My Desktop Photo 61: Wild Rose

Photo by Andrew Stark
(click on photo for larger view)

Round the Sphere Again

No Innocent Bondage
I’ve found moral inability to be one of the most difficult concepts to explain to people trying to understand Calvinism. John Piper does an excellent job of explaining it succinctly in this quote from Finally Alive. (Irish Calvinist)

Works Can’t Do the Job
“The reason we cannot be justified by the law is that we cannot keep it. Even if we could keep God’s commandments outwardly, we break them inwardly.” From Acceptable to God Through Keeping the Law? by Phil Ryken (Monergism.com)

The Real Jesus
Who Do You Say That I Am? (Kevin DeYoung)

Much Loved
Numbers 90, 91, 92, 93 on Sherry’s list of top 100 hymns.

Tour the World
of hospital food. (Now That’s Nifty)

On the Wild Side
The very warm weather here seems to have accelerated the wildflower season, so that instead of coming in sequence, they’ve all arrived at once. The lupines and Jacob’s ladder are out, along with the lungwort, arnica, and wild roses.

Praise for Faith

“A View of Olney”
Fore-Edge Painting on Volume 1 of Poems by the late William Cowper, Esq. of the Inner Temple

O

f all the gifts Thine hand bestows,
Thou Giver of all good!
Not heaven itself a richer knows
Than my Redeemer’s blood.

Faith too, the blood-receiving grace,
From the same hand we gain;
Else, sweetly as it suits our case,
That gift had been in vain.

Till Thou Thy teaching power apply,
Our hearts refuse to see,
And weak, as a distemper’d eye,
Shut out the view of Thee.

Blind to the merits of Thy Son,
What misery we endure!
Yet fly that Hand from which alone
We could expect a cure.

We praise Thee, and would praise Thee more,
To Thee our all we owe:
The precious Saviour, and the power
That makes Him precious too. 

More on (and from) William Cowper:

• Cowper’s Grave
• Sunday’s Hymn: William Cowper
• Sunday’s Hymn: William Cowper
• Sunday’s Hymn: William Cowper
• Sunday’s Hymn: William Cowper
• Sunday’s Hymn: William Cowper