“The Lord’s Prayer is a lifelong act of bending our lives toward God in the way that God has offered — “thy will be done, thy kingdom come” (William H. Willimon & Stanley Hauerwas, Lord, Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life, 22).

“It is indeed highly necessary to recognize the continued high priestly activity of Christ in heaven. . . . We must distinguish between the offering of sacrifice and the subsequent activity of the high priest. What the New Testament stresses is the historical once-for-allness of the sacrifice that expiated guilt and reconciled to God (cf. Heb 1:3; 9:12, 25-28). To fail to assess the finality of this once-for-allness is to misconceive what atonement really is” (John Murray, Redemption – Accomplished and Applied, 54).

Excerpt from the conclusion to the second chapter (“Puritan Hermeneutics and Exegesis”) in A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life by Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones.

Thus, their [Puritan authors like John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, John Howe, Stephen Charnock, etc.] covenantal reading of the Bible, whereby history is divided into two basic covenants (i.e., works and grace) meant that they were consciously reading the Scriptures with a Christ-centered lens, which was seen in their use of typology and, at times, allegory. They rejected the many “sense” of Scripture (i.e., the so-called quadriga), but their writings certainly show that they were often keen to press home the “fuller sense” of certain passages, which may have multiple layers of meanings and was a legitimate application of the literal meaning (sensus literalis). Their view that the Scriptures were internally consistent and that most theological truths had to be gathered out of more than one place in the Bible made the basic principles of the analogy of faith and “good and necessary consequence” [WCF. I.] an indispensable part of their hermeneutic. These principles of interpretation are important, but if reason alone tries to make sense of the mystery of the gospel, a Christian will forever run into error and heresy. Only a Spirit-wrought, supernatural faith will allow a Christian to believe that God had a Son as old as Himself! And yet to come to formulate such a truth a host of interpretative techniques were required (40).

“Our definition of atonement must be derived from the atonement of which Scripture speaks. And the atonement of which Scripture speaks is the vicarious obedience, expiation, propitiation, reconciliation, and redemption performed by the Lord of glory when, once for all, he purged our sins and sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high” (John Murray, Redemption – Accomplished and Applied, 55).

J. C. Ryle quoting Samuel Rutherford: “Believing and doing are blood-friends” (J. C. Ryle, Holiness, 48).

A lengthy excerpt, but much food-for-thought on the function and design of the Psalms.

And it is my thesis, in this chapter, that in the Psalms, praise is the expected outcome, but meditation is the underlying activity which we undertake in Psalm singing. Unlike modern church songs which are primarily about ‘getting right to the point’ and declaring praise, the Psalms are designed to help people who don’t always feel like praising begin by meditating on the mess the world is in, and only through a full and robust process of meditation, to come out with praise.

Praise is so vital an outcome from psalmody that we use the word ‘Psalms’ (lit., ‘Praises’) to describe them. In Hebrew, the volume is called Tehilim, meaning ‘praises,’ and in Greek it is called Psalmoi, which likewise indicates songs of joy and praise. But even a cursory reading of the Psalms reveals that they are not all hymns of declarative praise. There is a lot of moaning and groaning going on in the Psalms. The book is called ‘Praises,’ not because each individual hymn contained in it is joyful. The book is called ‘Praises’ because the nature of the whole collection is to carry us from sorrow to praise.

We use a similar method for naming streets in our culture. I live on the edge of Indianapolis, just south of another city called Lafayette. One of the major north-south routes on my side of Indianapolis is a street called, ‘Lafayette Rd.’ It is called Lafayette, not because I live in the city of Lafayette (I live in Indianapolis), but it is so named because, if you follow that road where it leads, you will end up in the city of Lafayette.

In the same way, the book of Psalms is so named because these are sung meditations, which meet us in the ‘city of confusion and trouble’ where we live and, if we follow them where they take us, they carry us ultimately to the ‘city of praise and rejoicing.’ This is true of each Psalm within its own compass on the small scale (each Psalm, generally trends to lift us from questions to answers). This is also true of the Psalmbook as a whole. In fact, the Early Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, wrote a book [Inscriptions of the Psalms] in the fourth century to describe how the Psalter carries us from the sorrow of living in a place of ungodly, sinners, and scorners (in Ps. 1) to the heavenly assembly of joy (in Ps. 150) (Michael LeFebvre, Singing the Songs of Jesus: Revisiting the Psalms, 96-98).

Regarding the spiritual discipline of Bible intake and meditation, Donald S. Whitney quotes William Bridge: “Friends, there is an art, and a divine skill of meditation, which none can teach but God alone. Would you have it, go then to God, and beg of God these things” (Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, 62).

Ned Stonehouse quotes from one of Machen’s letters, “[Christianity] was certainly not a way of life as distinguished from a doctrine, or a way of life expressing itself in a doctrine, but it was a way of life founded upon a doctrine. It was founded more especially upon a proclamation of something that happened. The primitive Church proclaimed the happening after the first great act in it had occurred; Jesus proclaimed it by way of prophecy, but the primitive Church and Jesus were alike in proclaiming an event,” then providing this additional thought:- “He [Machen] had shown that the experience of men was not the foundational fact of the Christian gospel but what God had accomplished once for all in Christ, and that Christian experience is essentially the response which men through the Holy Spirit make to the proclamation of these glad tidings” (Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen – A Biographical Memoir, 349).

I remember distinctly during undergraduate studies my Theology instructor telling our class, “Theology is controversial.” There were two maxims our instructor had us repeat throughout the class, the former more frequently than the latter, and they were, “I am a theologian,” and “Theology is controversial.”

“Praying and working are two different things. Prayer should not be hindered by work, but neither should work be hindered by prayer. Just as it was God’s will that man should work six days and rest and make holy day in His presence on the seventh, so it is also God’s will that every day should be marked for the Christian by both prayer and work. . . . Without the burden and labor of the day, prayer is not prayer, and without prayer work is not work. This only the Christian knows. Thus, it is precisely in the clear distinction between them that their oneness becomes manifest” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 69-70).