April 2020 Thoughts for the Day

Image: Water lilies, along Billy Goat Trail, Great Falls Park, Montgomery, Maryland, April 2020

I continued to update the "Thought for the Day" on the CRBC site. Here were April entries:

April 1:

“He it is that proceeded from a virgin, and appeared as a man on earth. He it is Whose earthly lineage cannot be declared, because He alone derives His body from no human father, but from a virgin alone” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, c. AD 318).

April 3:

“Afflictions are disciplinary, they teach us. They are, Schola crucis, Schola lucis [the school of the cross, the school of light]….Gideon took ‘thorns of the wilderness, and briars, and with them he taught the men of Succoth.’ Judges viii 16. God by the thorns and briars of affliction teaches us” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

April 6:

“Affliction shows us more of our own hearts. Water in a glass vial looks clear; but set it on fire, and the scum boils up; so when God sets us upon the fire, corruption boils up which we did not discern before” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

April 7:

“Sharp afflictions are to the soul as a soaking rain to the houses; we know not that there are holes in the house till the shower comes, but then we see it drop down here and there; so we do not know what unmortified lusts are in the soul till the storm of affliction comes; then we find unbelief, impatience, carnal fear, dropping down in many places” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

April 9:

“Affliction is a sacred collyrium [eye-salve], it clears our eyesight: the rod gives wisdom” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

April 10:

“Affliction brings those sins to remembrance which we had buried in the grave of forgetfulness…. When a man is in distress his sin comes fresh into his mind; conscience makes a rehearsal sermon of all the evils which have passed in his life; his expense of precious time, his Sabbath-breaking, his slighting of the word, come to remembrance, and he goes and weeps bitterly. Thus the rod gives wisdom, shows the hidden evil of the heart, and brings former sins to remembrance” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

April 13:

“There is profit in affliction, as it quickens our spirit of prayer… Jonah was asleep in the ship, but at prayer in the whale’s belly. Perhaps in a time of health and prosperity we prayed in a cold and formal manner, we put no coals to the incense, we scarcely minded our own prayers, and how should God mind them? God sends some cross or other to make us stir up ourselves to take hold of him…. In times of trouble we pray feelingly, and we never pray so fervently as when we pray feelingly; and is not this for our profit?” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

April 15:

“Why so much care for the body, to the neglect of the concerns of the immortal soul? O be not so anxious for what can only serve your bodies, since, ere long, the clods of cold earth will serve for back and belly too” (Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, 1721).

April 18:

“Affliction is for our profit, as it is a means to purge out our sins… Affliction is God’s physic to expel the noxious humour, it cures the imposthume of pride, the fever of lust; and is not this for our profit? Affliction is God’s file to fetch off our rust, his flail to thresh off our husks. The water of affliction is not to drown us, but to wash off our spots” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

April 22:

“Affliction is God’s file to fetch off our rust, his flail to thresh off our husks. The water of affliction is not to drown us, but to wash off our spots” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

April 27:

“The world is a great inn in the road to eternity to which you are traveling” (Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, 1720).

April 28:

“The worst men can do is to take away that life which we cannot long keep, though all the world should conspire to help us to retain the spirit” (Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, 1720).

April 30:

“If a clock be overwound, it stands still; so when the heart is wound up too much to the world, it stands still to heavenly things. Affliction sounds a retreat to call us off the immoderate pursuit of earthly things. When things are frozen and congealed together, the only way to separate them is by fire; so, when the heart and the world are congealed together, God has not better way to separate them than by the fire of affliction” (Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity, 1692).

JTR