Psalm 119:128 – All
God’s call is to keep all of the law all of the time, completely. Ouch!
Psalm 119:71 – The Blessing of Hardship
It was good for me to have suffered hardshipso I could learn your statutes. We tend to complain a good deal over hardship. We don’t like it. We ask why God allows it, or perhaps does it. But hardship is worked into the basic structure of the universe. That’s where we get the law of…
Psalm 119:43 – Power to Speak Truth
Never take the word of truth from my mouthfor I place my hope in your judgments. Tomorrow morning I’ll be leading a discussion of John Wesley in my Sunday School class. The notes in the book we’re using point especially to Wesley’s view of prevenient grace and to Christian perfection. It’s interesting to take these…
Look to Jesus (Hebrews 12:2)
The other day I was just waking up and realizing that I faced a challenging day. I decided to do a little scripture reading before even getting up. I chose to read a language I read only very slowly and with difficulty (Syriac), because that usually gives me more time to meditate. I have a…
The Danger of Making Things Tougher
I don’t spend a great deal of time talking about it, but following my MA in Biblical and cognate languages, I took one quarter in a MA in Theoretical Linguistics program. I had a full ride fellowship with a stipend, but after one quarter I resigned the fellowship and headed for more interesting places and…
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…
Repentance in Hebrews 6:4-6
When I talked about structure, I mentioned that I’d write a follow-up after my Wednesday night class. Here’s the rundown, though I plan to keep it brief. I’m indebted to David Alan Black for the basic note about the participles in this passage, and in a scholarly article I would need to cite a number…
Wanting to Be Right Theologically
I work on a heavy schedule, and as someone who is self-employed, with two distinct lines of business, I very rarely see a blank to-do list. In fact, now that I think about it, it has been several years since I finished a day and could say I was done. I identify a couple of…
Hebrews: Authorship and 6:1-8
Thomas Hudgins links to a post in which someone supports Luke as the author of Hebrews. The post to which he links indeed supports Luke, but I find a number of other things somewhat more interesting. The topic is Hebrews 6:1-8, one of the more controversial passages in scripture, and the title is An Enduring…