Pious Lutheran

The Good Samaritan, Joseph Highmore, 1744   God’s People are Those Who Have Faith in Him We typically think my people are those who are like me externally History of the two kingdoms The Faithful Remnant of Samaria was more faithful than Judah We are God’s people through faith The lawyer asked Jesus: “ Who is my neighbor? ” That’s another way of asking: “Who are my people?” We ask this question because like prefers like and we want to love those people who are like us more than we love those who are not like us. This is a generally true principle in many facets of life. We do this in mostly playful ways with sports, where we greatly prefer our team which we identify with and we do not like the rival teams. This happens more seriously between countries, sometimes even to the point of war. This happens with some seriousness between political parties, sometimes leading to political assassinations. This happens in families when one family member defends another even through criminal be...

The Pharisee and the Publican , Barent Fabritius, 1661 The Righteousness of Faith External righteousness is an unreliable predictor of true righteousness Pride often masquerades as righteousness True righteousness is received in humble repentance You can’t judge a book by its cover, as the saying goes. The same is similarly true in regards to righteousness. External righteousness is an unreliable predictor of true righteousness. This is evidently true throughout the scriptures. We see Cain and Abel; both hard working men, both offer the fruit of their labors to the Lord, with Abel the Lord is pleased, and with Cain the Lord is not. We see Saul and David. Saul is a man’s man, tall, handsome, muscular, the kind of man you’d expect to be king. David is ruddy and youthful, you might say he’s a pretty boy. Yet David was a man after God’s own heart, and Saul displeased the Lord. We see a Pharisee and a tax collector. The Pharisee is a good solid church goer, lives an upright life, very pious...

The Parable of the Unjust Steward , Marinus van Reymerswaele, 1540 Christian Wisdom Seeks Eternal Dwellings Wisdom is forward thinking and focused on the goal Christian wisdom employs every treasure, heavenly and worldly, for the sake of reaching the goal If there is a hardest parable, it might be this one; throws people off every time. The parable presents a rich man with a steward who was found wasting the rich man’s possessions. The job of a steward is to be faithful with someone else’s possessions, and this guy wasn’t cutting it. So obviously, he got fired. What’s crazy is the rich man lets the steward hand in the books, and he doesn’t hunt them down and take them from him immediately. The steward does exactly what you don’t want the steward to do, which is why normally the books get taken from the steward: the steward cooks the books. He meets some of the rich man’s debtors, probably tenant farmers, and in order to ingratiate himself with the debtors he adjusts how much they owe, ...