Let The Earth Be Glad is new from Wendell Kimbrough. It’s a setting of Psalm 96.
It’s on my list of songs to introduce this year.
Let The Earth Be Glad is new from Wendell Kimbrough. It’s a setting of Psalm 96.
It’s on my list of songs to introduce this year.
Heidelberg Catechism – Lord’s Day 2
3.
Q. Where do you learn of your sin and its wretched consequences?
A. From the law of God.
4.
Q. What does the Law of God require of us?
A. Jesus Christ teaches this in a summary of Matthew 22:37-40: ““You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”” (Cf. Luke 10:27.)
5.
Q. Can you keep all this perfectly?
A. No, for by nature I am prone to hate God and my neighbor.
Every time our cat looks out the door or window and sees a bird she crouches and makes this odd little burbling noise.
I don’t think her intentions are pure.
It’s in her nature.
from ‘They Can Talk’
Authenticity is the buzzword of the age.
Yet the aim of being authentic involves either conforming to certain social norms or displaying what are presented as faults, but only faults that bring no harm or are not immortal. More like the ways we indulge ourselves.
Church websites will have attractive photos and paragraphs, none of which will really feature a group of people who won’t talk to each other or rosters of various types that struggle to be filled.
Who puts a photo of their uncleaned toilets up as a display of authentic community?
The question to be asked and answered is ‘How is God’s grace manifesting itself in the ugliest of situations here?’
… the kind of authenticity evinced by influencers and self-help gurus is not authenticity at all. We may post a picture of our messy hallway with a caption about getting real, but no one is streaming videos of themselves snapping at their children. The approach is more accurately described as calculated authenticity or curated vulnerability. It is simply the smartest way to sell yourself – namely by appearing not to.
Since a low anthropology allows for hypocrisy and contradiction and frailty, it allows for love.David Zahl, Low Anthropology, Brazos Press, 2022, pg 157.
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