... my works are a stink in the nostrils of God

Apart from Him, my works are a stink in the nostrils of God.
Apart from Him, I am so deeply damned that I cannot even conceive the depth of my damnation.
There is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.
The world hates it when we preach this.
It will hate us as it hated the One whom we preach.
And the world is not kidding.
It will not give us a pass, but will execrate and reject us as those who disturb civil tranquility and turn the world upside down.
There is nothing quaint or tolerable about the preaching of the church about sin and grace.
There just isn't. This causes the cross of persecution to be laid upon our shoulders.
So be it.
We preach the cross of Christ so that we are empowered to bear our cross when it comes.
Now and to the ages of ages. Amen.

- not sure where this came from, but I pray the Lord may grant me such wisdom in all the throws of life. 

pmwl

A Prayer for the Treasure in a clay jar

Gracious God, heavenly Father,
You have chosen to place Your eternal treasure – Jesus Christ,
Within me, a clay jar, a broken and most weak clay jar.
While I cannot comprehend such choosing and placement,
I do gratefully pray that this blessed Treasure of Jesus Christ,
Whether He be spilt through cracks and weaknesses of my life and living,
Or He be poured forth by work of Your Spirit in my various vocations,
Grant that this Treasure may enrich the lives of all upon whom He is spilt or poured,
With a closer walk with You in faith.
Let this heaven sent Treasure be spilt upon this feeble prayer that it may be pleasing in Your sight.
Amen.

- pmwl

Are you crying for the truth and proper instruction ....?

A person may pretend to be a Christian while in reality he is not.
As long as he is in this condition, he is quite content with his knowledge of the mere outlines of the Christian doctrines…
However, the moment a person becomes a Christian, there arises in him a keen desire for the doctrine of Christ.
Even the most uncultured peasant who is still unconverted is suddenly roused in the moment of his conversion and begins to reflect on God and heaven, salvation and damnation, etc.
He becomes occupied with the highest problems of human life.
An instance of this kind is afforded by those Jews who flocked to Christ and also by the apostles. Those multitudes heard Christ with great joy and were astonished because He preached with authority and not as did the scribes.
But the majority of these hearers never advanced beyond a certain feeling of delight and admiration.
The apostles, too, were uneducated people, but they acted differently.
They did not stop where the rest stopped, but propounded all manner of questions to Christ…
It is, therefore, quite true what the Apology to the Augsburg Confession says: “Men of good conscience are crying for the truth and proper instruction from the Word of God” … (Mueller, p. 191; Triglot Concordia, p. 290).

—C. F. W. Walther

Treasury of Daily Prayer (Kindle Locations 24221-24226). Concordia Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

bad sermons ...

 This is a repost from a blog: http://letitstet.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/bad-sermons/

It is written by a lay person who is fed up with preachers trying to be something other than the Lord called them to be in the hopes that they'll get done what they Lord called them to do.  Enjoy!

There have been a lot of bad sermons in the world.
Sermons about the Packers’ score, unicorns, global warming, lands of make-believe, funny stories that really aren’t funny at all, and a lot of other topics that leave parishioners willing Jesus to come back before the sermon is over just to make the insanity stop.I’m not a pastor. I don’t know how hard it is to write ten minutes of theological genius each Sunday. I don’t know the sheep in the pew and what they need to hear.
But here is what I do know: pastors have, at best, one hour for church and ten minutes to pack all the Gospely goodness they can into a sermon.
They have ten minutes to cut those of us listening down with Law, apply the sweet salve of the Gospel, and to give us Jesus . . . again and again and again.
This other stuff is all superfluous. It’s filler. It’s what one of my favorite professors said:
This fill-in-the-blank bit is the in thing. (1) It is too late. We all know about it already. (2) It is a Gospel substitute. (3) The world is perishing.
And as if that isn’t reason enough, and although I may not be a pastor, I do know that taking up five minutes of those precious ten describing the latest YouTube video (which I already saw, thanks), recounting the newest movie (which I wouldn’t be caught dead seeing), telling us your kids’ soccer score (which I don’t care about), or attempting to create a bad analogy (which falls apart horribly moments later) is unnecessary and unhelpful.
And let’s be honest: it’s also a waste of time. If I want to watch YouTube videos, I’ll stay home in my office. If I want to see a movie, I’ll go to the theater. If I want to watch a soccer game, I’ll go to one. If I want to hear bad analogies, I’ll argue with someone.
But if it’s Jesus I need, and it is, I’ll go to church. And I’m counting on the pastor there to deliver the goods, the goods that the Internet, the theater, sports, and the world can’t.
I’m not a pastor. I don’t know anything about sermons.
But I am a Lutheran, and I do know this: It ain’t rocket science, and it’s not an atomic secret.
So spare me the Packers’ score, unicorns, global warming, lands of make-believe, and funny stories that really aren’t funny at all, and give me the one thing needful: Just give me Jesus.

