening time that inspired its own kind of music.
So over in Palo Alto at PBC, John Fisher released a record album called The New Covenant. His lyrics in the songs and the narrations in between the songs were inspired by the verses we read today, 2 Corinthians chapter 3 and 4. Now, with all my rock band experience, I was immediately intrigued. Here I was seeing words and concepts in pop music that agreed with and explained the words I was singing in choir. Something was changing.
It was like God was revealing himself to me. I’d like to pause and play a little 3-minute clip clip, audio clip, from a narration in that musical. When you hear it, you’re going to hear the speaker as if he were Moses talking to the church today, announcing that there is a new covenant. Let’s listen. I noticed some of you were rather puzzled when I told you why I wore the veil.
That’s because you probably learned in Sunday school that I wore it to protect the people from the glory of my face after being with God on the mountain. Well, now, that’s partially true. That is why I put the veil on. But I fooled the people, and you too, by keeping it on long after that glory had faded away. There’s one person I didn’t fool, though, and that was the Apostle Paul.
He revealed my secret in 2 Corinthians 3:13. He said that I didn’t want the people to see the glory fading and have them lose confidence in me. He was right. But why do you suppose it faded away? Because God brought this great and glorious standard to us, and no one, not even I, could follow it.
The closest we could get was a momentary shine on my face from being in his presence. The glory faded because it represented a basis of living that was never intended to last. I could never have made it through the rest of my life had I not begun to believe that ultimately there would be another way. Ah, yes, how privileged you are! How clearly you see what I saw so dimly— that there is another way.
What I brought to the people was the fading glory of an old covenant. But there was to come a new covenant, a new basis for living. With the old covenant, we had to leave God on the mountain and try to follow his laws in our own limited strength and fail. But now, with the new covenant, you have God’s only Son, Jesus Christ, who is the fulfillment of all the law living in your very hearts. And it is he who gives you the power to become ever everything God wants you to be.
The Old Covenant requires everything of us with no help from God. The New Covenant requires nothing from us because everything comes from God.
But be careful. I’ve been watching you, and I’ve noticed that it’s very easy for you to slip back into the Old covenant. Some of you don’t even realize there is a new one. You’re living the Christian life as if it were a set of rules and regulations for you to follow. You’re trying to change yourself by wearing spiritual masks because you don’t believe that God can really change you.
So now that I heard this, I recognized— I noticed some of you were rather puzzled when I told you I wore the veil. This was the thing that was missing from all my religious experience in my life. It was as if the words that Paul had written 2,000 years ago were written for me. They made me want to run to Christ. Rather than keeping him comfortably at arm’s length.
They were words that took the spiritual veil off of my eyes.
I doubt if there was one single day when this all clicked for me. I— all I know is that one, some— one winter, one day in the winter of 1975, in a service right here, an invitation was given for people to step forward to proclaim that a heart change that happened in their lives. So I was finally willing to acknowledge that I was a sinner, that I needed a Savior. So I walked forward and told that to the pastor. And so, and shortly after that day, I was offered a chance to publicly declare my new faith by getting baptized, just as believers did in the early church and should do today.
Turns out I was embarking that day on a journey that’s now lasted almost 50 years, in which I’ve been so blessed by this relationship with my Lord. God has enabled me to serve him in many ways, but music was the initial key that unlocked the door. I’ll close by mentioning Terry brought up a great song that we used to sing here in church. Church by Bill Gaither, and the— and part of the chorus has these 5 lines: Since I started for the kingdom, since my life he controls, since I gave my heart to Jesus, the longer I serve him, the sweeter he grows. Amen.
We’re going to have a little time now. Steve and and I to talk about some of that, those verses that we— yeah, let’s grab these chairs here. We’ll come forward.
I’ve heard that story now a few times this past week, and it gets more and more encouraging to me. Thank you, Al. Can we thank Al for sharing today?
We wanted to just spend a few minutes talking about what happened after coming to that place where the veil was taken away from your eyes, and just God, the work that he’s been doing over the last several years of your life. One of the things that I see in this passage when I’ve read through it a few times, one of the words that stands out out to me is this idea of glory. Yeah, glorious. And so it talks about how, for instance, the New Covenant described in 2 Corinthians 3 is more glorious than the Old Covenant, something that’s better. Uh, it’s not that the Old Covenant was completely awful, but it— right, it couldn’t do enough to save us and to make us right with God.
But the New Testament is more glorious, and it speaks about not only the New Testament or the New Covenant being more glorious, that Jesus himself is glorious, and that we are being transformed as believers to become more glorious ourselves. Not to draw attention to ourselves, but just the light of Christ in us. How does that resonate with you, that idea of the New Covenant and the, the gloriousness of it, the new life that comes, but also you being transformed as you seek to be conformed more and more to the likeness of Well, I think of the ultimate glory that belongs only to God, but Moses was transmitting this radiance that he got up on the mountain in the presence of God, and he was using it as a tool to heighten his authority as someone who had been with God. And now we, we under the New Covenant, we are with God always because we take the premise is absolutely true that God inhabits— when we come to Christ, he indwells us. He gives us that glory that he has.
