Time Out

Text: Haggai 2
Hymn: 639, Wide Open Stand the Gates
Kretzmann Commentary: Haggai
Bonus Bumper: Handel — Messiah, “Thus Saith the Lord”

Haggai 2 is yet another reminder that we cannot save ourselves and thus rely on the Lord for our salvation. Everything we touch in our condition becomes unclean. Everything that we make will be shaken. God has promised us a kingdom that will not be shaken and will be even more glorious than the first temple.

639 is a great communion hymn, focusing not only on the mystery of bread and wine, body and blood, but also the saints and the angels in union with us for eternity, all worshiping the God who saves.

 
Text: © 2002 GIA publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
Podcast under OneLicense.Net A-718131.

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Text: Zephaniah 3
Hymn: 915, Today Your Mercy Calls Us
Kretzmann Commentary: Zephaniah
Bonus Bumper: Cherubini — Requiem, “Dies Irae”

Zephaniah is — for lack of a more technical term — a crazy book. Chapter 1 foretells the Day of Wrath, verse 15, with “distress and anguish,” “ruin and devastation,” and a battle cry against the fortified cities. In Chapter 3 Israel moves from a rebellious nation to a humble people to one over which the Lord exults “with loud singing.” Loud singing? How loud and how majestic does a triune God sing?

915 is in the “Beginning of Service” section of the Lutheran Service Book, and it is a nice introduction into the Divine Service to come. Mercy, welcome, pardon, grace, and prayer — these are among the things we get out of worship.

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Text: Habakkuk 3
Hymn: 593, See This Wonder in the Making
Kretzmann Commentary: Habakkuk
Bonus Bumper: “Yet I Will Rejoice,” by Carolyn Hyde

Habakkuk 3 is yet another reminder that we don’t deal with a safe God. It is not safe to be unjustified, to be wicked, around the Lord God Almighty. He goes out for the salvation of his people and for his anointed. Though everything else fails, we hope in the Lord who has come and is coming again.

My mother, my brother and sister-in-law, and I sang “See This Wonder in the Making” at the baptism of my twin girls. Many will recognize the tune of “Children of the Heavenly Father.”

 
Text: © 1984 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Podcast under OneLicense.Net A-718131.

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Text: Nahum 1
Hymn: 666, O Little Flock, Fear Not the Foe
Kretzmann Commentary: Nahum
Bonus Bumper: Nineveh

Behold, the feet of him that brings good news and publishes peace! God will break the yoke of sin, death, and the devil off our backs. What a fierce God we have on our side. All that wrath that we deserve is abated on the cross.

The number may be a little scary, but the hymn is wonderfully strong and comforting. Pr. Lehmann informed me that Gustavus Adolphus and his army sang this hymn “while riding into battle on the day that he gave his life to save the Reformation.”

 
Setting from Lutheran Service Book © 2006 Concordia Publishing House. Used by permission.

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