When you don’t know whom to thank, you start thanking yourself. Praise turns inward. This is a double bondage. When you have only yourself to thank, you end up having only yourself to depend upon.
True strength, wisdom, and understanding come to us from God. His Spirit gives us wisdom and understanding through the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus.
This is our frontier religion: God is waiting to shower blessings upon us if only we will unlock those blessings with the right kind of works, and a sufficient quantity of the same.
The real power of his hymn comes from the fact that Bonhoeffer does not offer a rosy picture of life or any of the tropes so typical of cheap piety that tell us that everything is always right, that things happen for a reason, and that we should try to stay positive.
It’s strange that we’ll stuff our mouths today with a bird whose life preaches against us. For consider the turkeys, which neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
I became like God’s child David, whom the Lord pardoned of his adultery and murder. I became like Noah, Abraham, Judah, Aaron, Gideon, and so many more wayward children.