Bulletin 11.24.24

“The God I believe in isn't short on cash, Mister.” 

― Paul Hewson (Bono), live performance of “Bullet the Blue Sky” (on the 1988 album Rattle and Hum by U2) 

… the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rosseau stated, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A generation of Frenchmen were so convinced by this maxim, they set out to create a perfect society in France. Instead, they created a sea of blood as they strove unsuccessfully to purge wicked elements from their midst. They would have done better to read Luther and realize that man is born in chains, and only God can set him free.

That is the hope to which we can cling even when the world descends into wickedness. Evil should never surprise us. Rather, it is goodness and freedom that are precious gifts, the very substance of grace on planet earth. To the extent that we are not wicked, it is because of grace. That is what it means to have a bound will, and it is why, despite his low view of human nature, Luther could still have great hope for the future. For while he believed in the bondage of the will, he also believed in the resurrection of the dead.

It is also the hope for our society now. Not new methods and therapies, but miracles. For the greatest miracle God ever performed was to set captives free, and He performs it still today.

―  Amy Mantravadi, “(POST) ELECTION DAY HOPE” (on MBird.com; 11.5.24)

Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons – much less secure than non-Christians, because they have too much light to rest easily under the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have. Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They come naturally to hate other cultural styles and other races in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger. They cling desperately to legal, pharisaical righteousness, but envy, jealousy and other branches on the tree of sin grow out of their fundamental insecurity.

― Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life (1979; pp 211-12)

St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians 2.6-10a 

Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete... 

(Prayer)