It is good that we should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.1

Has God forgotten to be gracious?  Has He shut up His tender mercies towards us?2   We might believe this because of our tendency to live life with great haste.  Our life is fully lived sometimes before the day is over. 

Sometimes our hasty life gives us the illusion that we are cut off from the Lord.  Yet, God hears the voice of our prayer and supplications whenever we become still and cry out to Him.3

God shall avenge His own elect, so day and night we must pray to Him.4  "Day and night" here means that we must exercise prayerful patience.  We must learn how to act under the pressures of living "today" and wait upon the Lord for His help and guidance.  In patience we find salvation.5

So let us learn how to rest in the Lord, and wait for Him.  We must not be anxious when we see our neighbor prosper better then we do.6   This is not a battle that we need to fight.  Instead, we must set ourselves against such attitudes and stand still and behold the activity of God already at work in our every "today."  This will allow us to see and know the salvation of the Lord.7

In due season we shall reap what God has planned for us, but we must not grow weak.8  Remembr how the farmer must learn to plant and wait for the precious fruit of the earth.  This planting and waiting and then harvesting requires that he be patient, until the coming of the early and latter rain.9

1Lam 3:26; 2Psa 77:9; 3Psa 31:22; 4Luk 18:7,8; 5Pro 20:22; 6Psa 37:7; 72Ch 20:17; 8Gal 6:9; 9Jam 5:7;

Scripture is interpreted by Scripture.

A great many of the theological problems or innovations that we encounter today in the Church today are the fruit of a method of biblical interpretation called the historical-critical method. While there are many benefits found in using this method of critical study of the biblical text, its methodology can be overused and over relied upon when seeking a complete understanding or sense of a given passage of Scripture.

Briefly put, the historical-critical method has four components:

1. Form criticism
2. Source criticism
3. Redaction criticism
4. Textual criticism

An main assumption that lies with using these four components as a method of biblical study is the approach that there is only a rational and human development to the text of scripture as we have it.

A major problem that can develop when this method is not used correctly is to see the Bible as a piecemeal of narration. By dividing the Bible into four critical camps the one voice of the whole, the inner identity that sustains the whole Bible and binds it together is usually lost. What you end up with are interpretations that remove the transcendent and the miraculous from the Bible.

What we need to remember is that Scripture interprets Scripture. Scripture is God’s spoken Word to us. It has an underlying unity, logic and cohesion that is divinely authored for our sake. We must always labor to keep one part of Scripture always in relation to the whole, because our particular study or reading is part of a whole. When we remember that Scripture interprets Scripture we can make use of a variety of biblical tools to help us dig deeper into God Word without loosing touch with His truth that pervades it all.