Friday of the Third Week After the Epiphany

Reflections

January 31, 2025

Today's Reading: 2 Timothy 3:1-17

Daily Lectionary: Zechariah 10:1-11:3; 2 Timothy 3:1-17

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” (2 Timothy 3:16)

In the Name + of Jesus. Amen.

The Bible doesn’t contain God’s word. It is God’s word. All of it. The clear parts. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. The quirky parts. John needs you to know he’s a faster runner than Peter. The weird parts. A prophet called down a bear attack on the young men who called him bald. The parts I don’t like. The 10 Commandments that paint me as a sinner in many and various ways. God wants it all in there. He is the one who used the various writers with their various personalities, flaws, sins, and quirks to say exactly what He wanted said.

It's a Gift, though. Now, it’s not our job to sort through the Bible and pick out what’s actually God’s word and what’s just pretending to be. It’s funny how when that’s our job, God’s word always seems to agree with us. It’s a cold look in the mirror when we realize that if we are who determine what is and isn’t God’s word, that’s not just cleaning up after apostles who were ignorant because they lived before iPhones. It’s making yourself God. If you’re the one who chooses what God says, that sort of makes you in charge. Like God.

It's hard enough to believe it’s all God’s word. It’s harder still to believe it’s all profitable for you. Because the whole Bible, the narrative, the history, the law, and the gospel, they are for you. They testify of Christ, of hope, and of how things should be. It’s easy to carve up the Bible into what is and isn’t God’s word. It’s also easy to carve out all the things we think don’t actually relate to us. But all Scripture is for you. To call you away from the things of death. To point you to the things of life. To give you hope because if God can save sinners like those we read of, He can save you, too. When you read the Bible, it doesn’t just teach you what good is; it equips you to be good. By faith, you receive the very holiness the law demands, and a clean conscience willing to be corrected, always with the hope that your salvation rests on Christ, whom the whole Bible attests is your savior.

In the Name + of Jesus. Amen.

Thy strong Word bespeaks us righteous; Bright with Thine own holiness, Glorious now, we press toward glory, And our lives our hopes confess. Alleluia, alleluia! Praise to Thee who light dost send! Alleluia, alleluia! Alleluia without end! (LSB 578:3)

-Rev. Harrison Goodman, content executive for Higher Things.

Audio Reflections Speaker: Pastor Jonathan Lackey is the pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, Vine Grove, KY.

What makes a church "good?" Come join the fictional family as they test out eight different churches in their brand-new town and answer this question along the way. Will the Real Church Please Stand Up? by Matthew Richard, now available from Concordia Publishing House.