At our church, we will from time to time sing multilingual songs, typically in English and Spanish. For a while, I didn’t like this; we’re an English-speaking American church. I’d even try to spiritualize it — it’s not good to sing songs as worship when we don’t know what we’re singing, I reasoned, and many (most?) of us don’t know what the Spanish means other than a few words here and there. Most of the time the translation was provided, but sometimes it was absent (or was on a different page and not visible with the Spanish).

I knew about Revelation 7:9, that God is in the business of redeeming a people from every language. I knew that Heaven would be a place of multilingual praise. But in the here and now, and in the practice of the church visible, I wanted it to be in my language.

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I love the prayer of King David in response to God’s word through Nathan that David would not be the one to build a temple (2 Samuel 7:18-29, 1 Chronicles 17:16-27). It tells us much about the nature of bold and proper prayer.

To set the stage, David’s kingdom has been largely established, the Ark of the Covenant has been sought out and brought back to prominence in Israelite worship, and David has built his palace. He looks and sees that the Ark is in a tent, and purposes to build a temple for God. Through the prophet Nathan, God tells him, in effect, “You want to build me a house? No, I will build you a house, and your descendant will build my house.” Both texts covering this event then give us David’s prayer of praise in response to the message he has received.

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Make what you will of U2, but Bono sometimes has some crystal-clear articulations of the Gospel and what it entails. In Bono in Conversation, he makes one of these, picked up by Gene Edward Veith and Vitamin Z:

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so you will sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.

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D.A. Carson is preaching at Bethlehem this week and next, and is giving a 14-session seminar over the two weekends (Friday night and Saturday) entitled The God Who Is There: Naming God in a Pluralistic World. Jennifer and I have been going, and so far it is quite good.

Some observations he has pointed us to thus far:

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I’d like to start the Sunday Reflections thing again, so I’ll throw out a meditation God, in His grace, blessed me with towards the end of last summer. I had been reading Isaiah and was towards the end of the book. I was feeling somewhat dry at this time, having read fairly cursorily, yet I felt that there was something for me to learn or see in the midst of alternating depictions of the wrath and mercy of God.

In this mind I sat one Sunday morning with my Bible open to the 63rd chapter of Isaiah, praying and reading and waiting for God to show me something. My meditations focused on the first few verses (1-4 ESV):

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Jennifer & I have been reading a rather good book lately — They Teach Us To Pray by Reginald E. O. White. It’s a biographical survey of prayer in Scripture, looking at the prayers of such men as Abraham, Moses, Jabez, David, Habakkuk, and several more. With each of these men, he inspects what we can see from Scripture of their prayer lives and has some most excellent insights.

Today, we were reading of David’s prayer of repentance in Psalm 51, drinking in the beauty and honesty of his penitence.

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Last night, Pastor John mentioned something that I hadn’t thought of before — the duration and permanence of the incarnation of Christ. He pointed out in 1 John 4 how it says that spirits from God say that Jesus “has come” in the flesh, not “came.”

That is, he came, and is still flesh. In the Incarnation, Christ permanently connected himself with humanity and its fleshiness. He then just went ahead of us into His glorified body. It makes sense, Scripturally — He is called the “firstborn of many brethren,”, and a reasonable way to understand that is to understand him as not only connected with what we are, but the firstborn of what we will be. Joined to flesh, glorified, and waiting to welcome us into His paradise where we will be like him.

Last weekend, John Piper talked in his sermon of the historical basis of our faith. Specifically, he was preaching on the role of the Word of God in our salvation, and spent some time talking about the nature of that Word, and how it forms the foundation of our faith. I found it profitable, and thus today’s reflection is based largely on what he said.

That the Word of God is critical to salvation is plain from 1 Peter 1:23 — we have been born again “through the living and abiding word of God.”

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I’ve been lax in posting lately, and particularly in posting reflections. So here’s a new one.

Our Bible study has recently jumped in to a study of I John. We aren’t using any particular materials, just going through it (using inductive study methods). Outlining it is rather a pain, as it has a stream-of-consciousness structure rather than a more rigid, logical organization. But that’s fine; John is not Paul, and did not write like Paul.

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I’ve used Zechariah 3 before in my Sunday posts, but I’m revisiting it again in my personal study and found it worth bringing back to light. However, I think that today I shall redirect you to the insights of Spurgeon on the text.