... man putting himself at the center of everything.

In his book Worldviews: A Christian Response to Religious Pluralism, Anthony J. Steinbronn writes,

“According to Stott (Between Two Worlds), the missionary task is -

‘faithfully to translate the Word of God into modern language and thought-categories, and to make it present in our day.  However, if we are to build bridges into the real world, and seek to relate the Word of God to the major themes of life and the major issues of the day, then we have to take seriously both the biblical text and the contemporary scene … Only then shall we discern the connections between them and be able to speak the divine Word to the human situation with any degree of sensitivity and accuracy.’

At the heart of this bridge-building activity is a threefold commitment by those who are serious about making disciples of all nations: (1) studying God’s Word; (2) studying one’s target culture; and (3) discerning and constructing missiological bridges that communicate the apostolic message into the hearts and minds of the hearer because “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).”  (Kindle Locations 154-163).

In the study of our culture, Steinbronn identifies what I believe to be the foundation upon all that drives and authorizes much of our culture.  I fear that it is the same thing that is behind and drives the exodus from the true church for the non-denominational churches and gives rise to those who confess to being “spiritual” but not “religious”. 
What is it? HUMANISM!   Steinbronn goes on:

“What Is Humanism? There are three basic humanistic principles that provide the core assumptions of humanism:

NATURALISM – the rejection of the supernaturalist worldview that understands God as the ultimate source of all existence and value.
ANTHROPOCENTRISM - Reuben Abel traces the origin of modern anthropocentric thought to an assertion by Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. (See Reuben Abel, Man is the Measure, New York: Free Press, 1997.)
SCIENTISM – the view that science is the measure of what exists and of what does not exist. Since the Enlightenment period, the Christian truth-claims have had diminishing effectiveness for many people, partly because they have seemed inconsistent with the understanding of the world in modern science.

• Humanism is a system whereby man, beginning absolutely by himself, tries rationally to build out of himself, having only man as his integration point, to find all knowledge, meaning, and value.
• It is ‘the effort of modern man to find the meaning of his life in his own purposes or in his own communities and historical causes.’  Glover, Biblical Origins of Modern Secular Culture, 109.
• In a thoroughly anthropocentric world, there is no room left for God.
• The world spirit of our age, observed Francis Schaeffer, is autonomous man setting himself up as God in defiance of the knowledge and moral and spiritual truth that God has given.
• Humanism is freedom from “any restraint, and especially from God’s truth and moral absolutes.” Schaeffer, Great Evangelical Disaster, 315.
• Humanism, in its most fundamental expression, is man putting himself at the center of everything.

Worldviews: A Christian Response to Religious Pluralism
Anthony J. Steinbronn, (2007-01-01).
Concordia Publishing House. Kindle Edition. (Kindle Locations 439-444).

As much as we need to understand this humanism, it is critical that we understand it to be the most pure, raw and unleashed form of the old man born of original sin in the drivers seat.  As such it is all part of the first illusion Satan cast for Adam and Eve - that they could be like God.  
Truly there is nothing new under the sun. 
May the Lord grant us the wisdom of His Word and Spirit to articulate His Law so as to put the old man to death so that we might speak His Gospel by which He might resurrect a new life in all. 

- pmwl