Tag Archives: King Solomon

Thought for the Day February 24-28, 2025

Monday February 24, 2025

Hi this is Pastor Jim Driskell of Christ Lutheran Church with the NCTV 45 thought for the Day.

I’ve talked about Dietrich Bonhoeffer before, there was a full length feature movie in theatres about him a few months ago. He moved back from the United States to his home country of Germany during the second world war, became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler which failed and he was executed. He was a very well known writer, Pastor and commentator one his books is “Life Together”. Carla Barnhill quotes from it in her book “A year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer” and I am quoting her: “The fact that we are brothers and sisters only through Jesus Christ is of immeasurable significance… My brother or sister is instead that other person who has been redeemed by Christ, absolved from sin and called to faith and eternal life. Our community consists solely in what Jesus has done to both of us. That not only is true at the beginning as if in the course of time something else were to be added to our community, but also remains so for all the future and into all eternity … The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more everything else between us will recede, and the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is alive between us. We have one another through Christ, but through Christ we really do have one another. We have one another completely and for all eternity.”

By “community” Dr Bonhoeffer refered to the Christian community which always means Jesus’ church, where we who are in Christ are together. Now that doesn’t mean we are all lumped together. Christians are the most heterogenous people in human history. But we are all family in Jesus, much more meaningful and eternal family than anything in our life. I have had four brothers, they are my physical siblings and also brothers in Jesus I am blessed. Our true siblings for eternity will be the ones in Jesus.

I’m Jim Driskell the pastor of Christ Lutheran Church 1302 E Washington St, New Castle, Pa check us on the web Christlutheran-new castle.org questions comments contact me on the website. For a transcript of today’s Thought go to: wordpress.com/view/revjamesdriskellmdiv.com Sunday worship is at 10:30am, with the NCTV 45 thought for the day, God bless your day

Tuesday Feb 25, 2025

Hi this is Pastor Jim Driskell of Christ Lutheran Church with the NCTV 45 thought for the Day.

David Rosage in his book “Rejoice in Me” quoting Psalm 103:10 p. 77: “Not according to our sins does he deal with us, nor does he requite according to our crimes”. God’s mercy does not depend upon our deserving it, only on our willingness to receive his loving forgiveness.

The paradox is: God’s grace is greater than man’s sin.

St Paul reminds us also: “Despite the increase of sin, grace has far surpassed it, so that, as sin reigned through death, grace may reign by way of justice leading to eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom 5: 20-21) This is something that we need to be continually reminded of. Unless our sins are egregious and there is no repentance, than yes, God lets us go on in our way. He doesn’t give up on us. By the same token you aren’t saved either. You have rejected the forgiveness of Jesus. For those of us who are repentant, who are trying to work out their sinful situation, who are turning to Jesus for His forgiveness, yes, the sin does not matter, we are forgiven. God’s grace is always greater than any of our sin. We do need to be repentant, maybe even sorrowful over our sin, but trust that no matter the magnitude of our sin and we are all sinful, that God will forgive us in Jesus.

Wednesday Feb 26, 2025

Hi this is Pastor Jim Driskell of Christ Lutheran Church with the NCTV 45 thought for the Day.

King Solomon the wisest man in the world, ever, excepting Jesus obviously. He wrote three books in the Bible, as you might expect the wisest man in history to contribute to God’s Word. The books Solomon wrote are very earthy, very real world. Solomon had the advantage of seeing life in many ways compared to us who have been in comparably humble lives. Solomon seems to have certainly lived in the lives of his subjects, but he was also the greatest king, along with his father David, in the history of Israel, and I would make the case that he was one of the greatest in the world. In his book Ecclesiastes, he seems to have come to the end of his life and was looking back at how he conducted his life. He was the most fabulously wealthy and powerful king, yet many would say that his wisdom in terms of God was not what it should be. He was responsible for the division of the kingdom, between Israel and Judah. It didn’t happen during his reign, but God promised it would happen and it did shortly after Solomon died. Israel went from one of the most fabulously wealthy, powerful nations in the world, on a downhill slide that left it wiped out in about 500 years. He probably would have been really wise if he had really followed his comment in Ecclesiates 12: 13: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person.” He forgot, Solomon got involved in foreign “gods”, he had almost 1,000 wives and concubines, about 999 too many. And instead of making God his highest principle, goal, he sort of forgot. Take Solomon’s advice. Fear God and keep His commandments. Fear in this sense is more about respecting God, that He is the most important part of our life. When you think you want to do something that will offend God, decide that you should fear Him rather than offend Him.

