Daily Word

Daily Word

Daily Bible Readings for the Week of the Twenty-first Sunday of Pentecost, Year Two

Scripture Text: Hosea 6:1–3

CLICK for online jigsaw of this week's Scripture graphic.

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 Twenty-first 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 5:8–6:6; 1 Corinthians 2:6–16; Matthew 14:1–12

Without special divine assistance man can use his senses, exercise his understanding and judgment, or perform any act which comes within the province of the natural man. But he cannot discern spiritual things, or conform his own heart and life to the will of God. This requires the aid of the Holy Spirit; and until man is born again he is utterly impotent to all spiritual good. Naturally he is free, but spiritually he is in bondage—“carnal, sold under sin.”

J. A. Brown, “The Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States,” Bibliotheca Sacra 25, no. 99 (1868): 464.

Monday: Hosea 6:7–7:7; Acts 22:30–23:11; Luke 6:39–49

Conscience is no ultimate standard of right and wrong, but must be tested aud corrected by the Word, as even the best watches must be set according to a chronometer or sun-dial. To be “conscientious” is not the highest virtue.

Henry E. Jacobs, “Word of God,” in The Lutheran Cyclopedia, ed. Henry Eyster Jacobs and John A. W. Haas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 549.

Tuesday: Hosea 7:8–16; Acts 23:12–24; Luke 7:1–17

“The greater God’s corporal gifts and wondrous works are, the less,” said Luther, “they are regarded. The greatest and most precious treasure of this kind that we receive of God is, that we can speak, hear, see, &c. Yet who is there that feels these to be God’s gifts, or gives Him thanks for them?

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), 160.

Wednesday: Hosea 8:1–14; Acts 23:23–35; Luke 7:18–35

“This is to me,” said Luther, “and to all Christians, a comfortable doctrine to hear; for I persuade myself, also, that I have faith, but it is so so, and might well be better; and yet I teach the faith to others; and this I know, that my teaching and preaching is right; but, I confess it, I come very short of faith. Sometimes I commune thus with myself:—‘Thou preachest God’s word; this office is committed to thee, and thou art called thereto without thy will or seeking; thou confessest Christ, and preachest Him, which is not fruitless, for many thereby are amended;’ but when I consider and behold my own weakness, (I eat, I drink, sometimes I am merry, yea, also, now and then, I play the good-fellow*,) then I begin to doubt and say, ‘Ah! that we could but only believe!’ Therefore,” said Luther, “the secure and presumptuous spirits (heretics and all false Christians) are irksome and dangerous people, who, when they have only looked on the Bible, or have heard a few sermons, do presently think that they have the Holy Ghost, that they understand and know all. But good and godly souls are otherwise minded, and do daily pray, ‘Lord, increase our faith.’ ”

* Luther was an edifying and interesting companion, and could be a very amusing one. Possessed of rare talents, a great fund of various information, and of a remarkably social temper of mind, he would, it seems, now and then, play the good-fellow; that is, he indulged, too freely, his natural turn for pleasantry, especially when young people were of the party, and made his company more merry than wise. His conscience reproved him for it afterwards, and he was humbled; feeling, no doubt, that he dishonoured his Master by such ebullitions of folly, and lowered the dignity of his office. (See Ephesians 5:4, Colossians 4:5, 6, 1 Timothy 4:12; also Ecclesiastes 10:1.)

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), 62–63.

Thursday: Hosea 9:1–9; Acts 24:1–23; Luke 7:36–50

If any one think that he obtains the remission of sins because he loves, he dishonors Christ, and will discover in God’s judgment that this confidence in his own righteousness is empty and vain. Therefore, it is necessary that faith should reconcile and justify. And as we do not receive remission of sins through other virtues of the Law, or on account of these, viz. on account of patience, chastity, obedience towards magistrates, etc., and nevertheless these virtues ought to follow; so, too, we do not receive remission of sins, because of love to God, although it is necessary that this should follow. But the custom of speech is well known, that, by the same word, we sometimes comprehend by synechdoche the cause and effects. Thus in Luke 7:47, Christ says: “Her sins which are many are forgiven, for she loved much.” For Christ interprets this very passage when he adds: “Thy faith hath saved thee.” Christ, therefore, did not mean that the woman, by that work of love, had merited the remission of sins. For he says clearly on this account: “Thy faith hath saved thee.”

Henry Eyster Jacobs, ed., The Book of Concord; or, The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: General Council Publication Board, 1916), 107–8.

Friday: Hosea 9:10–17; Acts 24:24–25:12; Luke 8:1–15

The spoken word will not live in the hearts of the hearers without his grace, his presence. Christians are born again of incorruptible seed—“by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Peter 1:23; comp. also 1 John 3:9). That incorruptible seed is the grace of Christ, Christ’s presence, Christ himself abiding in the heart by his Spirit. His grace lives in the soul, growing, spreading through the heart, filling it with a new life, transforming him in whom the seed abideth into the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. 

H. D. M. Spence-Jones, ed., St. Matthew, vol. 2, The Pulpit Commentary (London; New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1909), 18.

Saturday: Hosea 10:1–15; Acts 25:13–17; Luke 8:16–25

The Church, as Luther says, is not the mother, but the child of Holy Scripture.
A prominent feature in the treatment of the doctrine by Lutheran theologians is that of the Three Estates.—Ecclesiastical, Political and Domestic, or the Church in its organized form, the State, and the Family. This rests upon the thought that every divine institution has its end in the eternal welfare of men. The State, or worldly government, is intended principally to protect men in the hearing of God’s word, and so to advance their temporal prosperity that the claims of God be not forgotten. The Family is for the raising and training of children of God. Only by a diversion from their divinely-intended end, do these two Estates sunder this relation to the Church, or assembly of believers. The goal of the Church is not reached in this world. The Holy Scriptures give many glimpses of its future glory in the world to come, where it will be free from the cross, and the pain and anxiety of battle. On this account the distinction is made between the Church Militant, warring in this life against the world, the flesh and the devil, and the Church Triumphant in Heaven.

Henry E. Jacobs, “Church, Doctrine of The,” in The Lutheran Cyclopedia, ed. Henry Eyster Jacobs and John A. W. Haas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 96.

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