A family of sparrows has occupied the vacated bird chalet in my garden after the swallows left for other worlds.  How could they resist the location where just beneath the birdbath atop a Japanese tori welcomes all the aviators of my neighborhood?  Yesterday after I had wire-brushed it clean and filled the basin with fresh water, a whole flock of sparrows invaded to splash gleefully together. (“Yea, the sparrow hath found a house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young…Psalm 84:3)

Lately, I have been listening to Moody Church’s broadcast of Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer.  He has been focusing on the doctrines of the Christian faith: why we can trust the Bible, Jesus as Lord, the Holy Spirit, and Sin (a word that has almost disappeared from the English lexicon).  He tells the story of how he regularly takes seminary students to a cemetery, circles them around a tombstone, and calls to the person buried there by name to “wake up”!  Of course, the dead person remains in his or her tomb, and the lesson, though seemingly absurd, implies that the student will be soon preaching to spiritually dead people.  The text is Ephesians 2:1-3:  “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” The verse that follows breathes life into these spirtually dead people:  “But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together in Christ (by grace ye are saved;) Lesson: the purpose of preaching and worship is to awaken life in the parishioners; real life begins only when the soul surrenders to Jesus Christ. Jesus came not to make bad people good, but to make spiritually dead people live!

There is a style of majesty about God’s Word and with this majesty a vividness never found elsewhere. No other writing has within it a heavenly life whereby it works miracles and even imparts life to its reader. It is a living and incorruptible seed....  The Book has smitten me. The Book has comforted me. The Book has smiled on me. The Book has frowned on me. The Book has clasped my hand. The Book has warmed my heart. The Book weeps with me and sings with me. It whispers to me and it preaches to me. It maps my way and holds up my goings. It was to me the Young Man’s Best Companion and it is still my Morning and Evening Chaplain. It is a living Book—all over alive—from its first chapter to its last word it is full of a strange, mystic vitality which makes it have preeminence over every other writing for every living child of God.  From a sermon by C. H. Sturgeon, 1877.