Thursday Feb 27, 2025

Hi this is Pastor Jim Driskell of Christ Lutheran Church with the NCTV 45 thought for the Day.

We were talking about King Solomon yesterday. Solomon wrote three books of the Bible. Proverbs, Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. If you are a fan of the Byrds, the who you ask? No that was another 60’s band. The Byrds hit song Turn, Turn, Turn, was ripping off Solomon, Ecclsiastes 3:3-8. Wow! Lucky there were no copyright laws in Israel 1,000 BC. Anyway I was talking to my lady friend about “two are better than one”, that it’s always better to be with someone, have someone in your life. Certainly one should be a romantic partner, the other should be a same-gender besty friend. I’m blessed to have many stand up guy friends and through the years I can see so many people romantic or guys who fit Solomon’s words in Ecclessiastes 4: 9-12: “Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up. Furthermore, if two lie down together they keep warm, but how can one be warm alone? And if one can overpower him who is alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.” We have become so physically isolated, we think we have real friends in cyberspace. No! Think about the weather we’ve been having your computer won’t keep you warm like a real human being will and your computer won’t pull you out of a hole or help you fight off someone who is attacking you, etc, etc. God had always intended us to live in community. I don’t care who you are or who you think you are but you always need someone else in your life. That is part of what Christ’s church is all about, people who reach out to show people Jesus so that they will be led to eternal life by the Holy Spirit and to be there when you are cold, or trapped or attacked.
The church is a cord of three strands where we are strongest, able to stand against the attacks of Satan and the world when we pull together in the church of Christ. Otherwise we are vulnerable to so much of the hatred of the world. Find someone to be there for you and for you to be there for them.

Friday February 28, 2025

Hi this is Pastor Jim Driskell of Christ Lutheran Church with the NCTV 45 thought for the Day.

Dr Heath Curtis in his book “Telling people what to think”, reminds us that we Christians are “People of the Book”, that is the Bible, Scripture. There are 40 men who wrote one of the 66 books of the Bible. We can certainly make the case that while these people wrote about what they saw, what they knew, that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit guided what they wrote. Dr Curtis writes: Having heard the Words of Christ in the Gospel we now speak back to Him what has been spoken to us. He has told us who He is, so we now confess that we believe His Word. We do so in the Creed of Nicaea. This is the great confession of the New Testament faith given in defiance of all the enemies of the Gospel, the statement draws a line between what is Christian and what is not.” I can hear the petty fussers now: “none of the creeds are in the Bible, they were made by man”. You have to wonder what their motivation is to talk such smack.

These are people who think they can deny the historic Word of God’s church and recombobulate it into their little happy place, where they can think and believe only nice things. More and more people are convinced that they are living in a world that they can make their little private place and dictate how it’s all going to end up. No, no, no. I know we have our happy clappy, big box churches that tell you it’s all about you. But people stood and died for the church so you can have your big house, car, trophy spouse, 2.8 perfect children. No on all counts. The Creeds; Apostle’s, Nicaean, Athanasian, were written by people who stood up for Christ in a world of great danger and animosity toward God. Despite what some silly little shoe salesman tells you it’s not about “Your Best Life Ever”, it’s about standing against the evil of Satan and the world in order for us to stay focused on Christ and the promise we have of an eternal life that will be magnificent beyond all imagination. Don’t listen to the phonys who aren’t Christian and just trying to separate you from your money. Trust that we know the genuine Words of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and those have been brought together by the universal Christian Church to say we believe in the Words of Scripture and will stand by them and defend them against all the attacks of the world and Satan.

