God, be merciful to me, a sinner!
The daily prayer for forgiveness is nothing other than the humbling cry for justification, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:9-14, ESV).
Free Greek tool
This Multilingual Bible looks like an efficient Koine parsing tool:
- Type key words or a Scripture reference in the search box.
- Click “Search,” then “Lexicon.”
How does this tool compare with others?
A blog on the heart of Christianity
The new blog Agapē Enthroned invites your comments on its essays relevant to the main message of Christianity. It complements this blog, which instead features updates to Absolute Paradox, Dawning Realm, and related web sites.
Featured Lutheran blogs
There are four more confessional Lutheran blogs featured by the Augsburg Aggregator.
Koine infinitives
See pages 301 and 358 of Mounce (Basics of Biblical Greek, 2003).
The structure of this chart is patterned after that of other verb charts in Mounce. The chart is intended to foster memorization, not to describe how the language developed.
The offense of the cross
Echoing the oldest objection against Christianity, Richard Dawkins finds the theology of the cross offensive (The God Delusion, page 251):
It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as a sacred symbol, often worn around the neck.
Theologians of the cross
The new “Theologians of the cross” category of the Augsburg Aggregator features blogs devoted entirely to Lutheran theology, that is, orthodox christology. If you know of an unlisted blog that meets the following criteria, please leave its URL in a comment:
- Agreement with the Book of Concord;
- Complete absence of non-theological posts such as those on technology, church or state politics, or family life;
- Real names of post authors;
- Quality of content and presentation comparable to that of the blogs already listed.
Blogs listed under other categories meet another set of criteria.
Why pray?
Still More Luther on Prayer « Taking Thoughts Captive…
You might wonder, “Why does God insist that we pray to him and tell him our problems? Why doesn’t he take care of us without our having to ask? He already knows what we need better than we do.” God continually showers his gifts on the whole world every day. He gives us sunshine, rain, good harvests, money, healthy bodies, and so on. But we often neither ask God for these gifts nor thank him for them. If God already knows that we can’t live without light or food for any length of time, then why does he want us to ask for these necessities? Obviously, he doesn’t command us to pray in order to inform him of our needs. God gives us his gifts freely and abundantly. He wants us to recognize that he is willing and able to give us even more. When we pray, we’re not telling God anything he doesn’t already know. Rather, we are the ones gaining knowledge and insight. Asking God to supply our needs keeps us from becoming like the unbelieving skeptics, who don’t acknowledge God and don’t thank him for his many gifts. All of this teaches us to acknowledge God’s generosity even more. Because we continue to search for him and keep on knocking at his door, he showers us with more and more blessings. Everything we have is a gift from God. When we pray, we should express our gratitude by saying, “Lord, I know that I can’t create a single slice of my daily bread. You are the only one who can supply all of my needs. I have no way to protect myself from disasters. You know what I need ahead of time, so I’m convinced that you will take care of me.”
(from Faith Alone: A Daily Devotional / LW 21:144)
Why does doctrine matter?
False doctrine is poison to the soul. An entire banqueting party drinking an admixture of arsenic can drink physical death from its cups. So an entire audience can invite spiritual and eternal death by listening to a sermon that contains an admixture of the poison of false doctrine. A person can be deprived of his soul’s salvation by a single false comfort or single false reproof administered to him.
—C. F. W. Walther, The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel, page 20
That’s why we need the church “in which the Gospel is rightly taught,” as the Augsburg Confession puts it.
