Untitled

For really, if a church preaches only the second use and never the first, what has it become? It has become a predator on human misery. A church that cannot say how God intends human souls and communities to be—loving and fearing God above all things, honoring parents, remaining faithful to spouses, restraining the urge to steal and covet, speaking truthfully about others—is like a scavenger lying in wait for the wounded to fall. Then it pounces, at no risk to itself, to snap up all the shattered pieces. It can offer little more than a spiritual bandaid to the damage and has no way of helping to reconstruct what has been destroyed and lost, no vision of God’s good intentions to guide that reconstruction. It has done absolutely nothing to prevent the fall of the wounded in the first place. http://www.lutheranforum.org/blogs/desperately-seeking-the-first-use-of-the-law/