Oh by the way, today is the last day of February!!! Yay to that!!! It has been a miserable month and sayanara baby to you, not soon enough. The only thing good about February, no not the Super Bowl, yikes! Baseball’s spring training started in Florida and Arizona, the much better promise of the return of spring than the bluebirds.

Thanksgiving vs vanities Psalm 100 Aug 4, 2019

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[for the audio of this sermon click on the above sermon]

We make our beginning in the Name of God the Father and in the Name of God the Son and in the Name of God the Holy Spirit and all those who give thanks said … AMEN!

God certainly is in the Old Testament but it seems that for the most part He left the Old Testament for us to understand who we are, get snapshots of ourselves. Sometimes those snapshots are good, positive, uplifting. Today’s Psalm is very uplifting and positive. The Psalms have been categorized into different “types”, there are 37 psalms that are considered to be “praise and thanksgiving”. Martin Luther writes: “the 100^th psalm is a prophecy of Christ. It calls on the entire world to be joyful to praise and to give thanks, that is, to worship God and come to His throne and His courts, and to call on Him with all confidence. His grace is an eternal kingdom, which truly remains forever and ever.”[1] Luther is right, what is more deserving of praise in knowing that He is coming, that He is coming again and from Him we have the promise of eternal life in Jesus in the resurrection.

Psalm 100 is not attributed to a writer, it could be the writer of our Old Testament passage, King Solomon. Doubtful. Solomon in his other writings does not seem to be the yippy-skippy type. The readings certainly contrast each other. There are passages from the Old Testament that speak of great nobility, but there are plenty of places that lack nobility. Our Bible is the only “holy book” that is not reluctant to describe the dark side of the people in the Bible. While Solomon was brilliant, things did not end up well for him.

The Queen of Sheba, of Solomon’s time, was incredibly wealthy and accomplished in her own right.^ESV1 Kings 10:2 She came to Jerusalem with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices and very much gold and precious stones. And when she came to Solomon, she told him all that was on her mind. 3 And Solomon answered all her questions; there was nothing hidden from the king that he could not explain to her… 5 the food of his table, the seating of his officials, and the attendance of his servants, their clothing, his cupbearers, and his burnt offerings that he offered at the house of the LORD, there was no more breath in her.” Solomon’s splendor had to have been staggering in order to wow someone like the Queen of Sheba. Under Solomon Israel was at its pinnacle. The temple he built was brilliant, encased in so much gold. It’s said there was so much gold in Israel that no one even bothered with silver, it was considered too common.

Solomon talks about “vanity” in Ecclesiastes. Vanity to us often denotes “wow look at me, aren’t I all that and a bag of chips! But it also means that no matter what we do, all we do, the world is usually going to pass us by, just ain’t no thing! I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of cleaning out the garage, basement, attic/ all of the above, of an elderly relative. Everything they did in life, collected, all that they had hoped and planned. To those of us who were doing the hauling most of it had little meaning. We owned our home in Massachusetts for twenty years, our children were raised there. From 1985-2005, what I accumulated there, eventually had to be packed and moved; it could be seen as vanity to keep much of that stuff, and also that I kept it in vain, to what end? My wife often asked me that. While we indulge our vanities and so much is in vain our Psalm reading tells us about giving praise and thanksgiving to the Lord.

