Thankful Thursday

It’s late. I’m tired, but thankful:

• for an exhausting but productive day. I took care of my second granddaughter during the day and then went to a long choir practice after supper. 
• for the immigrant communities in my church. Sunday we will sing hymns and read scripture in all the different native languages—Mandarin, Tagalog, Japanese, Slovak, and many more. (That’s what the choir practice was for: learning to sing verses of familiar hymns in the various languages.)
• for warm weather. It’s been a long, long winter, and I’m thankful that it’s finally over.
• for non-drowsy antihistamines—God’s good gift to me every spring.
• for the promise of a slower day tomorrow.
• for a comfy bed and an open window as I sleep.
• that God never sleeps.

Linked Together: The Older Person

As a Blessing
To the grandchildren:

It’s a pretty magnificent vantage point—getting to see close-up our God at work generation after generation, just like he promised. It’s a huge opportunity—having a chance to speak words of grace and truth into little lives opening in front of you like some time-lapse YouTube clip of flowers blooming. It’s the most consuming kind of fun—as you stop and read a story, and everything else in the world just disappears for a few minutes.

(Kathleen Nielson at The Gospel Coalition Blog.)

In the church:

[T]he Bible instructs the pastor to teach the congregation to be there for one another and does so by tying the generations together so that the built-in expertise of old age gets leveraged for every younger generation. It’s a beautiful thing.

In this way older members of the local church become the front line of discipleship and care. They brighten the future of the church by teaching younger members how to live out the faith, how to avoid mistakes, seize opportunities, practically apply the word of God to their lived realities.

(Thabiti Anyabwile at Pure Church.)

As a Burden
To the children:

I hope my children never have to sacrifice for their father when I’m elderly. But, if they do, I pray I’ll be Christlike enough to crucify my pride and receive their love.

(Russell Moore at Moore to the Point.)

Like a Thermometer, Not a Thermostat

Michael Kruger on the proper role of the church in the authentication of the canon of the New Testament:  

The books received by the church inform our understanding of which books are canonical not because the church is infallible or because it created or constituted the canon, but because the church’s reception of these books is a natural and inevitable outworking of the self-authenticating nature of Scripture. Viewing the role of the church in the context of a self-authenticating Bible can bring fresh understanding to the complex church-canon relationship … . The Catholic model [of the canon] insists that the church’s reception of these books is the sole grounds for the canon’s authority. In the self-authenticating model, however, the church’s reception of these books proves not to be evidence of the church’s authority to create the canon, but evidence of the opposite, namely, the authority, power, and impact of the self-authenticating Scripture to elicit a corporate response from the church. Jesus’s statement that “my sheep hear my voice … and they follow me” (John 10:27) is not evidence for the authority of the sheep’s decision to follow, but evidence for the authority and efficacy of the Shepherd’s voice to call. After all, the act of hearing is, by definition, derivative not constitutive. Thus, when the canon is understood as self-authenticating, it is clear that the church did not choose the canon, but the canon, in a sense, chose itself… . [T]he role of the church is like a thermometer, not a thermostat. Both instruments provide information about the temperature in the room—but one determines it and one reflects it.

Quoting from Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books.

Other quotations from this book:

• A Canon Based on Probability
• Canonical Bookends