I had another lessoning today!

Yes, I finished catechism for membership and for the Lord's Supper, but I just have so many questions, so much that I am struggling to understand in trying to peel back the layers of "works" instruction to get at the full measure of the proper division between Law and Gospel.

Because I could not sleep with my raging headache, last night I spend many hours reviewing the hymns in the Lutheran Service Book (LSB).  Out of the 635 hymns, I know 22, not including the doxology.  I honestly expected that I would know less, so at least I have a 3% chance of knowing one of the hymns during the Divine Service.

In case I have not quite conveyed just how seriously this man takes pastoral care or the heart that God has place within him, I shall tell you that Pastor rather readily agreed to my idea of using his digital recorder to tape him singing hymns to me so that I can listen to them afterward and learn them.  So, I now know, having just spent the last two hours learning them, along with reflecting upon my lesson, two more hymns!

He sang, for the third time, the one I posted a while back, Praise the One Who Breaks the Darkness.  While I had picked out a few that I would like for him to teach me when I was reviewing all the hymns, Pastor had an even better idea:  he sang a hymn from the service tomorrow.  That way, I could join in with everyone for one of the hymns!  Yes, Myrtle, you should trust that pastoral wisdom more!

The second hymn, Speak, O Lord, Your Servant Listens, is about the Word of God, matching quite closely much of what Pastor and I talked about regarding scripture.

Speak, O Lord, Your servant listens, Let Your Word to me come near; newborn Life and Spirit give me, let each Promise still my fear.  Death's dread pow'r, its inward strife, wars against Your Word of Life; fill me, Lord, with love's strong fervor that I cling to You forever!

Oh, what blessing to be near You and to listen to Your voice; Let me ever love and hear You, let Your Word be now my choice!  Many hardened sinners, Lord, flee in terror at Your Word; but to all who feel sin's burden You give words of peace and pardon.

Lord, Your words are waters living when my thirsting spirit pleads.  Lord, Your words are bread life giving; on Your words my spirit feeds.  Lord, Your words will be my light through death's cold and dreary night; Yes, they are my sword prevailing and my cup of joy unfailing.

As I pray, dear Jesus, hear me; let Your words in me take root.  May Your Spirit e'er be near me that I bear abundant fruit.  May I daily sing Your praise, from my heart glad anthems raise, till my highest praise is given in the endless joy of heaven. (LSB, 589)

It was nearly dawn before I fell asleep, so I had planned on sleeping right up until the moment that Pastor called to say he was on his way this afternoon.  However, I awoke at 10:30 and could not fall back asleep.  After seeing to Kashi's needs, I gathered my Book of Concord, Treasury of Daily Prayer, and bible and started reading.

After reading and praying through the morning service and today's reading, I prayed the Psalter for a while.  I then re-read all the readings for the month of September from the Treasury of Daily Prayer, in part because Pastor W had a blog entry on the readings from the 25th that I had not really understood and wanted to see if I could ferret it out. 

That lead to reading through parts of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession because of a quote that referenced the Apology, but not where:

Men of good conscience are crying for the truth and proper instruction from the Word of God.

I understand that, truly I do...

As the afternoon wore on and I knew Pastor would be calling soon, I re-read Part III of the Large Catechism for we are starting with prayer.  When I finished, I returned to Psalms and noticed something new.

One of my favorite verses, which I have actually still managed to remember, is Psalm 46:10a:  Be still and know that I am God.  Now just Wednesday, Pastor was encouraging me to be still, so take just one day at a time, with all that I have battled and all that I have wrestled.

Today, when I was studying, I remembered those words as well as another point from the "words of comfort" from the confession/absolution liturgy on Wednesday evening.  I know, truly I do, that I am quite poor at being still.  Patience is not a virtue of mine.  Some might say that we have actually never been acquainted.  Over the years, I have earnestly sought wisdom from God for what it means to be still before Him.  However, I never really mediated on the second part of that verse:

Be still and know that I am God;

I will be exalted among the nations;

I will be exalted in the earth.

