Luther on Psalm 51:17

Below is Luther’s thoughts on Psalm 51:17, “Psalm 51:17   The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. ”  Came across them last night, thought I’d share them with you:

“God is not the kind of God who wants to frighten the frightened or break the broken even more, but one who loves the broken, afflicted, and humble, who expects and hears the sighs and voices of the wretched…  In his true form God is a God who loves the afflicted, has mercy upon the humbled, forgives the fallen, and revives the drooping.  How can any more pleasant picture be painted of God.”

“Luther’s exposition of Psalm 51“

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Clement’s Praise of Love

“By love have all the elect of God been made perfect; without love nothing is well-pleasing to God.  In love has the Lord taken us to himself.  On account of the Love he bore us, Jesus Christ our Lord gave his blood for us by the will of God; his flesh for our flesh, and his soul for our souls.”

The First Epistle of Clement AD 96

Paul Zahl Talks Suicide at Liberate

Once again my former professor and friend speaks love and grace into a subject laced with fear and condemnation.  Here’s my highlight of the post:

Life is tragic. Suicide is a serious option. Lots of people have been doing it for a very long time. We just didn’t talk about it much. Now even more people are doing it, and we are, a little, talking about it. It is OK—it is normal—to have the thought. And the moment you know that God forgives you the thought and that He can handle the thought, its impulsive hypnotic grip on you begins to loosen. And you find yourself saying—and more important, feeling—like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind: “Tomorrow is another day.”

For the rest of the post head over to Liberate.

A Glowing Furnace of Love

“Now we have received from God nothing but love and favor, for Christ has pledged and given us his righteousness and everything he has; he has poured out upon us all his treasures, which no man can measure and no angel can understand or fathom, for God is a glowing furnace of love, reaching even from the earth to the heavens.”

Martin Luther March 15, 1522

Paul Zahl and the Greatest Gift

“The greatest gift to the world of the Christian religion, which comes straight from its founder, is the gift of absolving sacrificial love.  This is the gift of mercy.  Whatever words are right to describe it, he [Jesus] regarded his life, in all the Gospel biographies of him, as something lived ‘for you’.”

Paul Zahl “PZ’s Panopticon: An Off-The-Wall Guide to World Religion“

Karl Barth on the Importance of Theology in Everyday Church Life

A great, though slightly wordy, quote from Barth on a common misunderstanding that just won’t go away:

“How disastrously the Church must misunderstand itself if it can imagine that theology is the business of a few theoreticians who are specially appointed for the purpose, to whom the rest, as hearty practical men, may sometimes listen with half an ear, though for their own part they boast of living ‘quite untheologically’ for the demands of the day (‘love’) [Shawn note: something I constantly hear].

Beyond Deserving

“Parental love and, by extension, all mentoring love is authentic and effectual in proportion to the degree that it transcends the commonly assumed principle of the circular exchange.  All true love is a stranger to ‘this for that’…  The love that feeds the heart and mind, does in fact model itself after a dimply perceived sense of the way divine love comes to us–that is, moving in upon us first, without any presupposition of our deserving or earning anything.”

Dorothy W. Martyn “Beyond Deserving“