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July 1 - August 3, 2023
Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision.
The truth of God explained their lives, the grace of God fulfilled their lives, the forgiveness of God renewed their lives, the love of God blessed their lives.
a sharply worded invitation to repentance, asking them to join in the journey.
Every Christian has some variation on this immigrant plot to tell.
Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.
no. It rejects a worship of nature, a religion of stars and flowers,
All the water in all the oceans cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside. Nor can all the trouble in the world harm us unless it gets within us.
None of the things that happen to you, none of the troubles you encounter, have any power to get between you and God, dilute his grace in you, divert his will from you (see Rom 8:28, 31-32).
the mistake of supposing that God’s interest in us waxes and wanes in response to our spiritual temperature.
we use the everyday religion of the Reader’s Digest reprint, advice from a friend, an Ann Landers column, the huckstered wisdom of a talk-show celebrity. We practice patent-medicine religion. We know that God created the universe and has accomplished our eternal salvation. But we can’t believe that he condescends to watch the soap opera of our daily trials and tribulations; so we purchase our own remedies
for that. To ask him to deal with what troubles us each day is like asking a famous surgeon to put iodine on a scratch.
We Christians believe that life is created and shaped by God and that the
life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which God’s grace and love are experienced.
pray that person will one day find the one sufficient reason for going to church, which is God.
Psalm 120 is the psalm of repentance—the one that gets us out of an environment of deceit and hostility and sets us on our way to God. Psalm 121 is the psalm of trust—a demonstration of how faith resists
trusts God to work out his will and “guard you from every evil”
psalm of worship—a demonstration of what people of faith everywhere and always do: gather to an assigne...
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But worship is not forced. Everyone who worships does so because he or she wants to.
There are more people at worship on any given Sunday, for instance, than are at all the football games or on the golf links or fishing or taking walks in the woods.
The psalm singles out three items: worship gives us a workable structure for life; worship nurtures our need to be in relationship with God; worship centers our attention on the decisions of God.
God created you, God redeemed you, God provided for you.
God forgives our sins and makes it possible to live without guilt and with purpose.
in worship we are gathered into a single whole.
the inner unity of what God builds in the act of worship is demonstrated.
How do we get that framework, that sense of solid structure so that we know where we stand and are therefore able to do our work easily and without anxiety? Christians go to worship.
Worship is the place where we obey the command to praise God: “To give thanks to the name of GOD—this is what it means to be Israel.”
A word telling us what we ought to do, and that what we ought to
do is p...
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That is the reality. That is the truth of our lives. God made us, redeems us, provides for us. The natural, honest, healthy, logical response to that is praise to God.
But very often we don’t feel like it, and so we say, “It would be dishonest for me to go to a place of worship and praise God when I don’t feel like it. I would be a hypocrite.” The psalm says, I don’t care whether you feel like it or not: as was decreed (RSV), “give thanks to the name of GOD.”
But I have never said that we worship because we feel like it.
Feelings are great liars.
Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable ...
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It is the word Hebrews would use to ask for a second helping of bread if still hungry, or for directions if lost.
Shalom,
“peace,”
It gathers all aspects of wholeness that result from God’s will being completed in us. It is the work of God that, when complete, releases streams of living water in us and pulsates with eternal life. Every time Jesus healed, forgave or called someone, we have a demonstration of shalom.
shalvah,
psalm is not a lecture; it is a song.
Biblical writers
they are theologians. They
He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan.
He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for the kingdom.
Servitude is specific in its expectation, and what it expects is mercy.
Freedom is on everyone’s lips. Freedom is announced and celebrated. But not many feel or act free. Evidence? We live in a nation of complainers and a society of addicts.
our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master.
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you:
is to bring it out in the open and deal with it. If it is left to work behind the scenes in our hearts, it is a parasite on faith, enervates hope and leaves us anemic in love. Don’t hesitate to put the psalm (or any other Scripture passage) under the searchlight of your disbelief! The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts.
Christian discipleship is hazardous work.
What is hazardous in my life is my work as a Christian.
