King David's Prayer

Therefore David blessed the LORD in the presence of all the assembly. And David said:

"Blessed are you, O LORD, the God of Israel our father, forever and ever.

Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours.

Yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all.

Both riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all.

In your hand are power and might, and in your hand it is to make great and to give strength to all.

And now we thank you, our God, and praise your glorious name.

1 Chronicles 29:10-13 ESV

photo credit: regeniabrabham

Stock Up

Concordia Publishing House, in honor of its 140th anniversary, is having a 140-hour sale through September 14th. STOCK UP! Selected books are 50% off or more.

Examples:

- Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, $14.

- The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology, by Charles Porterfield Krauth, $15.

- A Seminary in Crisis, by Paul Zimmerman, $20.

Happy shopping.

Where’s Waldo?

Rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated. I’ve had several people call or email wondering if I’m all right. Yep, I’m fine. I’ve been taking a break from blogging to spend time with the family this summer and attempt to pare down the “honey-do” list. I’ve been successful in the former and not so successful in the latter. I get one thing knocked off the honey-do list and two more pop up. I guess that means I shouldn’t do any of them, to keep the list shorter. Well, maybe that wouldn’t fit in with my call to be a husband now would it.

Just to eat up a little extra time, I put a new hard drive in our oldest computer, and put a new hard drive and display screen in my laptop, which is now my old laptop, since I just bought a new one. Now I can blog in style. Sorry Mac fans, it’s a PC. At least one of the aviation programs I’m likely to use wouldn’t run on a Mac, even if it were running Windows. (Who would do that to begin with?)

Another speed bump I need to tackle is my annual training at work next month, which takes up two or three weeks between preparation, ground school, and simulator.

One down side to taking a break is that I haven’t been keeping up too much on reading the blogs I normally read either. I just checked my Google reader - 709 unread posts. Hmm... Time to do a little speed reading. Hope y’all had a good summer.

How Is Our Spirtual Life Preserved?

Since all our daily sins automatically register in our conscience as guilt, our spiritual life is preserved only in this way that the handwriting of our guilt is daily and continuously blotted out by faith in the reconciliation which Christ has accomplished.

Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Vol. II (St. Louis: Concordia, 1950) 411.

A Bag Full of Mercy, Grace, and Love

Quoting Pastor Matt Harrison on the June 30th Issues, Etc. segment on mercy:

God is mercy. He is compassion. He is eternal love, and in Jesus Christ that mercy and compassion is planted in our hearts. We’re forgiven, we cannot help but forgive. We’ve been loved, we cannot help but love. Luther says, “When you go to church, you come with an empty sack, and in the confession and absolution, you confess ‘Dear God, I’ve got an empty sack,' and God piles it full with forgiveness, and He gives more forgiveness and grace and mercy in the lessons, and then the sermon preaches you full of forgiveness and grace and forgives you, fills your bag up. You go to the Lord’s Supper - ‘take and eat for the forgiveness’ of your sins. Your bag is even heaped fuller, and then at the end of the service, ‘The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you His peace.' Your bag is packed full overflowing. You tie it up and you say ‘Amen, Amen, Amen, it’s in the bag.’ And you leave church, and then you meet somebody who sins against you or needs something, or your children, you can’t help but open the bag and say ‘Here. I’ve got a bag full of mercy and grace and love. I can’t help but give it to you - it’s who I am. That’s what God has created me to do. I’ve been given this rich treasure,’ and you come back to church the next week and you pray, you say in the confession, ‘Dear God, I got an empty sack.’”

Pastor Harrison is Executive Director of LCMS World Relief and Human Care, and author of the book Christ Have Mercy: How to Put Your Faith in Action, and the soon to be released At Home in the House of My Fathers. His personal blog is titled “Mercy Journeys with Pastor Harrison.”

VBS 2009 - Jesus Makes All Things New

120 little sinners at our church this week for Vacation Bible School - every one with an angelic face. It's great to see such enthusiasm on those little faces as they hear and see the Gospel. Here's a few photos.

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Take Hold of the Promise

Quoting Dr. Martin Luther from his lectures on Galatians:

Therefore the afflicted conscience has no remedy against despair and eternal death except to take hold of the promise of grace offered in Christ, that is, this righteousness of faith, this passive or Christian righteousness, which says with confidence: “I do not seek active righteousness. I ought to have and perform it; but I declare that even if I did have it and perform it, I cannot trust in it or stand up before the judgment of God on the basis of it. Thus I put myself beyond all active righteousness, all righteousness of my own or of the divine Law, and I embrace only that passive righteousness which is the righteousness of grace, mercy, and the forgiveness of sins.” In other words, this is the righteousness of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, which we do not perform but receive, which we do not have but accept, when God the Father grants it to us through Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther, Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann. vol. 26, Lectures on Galatians, CD-ROM (Saint Louis: CPH, 1999).

Is Your Sword Blunted?

