Cyberstones-A Lutheran Blog

Quote:

"No man can live without working, planning, suffering, and hoping. How shall you evaluate these things, measure them, share in them? You can't ignore them. You dare not become entangled in them as though they were the End. What on earth shall we do with life and with these affairs of life?

The priestly community of God does not keep the Feast in such a way as to escape the hard duties of daily life. The Holy Communion is not an escape mechanism from the calling of life. It is the means God uses of cutting your hearts free from entanglements so that we can engage in hard daily duties with detached hearts! He whose heart is entangled in bread, butter, security, success and immortality through these things, is precisely the man whose heart is not free in his work. He always seeks to achieve some other end by his work. And the end he seeks is the advancement of himself: he is not free to seek God's glory or his neighbor's benefit. The priestly community is free precisely because God has cut it free by the death of Christ and raised it to the hope in Christ's return. Thus the hearts of God's priests are free to carry out the daily duties of life -- not to gain for themselves, for in Christ God has already given them all they desire -- but to labor as God's co-workers to proclaim the Last Age in Jesus Christ."

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"Sinful men become idolatrous over bread and wine. They anchor their hearts to bread and to its security; they crave it for reasons of fear or greed, lust or hate. Men fight over bread, its
production and distribution and control. Men make it the grand end of all their being (either pleasure or power) and men are heart-broken, full of anxiety, when the bread of their life is
threatened. It was around food (given for use under the Word of God) that Satan organized his first attack on man in order to get man to use food under the word of Satan and thus frustrate God's purposes for man. The Second Adam in the wilderness was confronted by the deceiver with the same simple yet fate-full choice. And so are you!

You don't have to be trained in the art of anxiety---how to worry successfully. Just doing what comes naturally will soon feed you on an ample diet of anxiety. But even beyond the worry and anxiety, you don't need training in how to become an effective grumbler. You can (by nature) murmur quite skillfully about everything from your wife to your preacher, from your professor to your roomate......Or have you found it necessary to take a course on greed? Who has had to teach you the art of discontent?......If a man feeds himself on his greed and discontent, this is finally what he becomes -- greed. We become what we "eat" -- and I am not speaking only of groceries. Aye! We become what we eat. Jesus says to us. Take eat; take drink. In the mystery of His own Person, in the power of His own Act of Love, He shapes us by feeding us on Himself. He not ony feeds us on His Body; He builds us into His Body!"