Recent studies have shown that even into old age our brains are very plastic, that we really have a choice in letting our brains settle and harden into a rigid plasticity of the same old, same old. Too many people become bitter and complacent: I’m too old to learn, I’m too old to change, yada, yada. This is just not true, but in our “hey let’s find an excuse so we don’t have to push ourselves” world, it works for most people. So when we enter this hum-drum, gray existence where nothing ever changes, which is how Ecclesiastes reads, our brain gets wired that way. Nothing new, nothing to be thankful for, just grouchy, grumbly misery, which is rather stunning for us who are the most blessed of those living in the world today and in history! Yet what do we mostly see and often among Christians. There was a cartoon character when my children were children, Gulliver’s Travels” every episode was always: “Gulliver, we’ll never make it, we’re all doomed.” In spite of having everything we could begin to imagine, that might as well be the creed of Americans today.

There is thanksgiving in all that we do. We may have the vanity in our life, the things that we left behind, but I have no doubt that each of you has had times and places where we did make a difference. Where we did serve with strength, honor, conviction of what we knew would serve Christ and His Church. We honor Christ in what we are thankful for by keeping those times, those people in our heart. But we also need to move on from those things, there is no such thing as settling on your laurels in the church of Christ. I know how much of a nice, warm, cocoon we have in our memories, and those memories aren’t in vain, they were delightful times that God has given us. In those times we often forget about the struggle to achieve what God gave us to realize, that we need to persevere, the uncertainty, tragedy. We might let it interfere with the plans Jesus has for us now. We get caught up in the way things were, we tend to ignore the great things going on around us now and don’t do those things that the Holy Spirit is moving us to. In that sense our past becomes vanity and keeps us from moving into the future God has for us. The parable Jesus tells compares our vanity to our lack of thanksgiving. The farmer is patting himself on the back, how deserving he is of all his crop. Food was much more valuable then, people often went without, this guy knows he’s in for a big payday. We see tremendous vanity and complete lack of thanksgiving. He knows Psalm 100; “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise! Give thanks to Him; bless His name!” He’s in his counting house like Ebenezer Scrooge, or Scrooge McDuck, rubbing his hands “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink and be merry.” We’ve had those times cashing in. We didn’t enter God’s grace with thanksgiving and praise, too often we’re worried what tax bracket it’s going to put us in.

Ron Wessel has given me a great education in agriculture and I’ve heard this from him and other farmers: with crops and livestock you have to put in the work, but God gives the blessing and the return on our labor. While the farmer in the parable is patting himself on the shoulder, God steps in and I don’t think to punish this guy but he had reached the end God had planned, God lets him know; okay superstar! You think it’s all about you? You could work harder and longer and it wouldn’t make a difference, it would be in vain. Talk about vanity, in vain, you’re at the end tough guy, you’re not going to get to do any of those things you had planned. You could have given thanks, go to the temple to share some of what you have, take time in prayer. But instead of making it about me and all that I did for you, you made it about yourself and that never ends up well for you.

In Jesus we don’t get into the petty fussing and nonsense we see with the two brothers in the Gospel reading. We don’t let the monetary issues, the things that we might have received, but didn’t. We remember who it is that has given us the hope and promise of the eternal. That Jesus has put us back in relationship with God. God is completely holy, pure, just, who loves us greatly, but in His justice, He will not abide sin and evil. God the Father gave us His Son to reconcile us, to be the price for our sinful acts to make us perfect and save us from God’s justice. Jesus takes us and delivers us to His eternal hope and promise, the eternal life of the resurrection in Him. For that and so much that He’s given us we should be constantly entering His gates and going to His courts in Thanksgiving! Dr Luther writes: “…we’re showered with blessings every day and we’re always using what God gives us…we accept his gifts as if they simply appeared out of nowhere or as if we had earned them through our own efforts, diligence or wisdom. We think that God somehow owes us these things, and therefore we don’t need to thank him…”[2]

We can continue to live in vanity, take the joy out of a joyful life God has given us and intended for us, we should be doing all we can to enter His gates and go to His courts in Thanksgiving.

The peace of God that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amin and Shalom Christ is risen! He has risen indeed Hallelujah

[1] Reading the Psalms with Luther p 235

[2] Edited by James Glavin 365 devotional readings from Martin Luther Through faith Alone April 27