Daily Word, Pentecost 12A

Daily Word, Pentecost 12A

Daily Bible Readings for the Week of the Twelfth Sunday of Pentecost, Year A

Join us for Morning Prayer in the chapel, Monday through Friday* at 8:30am, where we read and discuss these Scriptures and pray together. We do the same during Vespers in the parsonage Sunday evenings at 6pm. Join us! The parsonage is across the street from the church. 

Our readings for the week of the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost are listed below. Each verse is linked and will open to Biblia so you may read online. Click the link to read online or read in your Bible. The additional reading each day speaks to the common conversation between the three readings.

Sunday: Judges 6:1–24; 2 Corinthians 9:6–15; Mark 3:20–30

“My tribulations,” said Luther, “are more necessary for me than meat and drink; therefore those that feel them ought to accustom themselves thereunto, and learn to bear them. If Satan, in such manner, had not plagued and vexed me, then I should not have been so great an enemy to him, neither should I have been able to do him so much hurt. Tribulations do keep us from pride, and therewithal they increase the acknowledgment of Christ, and of God’s gifts and benefits.

Martin Luther, Luther’s Table Talk: or, Some Choice Fragments from the Familiar Discourse of the Godly, Learned Man, and Famous Champion of God’s Truth (London; Dublin; Edinburgh; Newcastle upon Tyne: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green; Hatchard; Seeley; Rivingtons; W. Whyte and Co.; Finlay and Charlton, 1832), 58–59.

Monday: Judges 6:25–40; Acts 2:37–47; John 1:1–18

The new man in Christ subsists by the instrumentality of the substance of the Scripture as well as by the power of the Spirit. It is not by the Word alone, either as contained in the Scriptures or as preached by the Church, that the work of regeneration is effected or that faith is produced. The divine author of the Word transcends it, uses it as His instrument and makes it efficacious for the great result. The Word alone does not produce the new man; the Holy Ghost is the efficient agent. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit does not operate without the Word, which is the substance of the Scripture, either in the way of external magic, as the Romanist supposes, or in that of internal magic, as the Mystic imagines. The Word tends to produce faith; it is not powerless; it does not return unto God void; it presents the object which is to be believed, and thus gives occasion for faith; it contemplates, anticipates, expects faith. The Scriptures have affinity with the faith for whose origination—by means of their saving content—they become the instrument of divine grace. They tend toward having their content received, believed, appropriated, in a living, personal soul.

Samuel Sprecher, The Groundwork of a System of Evangelical Lutheran Theology (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1879), 148–149.

Tuesday: Judges 7:1–18; Acts 3:1–11; John 1:19–28

One more thing about John the Baptist, which is also a characteristic of the true witness for Christ, is that he lost himself in his Master. Without a single atom of regret, he said, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” ... Luther said, “When I am preaching, I see Dr. Jonas sitting there, and Œcolampadius, and Melancthon, and I say to myself, ‘Those learned doctors know enough already; so I need not trouble about them. I shall fire at the poor people in the aisles.’ ” That is the way Luther preached, and God richly blessed his ministry because he did it. Though he was a truly learned man, he was willing to be reckoned as knowing nothing at all if by that means he could the better serve his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

C. H. Spurgeon, “The Baptist’s Message,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 45 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1899), 521.

Wednesday: Judges 7:19–8:12; Acts 3:12–26; John 1:29–42

Testimony of the Spirit. By this is meant the personal experience of salvation wrought by the Holy Spirit through the Divine Word. It rests on the identity of the testimony of the Word and testimony of the believing soul, inasmuch as the believing soul in the pardon of sin and in adoption experiences that of which the Divine Word speaks. As a fact of the Christian consciousness it rises above all human arguments and contradictions, and gives a sure and immovable persuasion (plerophoria) of the understanding, Colossians 2:2, so that “converted and regenerated men can and do know with an infallible certainty that they truly believe.” The doctrine finds scriptural warrant in John 7:17; 1 Corinthians 1:24; 2:5; Ephesians 1:13; 1 Thessalonians 1:5, 6; 1 John 5:6. That the witnessing spirit is not an evil spirit, but the Divine or Holy Spirit, is evident from the effects of his operation. “The fruit of the spirit,” Gal. 5:22, 23. Luther laid but little stress on external miracles, and calls them “childish wonders as compared with the miracles which Christ is constantly working in the Church by his own divine almighty power.” He says also: “The Holy Spirit teaches us to know and to appropriate the benefits of Christ.” This the Spirit does in two ways: “Internally by faith, and externally by the gospel, baptism, the sacrament of the altar, by which, as means, he comes to us and applies to us the sufferings of Christ.” It was Luther’s belief also that the Spirit and faith come to us only through the means of grace. “Without the preached word God will not give his Holy Spirit.” Though the Spirit is immanent in the Word, yet he stands above it as a free and independent causality, “who in his own time and place works faith in those who hear the gospel.” 