We didn’t have to go to a mountaintop or have to receive stone tablets to receive that. We came to the cross. We acknowledged that Christ was the finished work. When he said, it is finished, on the cross, he didn’t mean, I am dead. Dead, he said, my work is finished.
And that glory just permeates the Christian life as imperfectly as it does every day, because we are not released from sin. We are still subject to the, the fall of Adam. But with, with that glory that came through Christ, we now can experience that together with him. Amen. And as we’ve talked about, there’s also times when even though we have a more glorious and a better covenant, how tempting it is for us to go back to the old.
Oh, the scary part. Yeah, yeah. You know, which kind of brings up the subject of man’s continual search through religion, through religious practice, to find God when all along he was finding us. That’s right. Yeah.
And so it’s possible to be in a setting like this day after day, week after week Yeah, and still need to be rescued from our tendency to either go back or to just have the veil removed from our eyes. Yeah, yeah, uh, yeah. And you talk— and the verse also alludes to freedom. That’s right. Freedom is, is such a benefit.
I am such a beneficiary of freedom in that I am freed from the consequence ultimately of sin Yes, I’m freed from the default setting to always sin now, and I’m freed from the worry about, will I really make it to heaven someday? No, Jesus said, for by grace you are saved by faith. It’s not of yourself. Stop boasting about it. I’ve taken care of it.
That’s my— that’s, that’s the Ephesians 2:8-9 according to my version. Yes. But it’s so important to recognize the freedom we have. Yeah, through the new covenant. Yeah, for sure.
And sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re enslaved or that we’re even trapped. And again, that’s where the veil needs to be taken away from our eyes. Well, this also talks about in 2 Corinthians 3 that this new covenant, this new relationship that God gives us when the veil is taken away from our eyes and we turn to the Lord, that it gives us hope as well. Talk about hope. Well, you know, funny, hope is kind of a word that you take the connotation in the modern vernacular and you say hope is wishful thinking.
It’s, I hope I have a million dollars someday. I hope my car doesn’t break down. But this isn’t wishful thinking. Hope is based on the word assurance. That’s right.
The hope we all have in Christ is that you are one of his. He will never leave you or forsake you. If we come to the cross, if we kneel at the cross and say, I am lost, I need you, it’s done. And that hope is just amazingly freeing and amazingly uplifting. And wow.
Yeah, no, we have to keep on going back to it, friends. I hope that you’ll, if nothing else, meditate on verse 16 of 1 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians 3 there in that passage. Verse 16 says, everyone who turns to the Lord has the veil taken away. How do you have the veil over our eyes that we’re born with?
We’re born into this separateness from, from God because of our sin and the wages of our sin being death. We have this veil over our eyes and we cannot remove it through our own actions or by being more religious or by being better than the person on our right or to our left or the person across the street. We need the Lord to take that veil away, and he’s the only one that can do it. I love— don’t you love Dan’s statement? He said, he says, by being— you can’t do it by being good enough, right enough, long enough.
I just love that little triad. Yeah, that’s right. And everyone, everyone who turns to the Lord though has that veil taken away by the grace of God, not because you or I are anything special, but because that is God’s purpose, to open our eyes to see him for who he really is. And so I want to offer to you all an invitation to consider, just as Al was offered an invitation 50 years ago, to enter into a new covenant with the Lord. A covenant— that’s not a word we use a whole lot around here nowadays.
It’s just simply this relationship. Whenever a person talks about a relationship with the Lord. God only ever relates to us in terms of covenant all throughout Scripture and even today. God, God, God is a God who makes covenant. God’s a God who only relates to us through covenant.
And so we need this relationship with the Lord, not simply being religious, but we need him in our lives. And so the way that you receive that is to just simply turn to him and say, Lord, I want you to come into my life, remove the veil from my eyes, eyes, remove the veil from my heart, set me free, come into my life. And we invite all of you who have never done that to do that. And for those who have made that decision at any point in the past, to recognize our penchant and our tendency to go back to the old ways, to the old covenant, doing things through the letter of the law, as if through strict adherence to the letter of the law we’ll be set free. You will not be set free.
You’re only set free by the relationship with the Lord. The, the, the letter of the law kills, but the Spirit brings life and freedom. And that’s what God wants for all of us. Well, Al, would you just close this time here? And our worship team’s going to come up here in just a moment.
Would you close this time in a word of prayer? Lord, we thank you that you have chosen to relate to us through a new way, a way not built on keeping but a way based on meeting you at the foot of the cross and saying, Lord, you did it all. I accept the gift. Thank you, Lord, for this chance to worship you by dealing with important and life-changing concepts today and having the Word of God truly speak to each one of us. We thank you for this time in Christ’s name.
Amen. Amen.
