Bounds: peril in orthodoxy

Saturday, December 9, 2017
Meditation:
    At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.”
    He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the day and yet are innocent? I tell you that one greater than the temple is here.”
    —Matthew 12:1-6 (NIV)
Quotation:
    We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It is the clean, clear-cut teaching of God’s Word, the trophies won by truth in its conflict with error, the levees which faith has raised against the desolating floods of honest or reckless misbelief or unbelief; but orthodoxy, clear and hard as crystal, suspicious and militant, may be but the letter well shaped, well named, and well learned, the letter which kills. Nothing is so dead as a dead orthodoxy—too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to pray.
    ... E. M. Bounds (1835-1913), Preacher and Prayer, Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, Dallas, Tex., 1907, p. 20-21 (see the book)
    See also Matt. 12:1-6,10-13; John 6:27,63; Rom. 3:20; 7:6-9; 8:1-2; 2 Cor. 3:6-9
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, cure me of my self-righteousness. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
    search    script    mobile
sub    fb    twt    Jonah    Ruth