Froude: duty

Saturday, January 9, 2010
Meditation:
    The LORD is slow to anger and great in power; the LORD will not leave the guilty unpunished. His way is in the whirlwind and the storm, and clouds are the dust of his feet.
    —Nahum 1:3 (NIV)
Quotation:
    [Thomas Carlyle] believed that every man had a special duty to do in this world. If he had been asked what specially he conceived his own duty to be, he would have said that it was to force men to realize once more that the world was actually governed by a just God; that the old familiar story, acknowledged everywhere in words on Sundays and disregarded or openly denied on week-days, was, after all, true. His writings, every one of them, ... were to the same purpose and on the same text—that truth must be spoken and justice must be done; on any other conditions, no real commonwealth, no common welfare, is permitted or possible.
    ... James A. Froude (1818-1894), Life of Carlyle [1884], New York: Scribner, 1904, p. 240 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, make me a means by which You awaken the world. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Beginning the 15th year of CQOD

Dear friends of CQOD,
    Today marks the 14th anniversary of the Christian Quotation of the Day. A lot has changed in that time, and the Internet itself has evolved into a far different medium compared to its beginnings. The most recent year has been a particularly exciting time.
    CQOD has been further integrated with the Internet through the CQOD blog, RSS, HTML email, the Bible Gateway, Facebook, Twitter, mobile CQOD, the portable CQOD for your website through Javascript, and more than anything else, Google Books. Because whole books are now available online from the classics, I hope CQOD encourages you to look at the work of (some of) these classical spiritual writers. As new technologies emerge, I hope you will write to me about any possible application to the ministry of CQOD.
    For you preacher creatures (students, too), there are some new features that have reached such a point of maturity as to be useful. The subject index has 546 subjects listing almost 8000 references to salient quotations. Further, the Scripture index lists 4500 references from almost 2700 distinct Bible passages. That’s enough to make it likely that you will find the passage you are preaching on next week (even if it is Nahum 1:3). You might find some quotations that serve some purpose in your sermon preparation. These indices will continue to expand in the coming years, God willing.
    Speaking of God’s will, the times we live in are making for anxious lives and shaking the foundations for people all around us, and perhaps for ourselves or those we love, as well. For those who are worried about the immediate or extended future, we have this: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Heb. 13:8 NIV). We are not to place our trust in princes of any kind, even when, as in democratic countries, we are the princes. Our confidence belongs in the One who rules in justice and might, Whose word is truth, and Who will make all things right. It is as true in this troubled new year as in past ones, and the authority of God is no more to be doubted in these times than any other.
    I hope that you will join me in the effort and intent to make this a year of priestly intercession, Godly trust, and active charity. Let this be the year when those gifts, which are given to all believers in the Body, grow to full maturity. For, we may let “the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea” (Ps. 46:2), but those who fear Him will not be shaken. We will be borne up by the “river whose streams make glad the city of God.” That river is the continuous flow of His word into our lives, through the power and presence of the Spirit. I will have more to add on this subject in the coming weeks.
    May the God of mercy grant you a happy and holy new year.
    RMA

Luther: the priesthood of all Christians

Friday, January 8, 2010
    Commemoration of Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Pete Fleming, martyrs, Ecuador, 1956
Meditation:
    Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name.
    —Hebrews 13:15 (NIV)
Quotation:
    Indeed, all Christians are priests, and all priests are Christians. Worthy of anathema is any assertion that a priest is anything else than a Christian.
    ... Martin Luther (1483-1546), Church and Ministry II, as v. XL of Works of Martin Luther, v. XL, Concordia Pub. House, 1986, p. 19 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, speak, for Your church is listening to You. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Minear on Brahms' German Requiem