James W. Richard, “Testimony of the Spirit,” in The Lutheran Cyclopedia, ed. Henry Eyster Jacobs and John A. W. Haas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 509.

Thursday: Judges 8:22–35; Acts 4:1–12; John 1:43–51

The meaning of the verse [1 Corinthians 4:1], then, is: “Let every individual take heed not to institute another leader, to set up another Lord, to constitute another Christ. Rather be unanimously loyal to the one and only Christ. For we apostles are not your lords, nor your masters; we are not your leaders. We do not preach our own interests, nor teach our own doctrines. We do not seek to have you obey us, or give us allegiance and accept our doctrine. No, indeed. We are messengers and ministers of him who is your Master, your Lord and Leader. We preach his Word, enlist men to follow his commandments, and lead only into obedience. And in this light should you regard us, expecting of us nothing else than to bring the message. Though we are other persons than Christ, yet you do not receive through us another doctrine than his; another word, another government, nor another authority than his. He who so receives and regards us, holds the right attitude toward us, and receives, not us, but Christ, whom alone we preach. But he who does not so regard us, does us injustice, discards Christ, the one true Leader, sets up another in his stead and makes gods of us.”

In Judges 8:22–23 we read that the children of Israel said to Gideon: “Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son also,” to which Gideon answered, “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: Jehovah shall rule over you.” And in 1 Samuel 8:7 we are told that when the children of Israel desired a king of Samuel, God said: “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them.” Thus we see God cannot permit any authority to usurp his own among his people.

Martin Luther, “Third Sunday in Advent,” in Luther’s Christmas Sermons: Epistles, trans. John Nicholas Lenker, The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther (Minneapolis, MN: The Luther Press, 1908), 66–67.

Friday: Judges 9:1–16, 19–21; Acts 4:13–31; John 2:1–12

Because the ministry is God’s institution, therefore we Lutherans, as Luther’s Small Catechism puts it, “believe that when the called ministers of Christ deal with us by His divine command, … this is as valid and certain, in heaven also, as if Christ, our dear Lord, dealt with us Himself.” In other words, in the ministrations of their sacred office pastors act in the place of Christ, as God’s mouthpieces. Christ, God, preaches, reproves, teaches, comforts, baptizes through them. It is this that gives to their preaching and administration of the Sacraments the power to convert sinners, to work and preserve faith in their hearts. The Word of God, also when preached by weak, sinful men, is always endowed with divine power; the Gospel of Jesus Christ, also when preached by men, “is the power of God unto salvation.”

G. Luecke, The Distinctive Characteristics of the Lutheran Church, Concordia Series of Modern Literature Theological and Religious (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1920), 34–35.

Saturday: Judges 9:22–25, 50–57; Acts 4:32–5:11; John 2:13–25

The life of the early Jerusalem church was full of a holy joy. But even in those first glorious days the Church had to battle against sin, and not all of those who desired to join themselves to the disciples were of true Christian life. One terrible judgment of God was inflicted in order to preserve the purity of the Church. Acts 5:1–11.

A certain Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, had sold a possession, in accordance with the custom of those early days, and had laid part of the price at the apostles’ feet that it might be distributed to the poorer disciples. Part of the price was withheld, and yet Ananias and his wife pretended to have given all. Ananias was not required to sell his field, or to give all of the price after he had sold it. His sin was the sin of deceit. He had lied to the Holy Spirit. Terrible was the judgment of God; Ananias and Sapphira were stricken down dead, and great fear came upon all who heard.

John Gresham Machen, “The Life of Christ and the Development of the Church in New Testament Times,” in A Brief Bible History: A Survey of the Old and New Testaments (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1922), 99.

*We do not meet in the chapel on Saturdays. On Sundays, we meet in the parsonage at 6pm to discuss the readings.

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