Daily Word
Daily Bible Readings for the Week of the Twentieth Sunday of Pentecost, Year Two
Scripture Text: Hosea 3:3
Join us for Morning Prayer in the chapel (well, in the counting room until the construction is finished), 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 Twentieth 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: Hosea 1:1–2:1; James 3:1–13; Matthew 13:44–52
Faith, since it trustfully apprehends Christ and His righteousness, brings Him also truly into the heart; and with Christ, all that belongs to Him becomes our own, and Christ’s righteousness and life must so manifest themselves as actual and powerful as to flow out, like the waters of a fountain, into those who are partakers of them, so that “the same powers of righteousness and life work within us, just as if they had been implanted within us by Him from our birth.”
Julius Köstlin, The Theology of Luther in Its Historical Development and Inner Harmony, trans. Charles E. Hay, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1897), 438.
Monday: Hosea 2:2–15; Acts 20:17–38; Luke 5:1–11
The Gospel has three characteristic traits. It is promise or attestation of the divine will of grace to the consciousness, it is promise of the forgiveness of sins, it is promise of the forgiveness vouch-safed in Christ for the awakened conscience. It is the active cause of faith which supports conscience without blunting it. With this faith the whole redemption is realized in principle; for it is the moving power for the fulfilment of the law. By extending over the whole life, it is the fulfilment of the first commandment, and by becoming a prayer of thankfulness and supplication, that of the second; and the desire to pass on our blessings to others produces in us an inclination to love our fellow men, and by paralyzing the attraction of worldly goods and evils by means of trust in God it gives the power to realize this inclination.
Samuel Macauley Jackson, ed., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908–1914), 427.
Tuesday: Hosea 2:16–23; Acts 21:1–14; Luke 5:12–26
“It is characteristic of God (es ist Gottes Natur) to make something out of nothing. Hence God cannot make anything out of him who is not as yet nothing … Therefore God receives none but the forsaken, heals none but the ill, gives sight to none but the blind, quickens none but the dead, makes pious none but the sinners, makes wise none but the ignorant,—in short, He has mercy on none but the miserable, and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.
F. Bente, Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, electronic ed. (Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 125–26.
Wednesday: Hosea 3:1–5; Acts 21:15–26; Luke 5:27–39
In Matthew and Mark the harm done is by increasing the rent in the old garment; in Luke it is twofold—he will rend the new and spoil it, and the new will not agree with the old, there will be want of harmony. Christianity is not patchwork; the new covenant is not something added to the old; whilst it fulfils and completes the old (Matt. 5:17; Heb. 8:13), it is itself a new spirit, a new life. (Comp. 7:28.)
H. Louis Baugher, Annotations on the Gospel according to St. Luke, ed. Henry Eyster Jacobs, vol. IV, The Lutheran Commentary (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1896), 114–15.
Thursday: Hosea 4:1–10; Acts 21:27–36; Luke 6:1–11
As God is love and can not help giving forth love, so he requires nothing but love from any one. Faith feels an inner compulsion to show forth love, and makes the Christian the servant of all, even while exalting him as lord of all things.
Samuel Macauley Jackson, ed., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908–1914), 294.
Friday: Hosea 4:11–19; Acts 21:37–23:16; Luke 6:12–26
Luther employed “every artifice to prove that it was the right of each individual Christian to judge of the preaching of the Gospel and of the avoiding of false prophets.” According to him the authority of the Church is intended merely to foster piety, and a spiritual governing power would result in compulsion and simply make the people impious.
Robert H. Murray, Erasmus & Luther: Their Attitude to Toleration (London; New York: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; The Macmillan Co., 1920), 172.
Saturday: Hosea 5:1–7; Acts 22:17–29; Luke 6:27–38
It is, further, essentially characteristic of Luther’s conception of God as merciful, that he always contends that God in the exercise of His mercy acts wholly and unconditionally upon the impulse of His own nature—that the work of salvation is purely and alone His work, a work of His divine and therefore eternal will and decree. That God is influenced in the exercise of mercy by human deed or merit, he denies, not only in reference to man as fallen into sin, but in general and on antecedent grounds.
Charles E. Hay, “Translator’s Preface,” in The Theology of Luther in Its Historical Development and Inner Harmony, trans. Charles E. Hay, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1897), 103.
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Rev. Dr. Mark E. Ryman has served as Pastor for St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Salisbury, NC, since 2021. Previously, Pastor Ryman served congregations in North Carolina and Ohio, as well as a call to specialized ministry with Sola Publishing.
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