The Israelite God was different from all the other gods, thus, the worship of Yahweh differed from that of all other gods.
David finally found the truth that it was not his seed of kingship but the promise made to Abraham that made him holy. From that, David refused to be moved and wrote this Psalm by the necessity of the Spirit as the assurance of faith. The law never made a man holy, not even one as robust as David; yet faith did this great thing without lifting a finger.
Today, the longing for cultural Christianity on both the left and the right hearkens back to an older version of Christendom that was a mixed blessing for the church in the western world. The cultural mediation of Christian views on created order has certainly benefitted the civilization we’ve inherited. But the gospel itself isn’t something that can be reduced to cultural mediation either. Instead, the gospel as a message stands apart from all human accomplishments and achievements, no matter how beneficial they might be.

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Because Jesus has set us free, we enjoy a freedom of movement in His world, under His grace, that loosens our tongues to sing His praise.
You might not know it, but every Christian hopes for the day when their faith will die. Really. I promise. Faith’s death is our celebration.
Justification and regeneration are, therefore, necessarily connected and have profound implications upon the craft of preaching.
Grace remits sin, and peace quiets the conscience. Sin and conscience torment us, but Christ has overcome these fiends now and forever.
Christians do have a hope that those who sleep in death will be awakened and their joy will never end, and we yearn for that day.
Faith should later again flow forth from our heart’s depths to our neighbor freely and unhindered in good works; not that we wish to rest our salvation in them; for God will not have that, but wishes the conscience to rest in himself alone.
As Christians, we rest in the finished work of Christ on the cross, and we yearn for our neighbor to be reconciled to God, to know the peace that we are resting in.
God’s candle is not so easily extinguished. His promise is not some vague light at the end of the tunnel that we may or may not reach. In fact, God’s light has a name: Jesus Christ.
The early biblical stories about Bethlehem are dark and violent. They wreck us. They frighten us. In this little town, we see a microcosm of the vast and mangled mass of humanity, each individual thirsty for even a single bead of light to be dropped into the blackened depths of their souls. He who is born in Bethlehem is that Light.
The church is the only place God promises to lift us out of ourselves not in order to become more like God but so that we may finally be freed from our obsession with becoming little gods.
We won’t use the right words, but the Holy Spirit is interceding with and for us, as we pray.
Our experience with good fathers – even when they are not our own – can point us to God the Father.