Week of Trinity XVIII - Wednesday

0:00Welcome to Luther for the Busy Man, the 18th week after the Sunday of Trinity Wednesday. Our scripture reading comes from Galatians 2 verses 15 through 16. We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. Our scripture lesson comes from Romans 2 verse 13. It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. How many are there who really understand the commandments you shall love the larger God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind? Few indeed. And there are fewer still who actually keep and observe this commandments.

1:00How are they to keep what they do not know? We are blind and our nature is also completely blind. Human reason hardly knows anything less about anything than it knows about what God wants in His law. Christ confers a benefit upon the Pharisees and lawyers into respects. First, He removes their blindness and teaches them what the law is. Secondly, He teaches them how impossible it is for them to fulfill the commandments. He removes their blindness and teaches them what the law is by showing them that the law is basically love. Reason cannot understand this today. Even as the Jews also failed in this respect. For if reason had been able to grasp this then to be sure the Pharisees and lawyers would have grasped it for they were the best and cleverest men among the Jews of that time. They thought that the fulfillment of the law depended solely upon the performance of the external works of the law, whether they were performed willingly or unwillingly. They never really faced up to their inner blindness, greed and wicked hardness of heart.

2:02They imagined themselves to be fully conversant with all the requirements of the law and regarded themselves as very fine fellows, holy and godly. As Jesus says though in Matthew 623, If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness? No one can fulfill the law unless he has been completely renewed. Let us pray. O God, our transgressions of your holy law are many and grievous. Eternal praise and thanks be to you for the obedience our Savior rendered to your law on our behalf and in our stead and obedience now reckoned to us for his sake and in his name. Amen. Find the print version of the Luther for the Busyman Daily Devotional at ambassadorpublications.org. Luther for the Busyman is produced by the free Lutheran Bible College and seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. Visit flbc.edu to learn how you can start here. Go anywhere grounded in God's Word.