Thursday, January 7, 2010
Meditation:
LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.
Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity
    —Psalm 39:4-5 (KJV)
Quotation:
    [Johannes] Brahms chose his own texts [for his German Requiem] from Luther’s Bible to illustrate the Protestant conviction that man must hear and respond to God’s word in man’s own language, and that every believer must be free to deal with the Biblical text apart from priestly veto... For the word “German” he would gladly have substituted the word “human” because he was concerned to comment on “the primary text of human existence,” finding there, as in the Bible, the universal themes of suffering and joy.
    ... Paul S. Minear (1906-2007)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You are the Father of all, and all belong to You. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Lecky: an ideal character

Wednesday, January 6, 2010
    EPIPHANY
Meditation:
    [Jesus:] Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
    —Matthew 5:37 (NIV)
Quotation:
    It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which through all the changes of eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the highest pattern of virtue but the strongest incentive to its practice; and has exerted so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
    ... W. E. H. Lecky (1838-1903), History of European Morals, v. II [1869], New York: D. Appleton, 1910, p. 8-9 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, our inheritance from You is rich beyond measure. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Nida: an unjustified analysis

Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Meditation:
    Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
    —Acts 2:46-47 (NIV)
Quotation:
    It is quite true that the Greek word ekklesia comes from two roots which mean literally “called out.” Many preachers have made use of this fact to point out helpful spiritual implications, and yet, by New Testament times, the word carried no such denotation as “called out.” It was simply the word for “assembly” or “congregation.” It so happened that in the Greek city-states an assembly of the citizenry resulted from the people being called out of their city and summoned from their farms to participate in such gatherings. Even though the etymology of the word remains, its real meaning is just “assembly,” and a Greek-speaking person of New Testament times would be no more inclined to understand ekklesia in its original etymological value of “called out” than we today would recognize “God be with you” in “good-by,” which, as we may learn from the dictionary, was derived from the longer phrase.
    ... Eugene A. Nida (b. 1914), God’s Word in Man’s Language, Harper, 1952, p. 61 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, we praise You for the promise of Your presence in the assembly. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Packer: the anchor

Monday, January 4, 2010
Meditation:
    And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.
    —1 John 5:20 (KJV)
Quotation:
    If we think that Jesus did not rise, but “lives” and “reigns” only in his followers’ memories and imaginations, and is not actively and objectively “there” in the place of power, irrespective of whether he is acknowledged or not, we should give up hope of our own rising, and of Jesus’ public return, and admit that the idea of churches and Christians being sustained by the Spirit-giving energy of a living Lord was never more than a pleasing illusion. And, in that case, we ought frankly to affirm that, though the New Testament is an amazing witness to the religious creativity of the human spirit, its actual message is more wrong than right, more misleading than helpful; and we must reconstruct our gospel accordingly. Only a weak, muddled, or cowardly mind will hesitate to do this.
    ... James I. Packer (b. 1926), “Jesus Christ the Lord”, in The Lord Christ, John Stott, ed., vol. 1 of Obeying Christ in a Changing World, John Stott, gen. ed., 3 vol., London: Fountain, 1977, p. 34 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, lead us out from under the spreading clouds of doubt. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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Fuller: another fool for Christ

Sunday, January 3, 2010
    Commemoration of Gladys Aylward, Missionary in China, 1970
Meditation:
    All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove [Jesus] out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
    —Luke 4:28-30 (NIV)
Quotation:
    George Brush, the hero of [Thornton Wilder’s] “Heaven’s My Destination,” a textbook salesman and evangelist extraordinary, is the innocent fool, in the kindliest sense of both the noun and the adjective. He is striving to be the fool in Christ, sowing the inevitable amazement, consternation and wrath that must ensue when Christ’s fool runs at large among the worldly wise.
    ... Edmund Fuller (1914/15-2001), “Thornton Wilder: the Notation of the Heart”, originally in American Scholar, September, 1959, pp 210-217, included in Books with Men Behind Them, New York: Random House, 1959, p. 49-50 (see the book)
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, you show that we cannot hold onto our friends’ good opinion of us and the Gospel. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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