Psalm 119:64
God’s grace precedes His laws, illustrating that divine love and covenant obligations are gifts. True holiness comes from God’s actions, not self-sufficiency.
Psalm 119:29 – Grace Me with Your Instruction
Deceitful ways turn aside from meand graciously give me your instruction [Torah]. It’s hard to read this verse when we use “law” as the English gloss for Torah. Graciously give me your rules? Graciously let me live in your rules? But that none of those are actually bad translations. Law or instruction, and the Torah…
Psalm 119:27 – From Precepts to Wonders
Explain to me the way of your preceptsand I will tell of your wonderful acts. We tend to think of particular rules or principles for living as fairly boring, somewhat annoying, and often unreasonably restrictive. We seem to live in a debate between what we ought to do and what we actually do. Even the…
Psalm 119:22 – Reproach and Contempt
Remove from me reproach and contemptfor I have guarded your testimonies. Meditating on a single verse each day means I often get somewhat out of context. But while context is important, literature can easily suggest other lines of thinking. Folks in various classes I’ve taught have called me the king of the rabbit trail because…
Psalm 119:17 – Order of Operations
Deal fully with your servant,So I may live and keep your word. There are numerous translation questions, including differences of opinion about precisely what the word I translate “deal fully with” actually means in this context. Another good option is what Bob MacDonald does in Seeing the Psalter: Grow your servantI will live and keep…
Stephen S.J. Hill on Our Much Loved Identity
It is very difficult to get me to watch any video. Yes, that’s true, even though I create videos and do online interviews on multiple subjects. It’s not my medium of choice. Getting me to watch an hour extends into the impossible. But I watched this one … I recommend that everyone, but especially those…
Love Is All You Need
Starting on Martin Luther King’s birthday, we have seen a number of quotes advocating love. I intended to post something that day, but as I frequently do I got diverted. I wrote something about this long ago. It’s unfortunate that love has become a sort of cliche for a benevolent feeling combined with inaction. We…
Psalm 19 for Sunday School
I’m teaching Sunday School this coming week, and the class uses the Daily Bible Study from Cokesbury. The first scripture for the week is Pslam 19:1-6. The lesson focuses on creation, so it’s not surprising that only the first six verses are used. Some scholars believe that Psalm 19 is two separate compositions. These first…
Video Interview for Quit Christianity
Their title may not tell you precisely what they’re up to, but I’ll let you figure that out by visiting. I was asked to answer a few questions for a video, with a key text of Romans 4:3. Here’s the video. It’s nice when someone truly skilled puts the final result together! https://youtu.be/jEsyvEGeCu4 There’s lots…
Grace and the Book of Hebrews
In my experience, Hebrews has provided a wealth of texts for sermons that call for works and human effort. Pride of place, perhaps, should be held by the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection, for which one of the central texts is Hebrews 6:1. No matter how many times Wesley affirmed Christian perfection as a gift…