Tag: bible

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Catching Up: 1 Samuel 7 and ‘Come Thou Fount’

I’m going to look back in our schedule at a selection that fell in the previous week of Year in the Bible. In 1 Samuel the Israelites are having some difficulties with their neighbors the Philistines. At the urging of Samuel, they cry out to their Lord for forgiveness and deliverance, and Samuel intercedes with prayer and sacrifice. God saves his people giving them victory over their enemies.

In response to God’s help and in recognition that God is the one who secured the victory, Samuel sets up a memorial to be a witness for the people. Earlier Israel had matched up against the Philistines and failed, but with God’s help they succeed. Samuel wants the people to remember this so he erected a stone to serve as the memorial and named it Ebenezer, meaning ‘stone of help.’

There’s a song that recounts this story from 1 Samuel and mentions this Ebenezer, but this detail has been lost in more recent rewritings. The song is “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Our hymnal at church uses the 1973 rewrite in which the second stanza goes like this:

Hither to thy love has blessed me
Thou has brought me to this place
And I know thy hand will bring me
Safely home by thy good grace

These lyrics replace in other modern hymnals the lyrics:

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I’m come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.

I can see why someone would rewrite lyrics that might carry no significance if no one knows what Ebenezer is. But that can be a challenge to teach others or inform ourselves of these Bible stories that inspired the hymn writers and shaped their words. When we sing this popular hymn let the words remind us of this story from 1 Samuel, a story of our complete dependence on God’s help and of the way we should memorialize the wonderful help he gives to us.

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Year in the Bible, Quarter 2 Week 6

I’m back from vacation now and here we are in week six of Year in the Bible. We’ll play a little bit of catch up in covering the two weeks of reading on the site, so now is the time to share any questions you may have.

We’re continuing in both 1 Samuel and Romans, with the latter especially packed full of information. This is all the more reason to try coming out to one of the two reading groups to share insights and try to get the most out of these books.

I’ve been hearing some good stories from people who are keeping up with all the readings and even heard today of someone who was able to catch up on three weeks of backlog. What was great is that this catching up wasn’t rushed through just to get it done. We don’t want to read to have just read the Bible. We don’t want to check it off like some chore. We read to learn more of God and to hear his voice speak to us.

So if you are catching up, take your time. You don’t want to rush through and miss what God would have you see.

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Exchanging Good For Bad

Looking at these two passages from 1 Samuel 8 and Romans 1 you see a common thread:

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, “Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the LORD. And the LORD said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.
1 Samuel 8

 

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Romans 1

We lack wisdom and continue to choose things of this world rather than cling to our God. Israel is not content with God as king, instead wanting to be just like everybody else. The people of Romans chose to worship created things, not the creator. How often do we continue to think we know better than God? Why can’t we trust that God will satisfy us perfectly in the way he provides, instead of blazing our own trail? It doesn’t work well in 1 Samuel nor in Romans. Let us gain a bit of wisdom and learn from the mistakes of others.

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Off to the Midwest

Here is a short note on my vacation.

I just want to give a heads up to everyone that I’ll vacationing from posting this week. But that is not a vacation from reading.

We all have many things on our plates and when something new comes along, temporary or permanent, we have to make choices. Can we fit it all on? Does something need to be displaced? These decisions are made, whether we are aware or not. Let’s be assertive in such a process. If we take account of our priorities and step in to make these decisions, then we can protect what we deem important. Reading God’s Word is important.

I’ll keep that up, and post if I get a chance.

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Video Overview of Ephesians with NT Wright

If you wanted to hear an overview of Ephesians before you sat down to read it, or better yet, if having already read it, you wanted to hear someone’s thoughts on the letter and be reminded of what you just read, take a look at this video.

In it NT Wright runs through the entire book of Ephesians in about 15 minutes. Although I’d hesitate to say, as it is titled, that this is a quick tour of Ephesians given that you could probably read the whole book in just about that same amount of time.

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A Book of Grace

Mr. T says, “I Pity the Foolish Galatians”

Paul’s style throughout Galatians is great. He has been a servant of Jesus Christ for years but still writes with such passion and urgency as if he is just coming back from meeting Christ on the way to Damascus. He knows what is at stake with the churches in Galatia who have fallen prey to false teachers and have subsequently turned from the gospel, and in so doing, have turned from the one who has called them.

He make God’s grace an emphasis of the letter–that God has called us, that Christ gave himself for our sins, that he has delivered us, and that any work that is required of us has been accomplished, therefore our works can not contribute to our being saved. He emphasizes grace through and through. Sometimes it is bold and confrontational as he challenges these churches, like when he quickly jumps into the meat of the letter with words like “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ” or when he calls them “fools” for now trying to bring in some sort of works righteousness into a gospel of grace.

But sometimes his lifting up of God’s grace, his movement to us and for us when we cannot merit it, is more subtle. It sounds almost offhanded in 4:9. Paul writes about the difference between where we all once were, enslaved to false gods, compared to being heirs of God. He writes, “But now that you have come to know God, or rather be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, who slaves you want to be once more?”

I love this verse. We are reminded even in knowing God that he has initiated. He is the one who has begun all things and he is also the one who has done all things for us. We have not come to know God, but to be known by him. How humbling is the verse, and for that matter, this whole book? We can never measure up to God nor can we ever merit his love. But he has called us by name, he has made us his own. Because of the death of Jesus Christ we can be freed from slavery to false gods and embrace the free grace of God.

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Paul, an apostle, tweets to you in Galatia

I found this not too long ago and it may be a bit silly, but at the same time it sums up Galatians very succinctly. David Mathis has boiled down the entire six chapters of this letter into 30 tweets. That’s not just 30 sentences, since each tweets is limited to only 140 characters. I think it’s impressive. But don’t go reading this instead of Galatians. Think of it like a good outline.

Here are the first couple:

Jesus gave himself at the cross both for us and for God—for our good and ultimately for God’s glory #Galatians 1:1–5

There is one gospel. One path from which saving grace flows to sinners: Jesus. Every counterfeit is damnable #Galatians 1:6–9

Here is the full 30 tweets at Desiring God.

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A Word on Focus Passages

It has been a few months now since we began reading the Bible in a year, so I thought I’d go back and touch on one of the aspects that people newer to Year in the Bible may not be familiar with. Each week we read quite a bit of text. We average around 23 chapters per week, with a lighter load mixed in for periodic breaks (or times to catch up!). Reading at this pace is difficult at times, and if you share my experience, it is a very different style of reading.

I grew up doing a lot of Bible study in which you take little chunks at a time. This is a great way to do it since you don’t rush and you have the flexibility to wrestle with passages, meditating on them to try to plumb the depths of God’s Word. That’s typically how sermons go, as well, with a preacher spending focused time on one or two passages. This is how I’ve taught Bible studies. For example, before beginning Year in the Bible, we spent just about all of 2011 studying the book of John.

Now that we’ve sped things up considerably you may lose some of that narrowly focused, in-depth time in the Bible. I think we’ve gained something by shifting into this style for a year, and I wrote about it here. Simply put, it is good to step back to see the larger arc of the story of God’s love for us.

We’re doing Year in the Bible in order to gain this larger perspective and to make sure we read and appreciate all of God’s Word. But we don’t want to miss out entirely on what is gained by slow, meditative study. That’s why each week there is a corresponding Bible study. That’s all that the Focus Passages are. I take a short selection from the readings, and prepare some questions and supporting passages. We use them for Bible studies and small groups, but they’re also great for personal study.

If you haven’t already, take a look at them in the This Week section, and to make it even easier, here is the current week’s below:

Q2 W3 Focus Passage Galatians 2