Saphir: teaching the unity of God

Saturday, July 25, 2009
    Feast of James the Apostle

Meditation:
    “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
    When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
    —Mark 12:32-34 (NIV)

Quotation:
    In the absence of so many vital points—the spiritual understanding of the Law, and the consciousness of sin, the unity and all-sufficiency of Scripture, and the expectation of the Messiah—we cannot wonder that the idea of God, as it lived in faithful Israel of old, was also obscured. Instead of the living, loving, self-manifesting God of the Old Testament Israel now took hold of the abstract idea of the unity, or rather the unicity, of God, as if that were God. Before—when they lived in communion with God, when God was known to them as a Person, speaking, acting, blessing, who had chosen them, who was educating them, and who was going to fulfill His promises—they declared, in opposition to the idolatrous nations that surrounded them, that this God of Israel was one God, that there are not many gods; but when they lost communion with God, in order to show what distinguished them from the nations of the earth, and especially from Christians, they emphasized that God in Himself was only one Person, and not as He is revealed to us in the Scripture: Sender, Sent, and Spirit. It is the boast of the modern Jewish synagogue that their great mission is to testify to the world the unity of God. But it is a striking fact that the Gentile nations who have, since the dispersion of Israel, been converted from idolatry, have been influenced, not by the synagogue, but by the congregations of Jesus Christ, and were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost... It is one thing to believe in justification by faith, it is another thing to be justified by faith; and so it is one thing to believe in God, who is One, and it is another to believe in the numerical abstraction, in the mere idea of unicity.
    ... Adolph Saphir (1831-1891), Christ and Israel, London: Morgan and Scott, 1911 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You are not remote from Your creation and Your people.

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Thomas a Kempis: our need of God

Friday, July 24, 2009
    Commemoration of Thomas à Kempis, priest, spiritual writer, 1471

Meditation:
    So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.
    —Romans 7:21 (NIV)

Quotation:
    When we are troubled with temptation and evil thoughts, then we see clearly the great need we have of God, since without him we can do nothing good... No one is so good that he is immune to temptation; we will never [in this life] be entirely free of it.
    ... Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471), Of the Imitation of Christ [1418], Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1877, I.xii-xiii, p. 45-46 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, I fail in combatting sin. Without You every minute, I am lost.

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Chapin: eternal significance

Thursday, July 23, 2009
    Commemoration of Bridget of Sweden, Abbess of Vadstena, 1373

Meditation:
    Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time--God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen.
    —1 Timothy 6:12-16 (NIV)

Quotation:
    Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
    ... Edwin Hubbel Chapin (1814-1880), paraphrased from Duties of Young Men, Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1853, p. 160 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, though we are weak and sinful, You use Your people for greater good than we could ever intend.

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Pinnock: the proofs of theism

Wednesday, July 22, 2009
    Feast of Mary Magdalen, Apostle to the Apostles

Meditation:
    Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
    —Genesis 1:26 (NIV)

Quotation:
    It has been observed that nowhere does Scripture attempt a deductive argument for the existence of God, like those of Thomas Aquinas, for example. This fact ought not to be taken to imply, however, that such an effort is unjustifiable and necessarily useless. The distinctiveness of the Biblical approach is its immediacy. The theistic proofs for God’s existence constitute a laborious, painstaking, and patient justification of theism. They attempt to set forth in rational argument what the soul grasps intuitively. But for the Bible, the deepest proof of God’s existence is just life itself. The knowledge of God and man’s knowledge of himself are closely intertwined. If only God could be written off neatly and cleanly, how simple things would be! But the hound of heaven pads after us all. He does not let us go. There is no escaping him...; when least expected, he closes in. The explanation for this is man’s creation in the image of God. His identity is known theologically, in relation to the God who as a man in his true significance cannot survive permanently in isolation from his Maker. Without God, man is the chance product of unthinking fate, and so of little worth. The current loss of identity and the emergence of the faceless man in today’s culture are testimony to the effects of losing our God. The knowledge of God is given in the same movement in which we know ourselves.
    ... Clark H. Pinnock (b. 1937), Set Forth Your Case, Chicago: Moody Press, 1971, p. 108-109 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You demonstrate Your presence in life.

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Carmichael: user rather than used

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Meditation:
    Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
    —Hebrews 2:14,15 (NIV)

Quotation:
    If I crave hungrily to be used to show the way of liberty to a soul in bondage, instead of caring only that it be delivered; if I nurse my disappointment when I fail, instead of asking that to another the word of release may be given, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
    ... Amy Carmichael (1867-1951), If [1938], London: SPCK, 1961, p. 52 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, we must be taught still more about neighbor-love.

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Willard: a conversational relationship with God

Monday, July 20, 2009
    Commemoration of Bartolomè de las Casas, Apostle to the Indies, 1566

Meditation:
    We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
    —1 John 4:13 (NIV)

Quotation:
    Our union with God—his presence with us, in which our aloneness is banished and the meaning and full purpose of human existence is realized—consists chiefly in a conversational relationship with God while we are each consistently and deeply engaged as his friend and colaborer in the affairs of the kingdom of the heavens.
    ... Dallas Willard (b. 1935), Hearing God, Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999, p. 56 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, I rejoice that I am no longer alone.

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Self-knowledge without shame

Sunday, July 19, 2009
    Feast of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, & his sister Macrina, Teachers, c.394 & c.379

Meditation:
    [Jesus:] For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.
    —Luke 8:17 (NIV)

Quotation:
    All angels, all saints, all the devils, all the world shall know all the deeds that ever thou didest, though thou have been shriven of them and contrite. But this knowledge shall be no shame to thee if that thou be saved, but rather a witness to God—right as we read of the deeds of Mary Magdalene [as] her witness to God and not to her reproof.
    ... Middle English Sermons, Woodburn O. Ross, ed. by H. Milford, London: Oxford University Press, 1940 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, there is nothing that You cannot transform into a blessing.

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