Sunday

I love to listen to Dr. David Jeremiah's sermons online. Here he talks about child-rearing. And what happens when we fall short both as parents and adult children when we're less than stellar role models.

Another sermon of Lon Solomon at McLean Bible Church in Tysons Corner, Virginia: At the end of Moses' life, the Israelites are getting ready to cross over into the Promised Land. Today, they're detouring into a terrible land of fiery snakes. Lon talks about the fatal problem of our innate sin nature and what God wants us to do about it.

REFLECTION:

"The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing...to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people.You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal,and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.... But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden."

— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

(Quote from Redeemer Presbyterian Church's recent Sunday program in New York.)