Readings and Ideas for the week of July 15th, 2024

Sermon Notes

Douglas Wilson, listened to on July 14, 2024 
On Loving the Standard (Biblical Child Discipline in an Age of Therapeutic Goo #9)          Deuteronomy 6:1-9

The greatest commandment is embedded in instruction on child-rearing. 

Loving the standard is a higher calling than simply obeying the standard.

Your actual theology is what you do. These statutes for Israel were to be lived out in the land He was giving them.

In Ephesians 6:1, Paul repeats the commandment and expands the promise: "Children, obey your parents, honor your father and mother, that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth" which now encompasses more than the land of Israel.

Parents are to diligently teach their children, dominated by living out the Word of God. Love is indeed a thing that can be taught.
Whatever you are manufacturing in your life and heart is what you are exporting or giving to your children.

From your heart, to the mouth, to the environment of the home.
Consistent Christian living in the home with humility, not perfection, is the goal.
God is at work in us by His Holy Spirit and we work out what He works into us. If it doesn't grow organically, then it is not obedience.
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Doug Wilson used a phrase in this sermon (transgenerational transitions) that I had never heard him use before and it summed up what I have been thinking about as our children become young adults and we look to what comes next in the life of our family. 

I have been thinking of how in some families the faith of one generation is successfully passed on intact and enlarged and in other families, the faith is ignored or severely altered and produced disunity. I was also thinking of how living generations stay in fellowship and unity with one another even over distance.
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Luke 24:37-43

They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, "Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have." When He had said this, He showed them His hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, He asked them, "Do you have anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish and He took it and ate it in their presence.

I never noticed before how Jesus doesn't say that they are foolish for believing in ghosts. He instead offers His risen body as proof that He can't be a ghost because they can see and touch his real body and then the second test is that He eats with them. A few years back, I realized that I had been more affected by pop culture ideas like Ghosts aren't real but that the Biblical accounts do not point in that direction. On the The Theology Pugcast, they have talked about the spiritual beings that exist in a way that we often cannot see or explain satisfactorily. 

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Even our workspaces can be infused with refinement and delight while we carry on with the work of homemaking. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, this milkhouse description feels like a combination of spaces and places I've been in: summer kitchens, fern-crowded stone steps, earthen floor cellars, glass-paneled French doors, wet dairy floors, moss-covered sheds, and wooden shelved pantries.

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Two thoughts that came as I listened to the Book of Common Prayer service this morning:
Psalm 18:46 - "the foreign peoples"  
How can we have a concept of foreign peoples if we do not have nations that are bound together by an exclusive language and culture?
To look into: Was this concept of foreign peoples only understood after God dispersed the people by changing their languages in Genesis 10?

Ezekiel 20:12
"Moreover, I gave them my sabbaths, as a sign between me and them, so that they might know that I the Lord sanctify them." (NRSV)
"Also I gave them my Sabbaths as a sign between us, so that they would know that I the LORD made them holy." (NIV)
The sabbaths were given as a means of setting God's people apart from the other nations. A day in which ordinary work and trade was suspended in order to worship God and meditate on His works. It wasn't a punishment, it was a blessing.
And it was a sign between Israel and God signaling an agreement or covenant that God had made with the people to be their God.

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I saw this CM quote shared on Goodreads and wanted to add it here to refer to. Ourselves p. 40-41

The thing is, to keep your eye upon words and wait to feel their force and beauty; and, when words are so fit that no other words can be put in their places, so few that none can be left out without spoiling the sense, and so fresh and musical that they delight you, then you may be sure that you are reading Literature, whether in prose or poetry. A great deal of delightful literature can be recognized only by this test. 

And here's one of the test passages that she asks her readers to consider with some instruction:

Try if the first gives you a sense of delight in the words alone, without any thought of the meaning of them, if the very words seem to sing to you;--

"That time of year thou mayest in me behold

     When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

     Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

(Sonnet 73, William Shakespeare)