DEVOTION// Are you a lazy belly?

Teach me, LORD, the way of your decrees, that I may follow it to the end. Give me understanding, so that I may keep your law and obey it with all my heart. Direct me in the path of your commands, for there I find delight. Turn my heart toward your statutes and not toward selfish gain. Turn my eyes away from worthless things; preserve my life according to your word (Psalm 119:33-37).

How foolish we are to think we can exist on minimal contact with God’s Word.

Martin Luther judged his Small Catechism as an essential tool to help believers mine the Scriptures. Do you treat his catechism with such honor? Perhaps repentance is in order. And then rejoicing over our forgiveness. Followed a commitment to more time in Luther’s little handbook on the Bible. 

Luther writes:

Oh, what mad, senseless fools are we! While we must ever live and dwell among such mighty enemies as the devils, we still despise our weapons and defense [2 Corinthians 10:4], and we are too lazy to look at or think of them! 

What else are such proud, arrogant saints doing who are unwilling to read and study the catechism daily? They think they are much more learned than God himself with all his saints, angels, prophets, apostles, and all Christians. 

God himself is not ashamed to teach these things daily. He knows nothing better to teach. He always keeps teaching the same thing and does not take up anything new or different. All the saints know nothing better or different to learn and cannot finish learning this. 

Are we not the finest of all fellows to imagine that if we have once read or heard the catechism, we know it all and have no further need to read and learn? Can we finish learning in one hour what God himself cannot finish teaching? 

He is engaged in teaching this from the beginning to the end of the world. All prophets, together with all saints, have been busy learning it, have ever remained students, and must continue to be students.... 

Now I truly know that such lazy bellies and arrogant spirits do not understand a single psalm, much less the entire Holy Scriptures. Yet they pretend to know and despise the catechism, which is a short and brief summary of all the Holy Scriptures.