A fresh devotional for the new year.

UPDATE: This post was originally from December 29, 2019. Seems a good time to bump it to the top of the stack.

I really like and frequently recommend these one-year Bible reading plans, as much for their manageable structure as for their probing and thought-provoking devotional commentary. The Spirit at Work starts at Pentecost. The Word at Work starts on the second Sunday of Easter. Now I see there is a new one, Sitometrion, that starts (or started) on Christmas Day. Each of them, with just a bit of adjustment, can be taken up at any time of year. Just jump in on the day (you can ignore the year for the most part), then wrap around when the time comes.

        

A Short Course in Preaching

Subtitle: Daily Reading as the Seedbed of Sermons.

It's looking like I'll be teaching preaching a lot to various constituencies and at various levels in the near and foreseeable future, so I figured it was time to boil down the basics, as I see them, into a "short course in preaching." Includes a "Second Short Course" in the form of a sermon on the Benedictus, and a first English translation of the ten summary paragraphs of Heinrich Bullinger's 1556 Summa, which was itself a summary of his famous sermon series, Decades. The Decades were as important and popular as Calvin's Institutes for several centuries and generations. So imagine having the Institutes boiled down—twice—into seven pages. I have included these paragraphs here as a way of (unofficially) supplementing the Book of Confessions as a tool for dogmatic testing. 

 

Heinrich Bullinger's Sermons on the Apocalypse The First Vision (Revelation 1—3)

The first 22 of Bullinger's 101 sermons on Revelation. What more orthodox and trustworthy (human) interpreter of the Apocalypse could the church ask for than the author of the Second Helvetic Confession? 

Very reasonably priced hard cover with d.j.

Revenant Psalms, Vol. II

 

This really pulls back the curtain on cobalt

... and makes carbon look beautiful by comparison.

https://rumble.com/v21xovy-the-disturbing-reality-of-cobalt-mining-for-rechargeable-batteries.html

Oliver's Christmas commentary nicely conveys the sense of the Magnificat

 

499 years old, now going on 500

This historical and pivotal sermon series began on December 1, 1523. It evidently ran right up through Christmas Eve.

2023 would be a great time to have a Bible study on 1John, with Oecolampadius' sermon series to guide you. 

Here is a playlist of 17 videos consisting of a 30-min Introduction and sixteen short summaries by Oecolampadius' leading biographer, Ernst Staehelin (a contemporary colleague of Karl Barth); the summaries are newly translated and read as introductions to Bible Study sessions.

Meanwhile, as further evidence of just how groundbreaking this series was, check out this link; notice whose name appears first and notice the categories:

Tradition = Reformed and Genre = Sermon / Sort = Date (Oldest)

The title in question is the third on the list. The first is Oecolampadius' translation of a patristic sermon, the second is a collection of three sermons from 1521, which merit translation, but do not quite represent the full breakthrough to the Reformation, as they were produced while he was still in the monastery.

For the hardcover version of the Sermons on the First Epistle of John, and also for additional translations of related material, ... these Works of Oecolampadius are appearing at Barnes & Noble.

First Year in Basel

This latest volume in the series, The First Year in Basel, fills the gap between Sown on Rock: The Sermon on the Vernacular and the Correspondence with Hedio, and the Sermons on the First Epistle of John (A Handbook for the Christian Life).

[Links to images lead to paperbacks. Links in the paragraph above lead to hardcover options.]