Worn out from passing all of those resolutions on evangelizing this or that demographic at your District Convention? Tired of hearing Evangelical speeches about “vision” and reaching the “unchurched?” Worried that your ministry may not be “effective?” Feeling like your Confessional sword has been blunted a little? Not to worry. Time for a little “revitalization!” Listen to Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller, the Pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Aurora, Colorado and co-host of Table Talk Radio, on this excellent Issues, Etc. segment, where he answers the question: “Is it possible to care more about evangelism than the Evangel?”

It’s 20 minutes in length. Go ahead, give it a listen. I guarantee you your sword will be sharpened up after listening to this, restoring it to its pre-convention knife-edged readiness. You’ve got 20 minutes don’t ya?





photo credit: th3ph17

Put the Sacraments Back Together Again

In yesterday’s blog post, Pastor David Petersen spoke of the Sacraments, and how they should be seen together as our life in Christ. To take his thought a step further, we often live our lives as though we’re disconnected from the Sacraments altogether, even in the Church. The old Adam in us likes to bypass the Sacraments, in favor of our own plans, forgetting where our life comes from. Passive righteousness is shunned in favor of our own active righteousness. We tend to focus on our own activities and wander from that which nourishes us. The Lord’s Supper becomes a sideshow on the midway that we might stop in to see on our way to the main event. But once we get to the big top, it’s all about us.

The “all about us” show isn’t always advertised as such though – it’s usually disguised by a colorful painting on the side of the tent, along with a guy on stilts in a top hat holding a bamboo cane, drawing attention to the painting. The message trumpets what we’re going to accomplish as foot soldier’s in the army of the Lord. But the message, which may revolve around the Gospel, doesn’t preach the Gospel. It’s a message of Law instead, designed to motivate you to do something.

Our recently concluded District Conventions illustrate how we’re being drawn into the Law-driven big top. Here are several of the themes from this year’s Conventions:

• "The Love of Christ urges us on"
• "Make a World for Christ My Goal"
• "Transformed for His Mission"
• "Faith Aflame: Communicating the Gospel"
• "Ignited in Christ to be Ablaze in HIS Mission!"
• "Called Into Partnership"
• "Chosen for a Purpose"

Aren’t we forgetting something here? Are we so far off-topic that we can no longer properly distinguish Law and Gospel? Yes, we are. Our life in Christ revolves around Him and his life giving gifts first, not us and our mission. Get that message backwards, and you’re wasting your time.

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A Synod, with Sacraments

Quoting from Pastor David H. Petersen’s article “A Sacramental Church: A Call for Reformation” in the latest edition of Gottesdienst (Vol. 17, No. 2; Trinity 2009). Reprinted with permission:

Dr. Norman Nagel is reported to have once quipped that the LCMS is not truly a liturgical church, but simply a church with a liturgy. We might say the same thing of the Sacraments. We aren’t so much a sacramental church as we are a church with various means of grace, with Sacraments. Our theology isn’t sacramental. It is scholastic, a collections [sic] of lists and categories and ways that God might work or interact with us.

This sort of confusion abuses the gifts of God by trying to hold them equal. In communist style we equalize by lowering everything to the lowest common denominator and running after bare minimums. Christians who come to the Mass “for the sermon” miss the point of the sermon, which should, ideally, lead to the Sacrament. This is not to say that one gift is better or more necessary than another. Each gift has its place and time. Each stands in relation to the other. None is a substitute for another or stands alone. They all serve together to bestow the fullness of grace. For all the gifts of God flow from Christ, and Christ, our Lord, is one. To divide the Sacraments is tantamount to dividing Christ.

The Lord creates faith and makes for Himself a people by Holy Baptism. He absolves the baptized in the Holy Absolution and preaching. He then gives Himself to them and joins them to Himself in the Sacrament of the Altar. We misunderstand and misappropriate these things when we try to understand them separately or as avenues of grace rather than as grace itself. When they are seen together, as our life in Christ, the Holy Communion is obviously the center of our faith. This is not because it is greater than the other gifts God bestows, but because it is where the Lord Incarnate comes to us and enters our flesh in His flesh.

The ceremonies of the Mass indicate something of high points and distinctions. The Lord comes to us in the reading of the Bible, preaching, and in the Absolution. So also does He come to us in His crucified and risen flesh in the Holy Communion. We stand for the reading of the Holy Gospel because the Gospels contain the very words and actions of our Incarnate Lord. This is not a confession against the rest of the Bible. Instead it is a confession of the significance and centrality of the Incarnation. To place the Lord’s Supper in the highest position ceremonially and theologically is like standing for the reading of the Gospel. it is not a confession against the other gifts. it does not lower them or dismiss them. It simply recognizes and confesses the centrality of the Incarnation. This is how God has loved and saved us in the Son. This is the fulfillment of all prophecy, the culmination of history and creation. Thus does the Holy Communion have more elaborate ceremonies than preaching or the reading of the Scriptures. So also it should have a more central place in our theology and piety.