Is it strange that I found this comforting?  I mean, I can be still because of who God is, that He is God, Creator, the Almighty.  But more than that I can be still because of what He has done, what He is doing, what He will do.  He will be exalted.  No matter what I do or fail to do, God will be exalted.  Not only can I take refuge in the fact that He is God, but I can take refuge that He will be exalted.  His perfect plan for all of creation will come to fruition!

Selah.

We did not finish a whole page in the Large Catechism, which makes me sigh heavily.  I wish to ferret out what is bothering me about prayer ever so much.  I confess I did mutter a rather churlish remark about how little we covered.  However, our conversation was filled with more than just learning about prayer.  In a large way, Pastor clarified a soul-jarring truth about sin that comes in two parts.  Now you might feel as if this should be Christian 101 knowledge, but I honestly had not really thought about the heart of the matter.

Part One:

You do sins because you are a sinner. You are not a sinner because you do sins.

If you recall, I posted a good bit from the Apology to the Augsburg Confession about Original Sin because I found it freeing in a way.  I cannot love or fear or trust God apart from the Holy Spirit gifting me faith because I am a sinner.  There is nothing within me, nothing about me, that would enable me to come to God.  That means that all the "works" I did to try and enlarge my faith, as I was encouraged to do in Protestant churches, failed because there was nothing, is nothing, that I can do to accomplish such.  Only the through the gifts of Christ, only through the work of the Holy Spirit, does our faith grow.

Yet this axiom gives even further comfort.  I am not a sinner because of my sins, because of my actions.  I am because I am.

Wednesday night, one of the things I talked with Pastor about is that I gfelt as if my heart was growing blacker despite all that I have studied and learned over the past four months, that the time I spent in Romans 7:15-20 was growing larger, not smaller.  That I did more of what I did not want to do than what I wanted to do.  He assured me, rather simply, the truth of the matter is that my heart cannot grow blacker.  It already is completely black, the old Adam in me sees to that.  What is growing is my awareness of my own sin and my own need for Christ.  Struggling with sin, waging war against it, is a good thing in his eyes.

Pastor's axiom also has a flip side to it:  You are not a Christian because you do good works.  You do good works because you are a Christian.  I can only do good works because of the Holy Spirit, because of the washing of Christ's blood.  Doing them makes me not one bit holier or more worthy.  I am only holy, I am only worthy, because God makes me so through the Cross.

Part Two:

We live day by day, plodding along our path, sometimes looking back, sometimes forward.  We think in only in terms of present, past, and future.  However, God is outside of time.  This moment, the moment of my birth, and the moment of my death are all the same to Him.  So, when Christ died on the cross, He bore God's wrath and anger at my sin as a child, my sin today, my sin tomorrow.  Tomorrow, when I sin and anger God, that sin and righteous anger has already been washed, cleansed, forgiven.  This is what is meant by all sins.  This is what is meant by casting your cares on Christ, all of you who are weary and heavy laden!  This is what is meant by God bringing to light the things hidden in the darkness, disclosing the motives of men's hearts, and then then having each man's praise come from God!  This is what is meant by God taking delight in us!  He delights because we are made sinless by dying in baptism and being reborn through the resurrection.

As he is wont to do, Pastor also made a drawing in my notebook to help me further.  You know me, I see words such as "lest you anger God" and immediately start dwelling upon all my sins and how I've surely angered Him.  I even said as much even while Pastor was encouraging me in the immeasurable wealth that is the Cross.  So, out comes his pen to paint a picture clear enough for this oft dense child to grasp.

As you can see here, the only way for sinful man to approach God is through the Cross.  The same is true in the reverse.  The only way that God can have a relationship with sinful man is through the Cross. 

Since sin was covered for all time on the Cross, I do not have to bear His anger and wrath at my sin.  Christ bore it.  With God, there are no end-arounds, only the Cross.  Furthermore, since God is looking at me through the Cross, I am whole and clean and loveable in His sight.

I am baptized.  I am a child of God.  I am forgiven!