Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus

Come, thou long-expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.

Israel's strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art:
dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart.

Born thy people to deliver,
born a child, and yet a king,
born to reign in us for ever,
now thy gracious kingdom bring.

By thine own eternal Spirit
rule in all our hearts alone;
by thine all-sufficient merit
raise us to thy glorious throne.

Words: Charles Wesley (1707-1788), 1744

"Homemaking -– being a full-time wife and mother –- is not a destructive drought of uselessness but an overflowing oasis of opportunity; it is not a dreary cell to contain your talents and skills but a brilliant catalyst to channel creativity and energies into meaningful work; it is not a rope for binding your productivity in the marketplace, but reins for guiding your posterity in the home; it is not an oppressive restrain of intellectual prowess for the community, but a release of wise instruction to your own household; it is not the bitter assignment of inferiority to your person, but the bright assurance of the ingenuity of God's plan for complementarity of the sexes, especially as worked out in God's plan for marriage; it is neither limitation of gifts available nor stinginess in distributing the benefits of those gifts, but rather the multiplication of a mother's legacy to the generations to come and the generous bestowal of all God meant a mother to give to those He entrusted to her care."

-Dorothy Kelley Patterson, Where's Mom? The High Calling of Wives and Mothers, pg. 47

Words

"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
George Eliot

Their religion is a great, soft cushion.

Rev John Stott of London, wrote, “Thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so-called 'nominal Christianity.' In countries to which Christian civilisation has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved; enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism.”

John R.W. Stott “BASIC CHRISTIANITY.” IVF 1958 p108.

Especially Preaching - not my own writing and very insightful

The shorter catechism (#89) says that the Spirit of God makes "the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, and of building them up in holiness and comfort, through faith, unto salvation."

Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:11 that Jesus gave pastors and teachers (or, more literally, pastor-teachers) to His people. Why? V. 14 - so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. In other words, Jesus gave pastor-teachers because we need them. Because on our own, we would be blown every which way and would not reach maturity in Christ. The fact that Jesus gives preachers - and that we didn't come up with this idea on our own - means that our responsibility to the preaching we receive on Sunday mornings is a responsibility we have to Jesus, the giver of the gift. Contrary to popular thought, it was Jesus' opinion that we do need preachers to understand the Word of God. Not as mediators, but as teachers. And not that we are ignorant on our own, but that we won't normally achieve the maturity and protection Jesus has planned for us apart from the church's preaching and teaching.

I just read Acts 15 this morning...

"Acts 15, where the council of the church decided what the Scriptures taught regarding circumcision and handed their decision down as authoritative. Again, the Scriptures lead us to seek balance. Real authority, the primacy of preaching yet maintaining the practice of submissive discernment."

More here by a man of good and Godly counsel:
http://measureofmydays.blogspot.com/2008/02/especially-preaching.html
http://measureofmydays.blogspot.com/2008/02/more-on-primacy-of-preaching.html
http://measureofmydays.blogspot.com/2008/02/just-once-more.html

Heard and Noted:

"We do not merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it."
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

"God made the earth by His power." Jeremiah 10:12-13

I sing the mighty power of God, that made the mountains rise,
That spread the flowing seas abroad, and built the lofty skies.
I sing the wisdom that ordained the sun to rule the day;
The moon shines full at God’s command, and all the stars obey.

I sing the goodness of the Lord, who filled the earth with food,
Who formed the creatures through the Word, and then pronounced them good.
Lord, how Thy wonders are displayed, where’er I turn my eye,
If I survey the ground I tread, or gaze upon the sky.

There’s not a plant or flower below, but makes Thy glories known,
And clouds arise, and tempests blow, by order from Thy throne;
While all that borrows life from Thee is ever in Thy care;
And everywhere that we can be, Thou, God art present there.

Isaac Watts, Di­vine and Mor­al Songs for Child­ren, 1715.