Five Minutes with Luther – Devotion of the Week by BJS

There are many devotional sources around the web that will deliver to your inbox a short piece to help you in your daily or weekly devotionals, or just get your day started in the right frame of mind. We at BJS use several of these ourselves, and wanted to bring some of them to your attention. We will be posting a devotional from different sources that we are aware of. If you receive or know of a good Lutheran devotion, please contact us and we’ll look at it and make it available to our readership.

Five Minutes a Day with Luther is an email list sent out daily by Pastor Robin Fish. It includes a bible passage, a writing on it by Luther, and a hymn verse related to the same. Here is a description of the project:

Several years ago, a delightful elder lady in my congregation gave me one of her old devotion books which she had stopped using. It was called “Five Minutes Daily with Luther”. My wife and I have used it four or five different years since that day, and find it a delight for our own daily devotional reading. Sadly, the book is out of print and difficult to find, having been originally published in 1926. My copy is fast falling apart, and not only do I want to preserve it for myself, I want to be able to share it with others, so I took up the task of editing the book. Here it is, ready for the whole world to read and share, and find the same comfort and strength in these devotions as I have.

This is a project that is evolving. My original edits were very minor, but I find myself cutting deeper to make the old text speak more clearly to our modern America. Constructive criticism is always welcome.

I’ve now made the whole series available from Scholia through Lulu – a self-publishing site. The book may be puchased, or downloads in pdf format are free. There is no profit in the price for me. My profit is in seeing this great devotional book preserved in print for another generation.

Below is today’s Five Minutes a Day with Luther:


Bible Passage:1 Peter 1:12

It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven — things into which angels long to look.

That is, the prophets possessed enough thereof to know the fact. But that they should have left it behind them (on record) calls for our gratitude; they have become our servants, and have so ministered to us, that we, through them, might go to school and learn the same lesson. Such great things have the Apostles declared to us, through the Holy Spirit, who descended upon them from heaven, as even the angels would gladly look into. When this Spirit opens our eyes and makes us see what the Gospel is, we shall have an appetite for it and a joy in it, although we cannot behold it with bodily eyes, but must believe that we are partakers and fellow-heirs of the righteousness, truth, salvation, and all the blessings which God has to bestow. For since He has given us His only Son, that highest good, He will also, through Him, give us all good things, riches and treasures, whereof the angels in heaven have all their joy, and of which they are most desirous. All of this is offered to us through the Gospel, and if we believe we shall also have a similar desire for them. But our desire for them cannot be as perfect as that of the angels, so long as we live on earth. However, in heaven it is so great that no human heart can conceive it. If we reach that place we shall ourselves feel it.

Ah, then my spirit faints
To reach the land I love;
The bright inheritance of saints,
Jerusalem above!

To view this on the web, letting you subscribe to it daily, visit Five Minutes a Day with Luther.

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