–An Excerpt From Martin Luther’s Spiritual Last Will & Testament. CONFESSION CONCERNING CHRIST’S SUPPER (1528), Part 3 by Martin Luther, 1483-1546. Translation by Rev. Robert E. Smith from the German text in: DR. MARTIN LUTHERS WERKE: KRITISCHE GESAMTAUSGABE.(Weimar: Herman Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1909), pp.499-500.–

“Because I see that the mobs are always growing, the number of errors are always increasing and Satan’s rage and ruin have no end, I wish to confess with this work my faith before God and the whole world, point by point. I am doing this, lest certain people cite me or my writings, while I am alive or after I am dead, to support their errors, as those fanatics, the Sacramentarians and the Anabaptists, have begun to do. I will remain in this confession until my death (God help me!), will depart from this world in it, and appear before the Judgment Seat of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So that no one will say after my death, “If Luther was alive, he would teach and believe this article differently, because he did not think it through sufficiently,” I state the following, once and for all: I, by God’s grace, I have diligently examined these articles in the light of passages throughout the Scriptures. I have worked on them repeatedly and you can be sure that I want to defend them, in the same way that I have just defended the Sacrament of the Altar.

No, I’m not drunk or impulsive. I know what I am saying and understand fully what this will mean for me as I stand before the Lord Jesus Christ on the Last Day. No one should think that I am joking or rambling. I’m serious! By God’s grace, I know Satan very well. If Satan can turn God’s Word upside down and pervert the Scriptures, what will he do with my words — or the words of others?”

How interesting to think of this excerpt in light of how people have tried to pervert Luther’s words even to this day. I just thought this was quite a thinker. So, I wanted ot share it. =)

Do you remember your childhood fantasy?
“When I grow up I want to be a …”
Elementary schools nationwide obsess over a child’s drive toward a future occupation or life-goal. Journal entry after journal entry is written upon, or in Kindergarten, each journal picture is drawn depicting your childhood fantasies. Some pursue those childhood fantasies. “When I was little I wanted to be a Sunday School Teacher,” Carla told me a few weeks ago as she set out chairs for the Miamisburg “Daniel” Bible Study. And yet others merely laugh at their old dreams and ambitions, tossing them to the dusty path of past memories.

When I was little, I, like every other Kindergarten child, wanted to be a teacher. And then I wanted to be any other number of things from a writer to a world-famous babysitter.

Oh yes, there are dreams that have “matured” through the years… At four, I wanted to be a mother of sixteen children. As I grew older my dreams “matured” and I wanted to be a mother of ten, then eight, then four, then three, then four, then eight, and now six children. [I know, I know… I’m crazy and every other comment that you think I haven’t heard and yet have already heard regarding everyone else’s opinion of how I should run this life of “mine.”]

But there is one dream that grew with me and that I haven’t lost… but still hangs in the future, regardless of whether or not it will ever come near. This dream stirs silly childhood, “I can do anything” thoughts. The “I can excel if I put my mind to it” thoughts that come with chocolate milk mustaches. The “I actually could do this,” thoughts that come with experience.

—Yes, world, I’m a dreamer. —

I wish I could describe the high I felt standing in my purple dress in front of the Jr. High parents. Or that true high, after giving my life to the Lord, that I felt while praying that God would use me from a 45 degree angled big wooden bed as I awaited my first high school musical entrance chords. Or that feeling of looking into the peering faces as I sat on the stage extension, stacking harmonies with a friend. Or the high of standing, with knocking knees, before my high school youth group and strumming my first few chords of worship. Or the feeling of stepping away from the microphone sophomore year of college and hearing a sea of voices carry the chorus of “How Great is Our God.” I wish I could describe the high of standing in the recording studio, with my favorite person to sing with standing beside me. The tension pulsed through me as we “sang like we always do,” but this time with a different, one-shot-take audience. I wish I could describe the complete assurance of who you were created to be of standing in a dark room, releasing the very pit of who you are with a group of teenagers and a few buzzing chords.

It’s weird how God has taken me from desiring the fame of my name to desiring His Fame. And yet He has used the same tool all these years.

It’s weird, but I really don’t feel that He is finished with that tool yet. In fact, the child within me leaps at the thought of what He could do with a willing pair of hands.

And what He already has done…

Kind friends in the land of virtual reading,
I wanted to send word of my continual breathing.
For recently my existence you may have doubted,
But no fear, my friends, I haven’t been outed.

For here in the quiet I wait for a task
As deep sighs of boredom here do pass.
For here at work all files have been filed
And sadly indeed all lowly reports compiled.

Minutes birth months, Seconds birth hours,
But still hope lives within me and in me it flowers.
For when alas the hour of five arrives
Out to the streets we’ll run like bees to our hives.

Car after car we’ll fill the streets in a car ballet
And stop-and-go traffic will begin with no delay.
As this passenger smiles at the time therefore wasted
And wonders if she’ll make it despite no time hasted.

But after the days and hours and weeks,
To the church she’ll arrive with color in her cheeks.
And there the weekend she’ll spend with the youth
Each one joyously grinning sharing each tooth.

Alas, my dear friends, the big and the small,
Indeed, Monica’s not dead… no not dead at all.
She is merely enjoying what life brings her way,
The job, the traffic, the ministry and the play.

So to all as the time comes, and indeed comes quite fast,
I wish you the most blessed Thanksgiving blast.
And may you find thanks in each and every way,
For the things God has given you, throughout each boring day.

=)

And I just began to think a bit about some of the wisdom that could be hidden in their eyes.

I’m not naive enough to believe that age equals wisdom. But some age does equal wisdom. And I began to wonder when we as a society began not to respect that wisdom.

Now in days the common thought is that the elderly in our communities are too old for ____ and really anything can be filled into the blank. Driving, taking care of themselves, etc. But at what point in society did we make that conclusion. I’m sure it was near the time that we as a society decided that parents are no longer sources of apprenticeship, but aliens who never experienced the struggles that “we kids” go through. And now we call that rebellion “the teenage years”. Only that theory is no longer holding to merely teenage years as “pre-teens” have begun to adopt the same level of disrespect. But that’s a whole other topic, though tied in some way.

I just was thinking this morning in the quiet of our apartment. I wondered what wisdom lies behind elderly eyes. Wars, they have seen. Hurt. Destruction. Famine. Deprivation. They have survived it all. Yes, some are cynical and have resorted to hating every day of existence. But I wonder what is behind the smiling eyes of the elderly who have experienced all this change in our country, from the introduction of cars to the Internet. What do they think as they look into public schools? What do they think as they view our dealings with Iraq and now the talk of Iran? What do they think as homosexual laws are spoken of? Or what do they think of the growing pornography industry?

Do they miss home? When they look at the amount of children in foster care, do they miss home? Or when they watch our generation devalue their worth and their wisdom, do they just want to go home?

I’m not saying that all the people in our generation hate the elderly. This is not a political or psychological stance that I am ever planning on taking. But when it comes to the elderly, are we really seeing those rightly who have overcome so much in their lives and still cling to the cross? We, on Christ’s side of the cross, are we seeking out and respecting their wisdom? Or is the assumption of Alzheimer’s our default?

I was just thinking…

I was just wondering…