“How far back in your life can you trace the hand of God? If you have never done this, I venture to think you will be surprised! Consciously or unconscious to us, Yahweh has been our support since birth (Ps. 71:6); it was he who caused us to be born at the time and place of his choice. Not accident but design, not coincidence but plan, not chance but divine direction—this is the story of every believer, the secret history…
“Why are we so vexed by thoughts, seeing that the future is not in our power for one moment? Let us, then, be satisfied with the present and commit ourselves to the hand of God, who alone knows and controls the past and the future.” — Martin Luther In Gene Veith, A Place to Stand: The Word of God in the Life of Luther, 158.
“Our Lord God resembles a typesetter, who sets his letters backwards. We definitely see and feel that He is setting His type, but the print we shall see in the beyond. Meanwhile we must have patience.” — Martin Luther In Gene Veith, A Place to Stand: The Word Of God in the Life of Luther, 156.
“In a sincere effort to honor God, many of us have assumed that it doesn’t matter how we feel, we just need to obey. We’ve conceived of Christian duty mostly in terms of thoughts, words, and actions, but not feelings. We have unwittingly bought into a common misconception that God doesn’t care how we feel—he cares only about what we do in spite of what we feel. But we cannot please God, fulfill the great commandments, or grow in Christlikeness…
“Paul’s current eye of faith does not stare mysteriously into the cosmos, but backward to the revealed historical person of the Son of God. In his role as ‘Son of God’ and ‘Christ,’ Jesus fulfills the messianic and representative service predicted of the suffering servant (Isaiah 53). In Jesus’s death, Paul does not see a stoic philosophical transaction, but love! ‘He loved me,’ Paul cries! ‘He loved me, and gave himself for me!’ Indeed, unless a person looks back to…