Monday, March 2nd
Reflections on Trust
“You are to have no other gods. A ‘god’ is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart. As I have often said, it is the trust and faith of the heart alone that make both God and idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true one. Conversely, where your trust is false and wrong, there you do not have the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.”
— Luther on the First Commandment, Large Catechism
“Our mortality is not only in that we will die, but that we live our lives in that creaturely insecurity whereby we attempt to secure our lives through the wrong means. We so want to establish ourselves through some means other than through life with our Creator and on the Creator’s terms. The larger sin of idolatry [sets] up something else in our lives where God ought to be.”
— William H. Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian.