I will cleanse them from all the guilt of their sin against me, and I will forgive all the guilt of their sin and rebellion against me.
1 John 2:2
He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
Words of Grace For Today
To have enough,
Not too much,
and
not to litle,
and
to know one has enough,
and though one could use more and dream of that perhaps, to still know
that for today, this is enough:
That is the gift God gives the saints.
…
One may think that has to do with things, food, property, profitable work, toys, power, reputation … or a host of other things.
Yet, none of that is all that important: one may consider air, water, food, clothing, shelter, meaningful labour, and love more important than the others.
What we need enough of is God’s love,
and forgiveness,
and promise of renewed life.
Enough is not that we have God’s gifts and promises, but enough is to know that God provides these essentials for life for all people.
And [the Lord] said [to Moses], ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, “The Lord”;and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’
2 Corinthians 8:9
For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.
Words of Grace For Today
God saves Moses by covering Moses’ face as the Lord, in all the Lord’s goodness, passes by Moses.
For all of us God’s great goodness becomes visible in Jesus, a living human being. The greatness and goodness of God is not as we might have expected, such greatness that it over powers all evil. Instead God’s goodness becomes visible for us all in that Jesus gives up all claim to greatness, is born into poverty, lives in poverty, dies in poverty … so that we might come to know God’s greatness lies in self-sacrificial love, everything given up so that we might live, forgiven and renewed, and filled with hope … hope that all will be well, for us and for all people.
In this gift of hope God shows us all mercy, mercy that we certainly do not deserve, but without which we could not live.
Although our iniquities testify against us, act, O Lord, for your name’s sake; our apostasies indeed are many and we have sinned against you.
O hope of Israel, its saviour in time of trouble, why should you be like a stranger in the land, like a traveller turning aside for the night? Why should you be like someone confused, like a mighty warrior who cannot give help?
Yet you, O Lord, are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name; do not forsake us!
Ephesians 1:16-19
I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
Words of Grace For Today
Jeremiah knew, even if the people of his day refused to admit it, that they had all sinned terribly against God. Jeremiah prays that God will not be known as a stranger in God’s people’s land, or like a warrior with dementia who has forgotten how to fight to save his own people.
Jeremiah knows that God is with the people, in their midst, as God has been through all the generations. Jeremiah also knows that God does not automatically ‘save’ the people as they wish to be saved.
God is not always a God of great displays of might while saving God’s people. In fact this time, God turns a deaf ear to Jeremiah’s cries for the people, and the people suffer greatly.
The truth about God is that God cannot be fully comprehended, predicted, or controlled by any human. The writer of Ephesians knows this well and prays that the people of Ephesus (and all the readers of the letter, including us today) will receive from God a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that with the eyes of our hearts enlightened in the mysteries of the saints, we may come to know the hope that God gives us, that guides us, that draws us forward each day as God’s own saints. With the wisdom we may then ‘see’ the great power of God, the power of weakness, humility, suffering, and self-sacrificial love. This is the power of God demonstrated in Jesus’ story, living, teaching, dying, and raising to new life … in order that we might finally believe the impossible … that God saves us even as we think we are losing everything we treasure, even our lives.
God’s power is the greatest power in and beyond the universe. It is the power that creates, sustains, and provides the universe as a place-time for us to live, and to live free to choose to love as God does, or to turn away from God, sinning and creating evil.
Even then God comes to save us again, and again, and again, and … always forever again, so that we might live in God’s love, and live that love for all people around us. This is the spirit of wisdom that God gives us, freely, and the hope that guides us, and the love that is life itself.
What a year to come! To live as God’s saints in this time and place, as real and messy as it is, as challenged as we all are by Covid and the limits it places on our lives, and as wondrous as life has ever been.
whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s
Deuteronomy 32:39
See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god besides me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand.
Romans 14:8
If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.
Words of Grace For Today
When the jellyfish came up out of the lake, crawling on all 10 feet, it posed a question that deserves our attention:
What will you do about the rats’ snot that collects on the lower branches of the olive trees, making the collection of sap from the neighbouring maples impossible until fall and then it’s too late, for the time for the amendment of life will have passed us by in the wrong lane?
It’s not a simple question, not like ‘what are we to do with the nuclear wastes from our personal nuclear power pockets that we all carry on our backs to propel us through time and space as we are wont and as we will at the time – or place – that used to be when-where we were?’
That waste … well we can either feed that waste back into our personal reactor for another go at atomizing-chaos-reordering, or we can simply make a quick visit to the nearest sun, deposit our waste in that reaction and then get out so quick it does not consume us for all time in all of space the size of one Adam.
The snotty question of the jelly fish is really the same question that keeps coming up again and again, which we find so hard to state as it is, because .. well we find it so hard because the obvious answer is that we’ve warped the time-space continuum so completely out of whack from it’s original bends and turns that the extreme cases of mist-ordered events and consequences from last year keep getting dwarfed by new extreme event-consequences this year. After a century or two of these it’s pretty hard to catch where the mist is coming from and how the events are consequences or vice versa. It’s just that three orders of species, of the twenty that remain, rely on maple syrup for proper nurturing. And the projections of the best scientists-artists are that any fewer than twenty orders of species and the whole ecosystem of all the various iterations of earth will simply dissolve. It’s like the warnings that no one heeded about climate change and the ice melt of Greenland and Antarctica. But that was centuries ago, or yesterday, depending on where in time one lands or begins.
The only sure thing in this mess we seem to have made of the universe is that God did create it, and whether we live or die we are Christ’s own people, so totally flawed and living by Grace alone.
It’s that Grace that gives us a reference point, the only available reference point in the messed-warped time-place continuum. What is done is done. What is coming will still come. We have now, and only in our now can we make choices, and pray that, also dealing with rat snot, they will reflect God’s Will to give life and heal, and not harm and kill even if it seems it is all impossible to cure of evil.
The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people.
Jude 1:22
Have mercy on those who doubt.
Words of Grace For Today
The last day of the year
leaves us to ask (as so many media do for us in various ways):
Where has this year taken us?
Where will this next year bring us?
Will we have any choices that will make a difference, a real difference, for ourselves and all living on the earth, and for the course of human history?
We, if we were here at the beginning of the year and if we are here at the end of the year, have survived.
What have we survived besides merely to live on? Our enemies have sought and continue to seek to kill us by whatever means they can use (trying not to get caught of course or pay any price for their efforts.) We have survived all the attacks of our enemies. Our enemies have built up a collection of lies about us, which has next to nothing to do with us (except … well read on) and which clearly defines who they are, what kind of people they are … and as humans have been wont since the beginning of time their lies reflect rather clearly exactly what they have done. They have lied that instead of them being the ones doing terrible things, they have names us as the perpetrators of their great evil. Which we have survived, though … the consequences of their lies are that more and more people believe their lies, and more and more people join their efforts to kill us, slowly or more quickly. And still we have survived.
We have survived not because we are so strong, no, we are old and weak. We have survived not because we are so rich and influential, no, we are caught deep in the grips of poverty from which we likely will never emerge and most of our friends we used to have, have deserted us, afraid of being associated with one who is attacked so ferociously. They do not want to become collateral damage. We have survived only by the Grace of God, and by many and various miracles that God has worked to keep us alive.
We have survived, though it has appeared at many times that we would not, could not, simply because even in those darkest moments of doubt, God has made us able to remain grateful of all God does for us and for our enemies, offering us forgiveness and renewed life. With grateful hearts more and more miracles have sprinkled our path, been noticed, convinced us that God walks with us making us saints and this has given us hope … and hope has carried us through the darkness to the light of day, to the Light of Christ.
We are thus quite able to trust that this coming year will be more of the same: God walking with us, miracles in abundance, hope carrying us always into the Light.
Our choices? Well our choices will be as always, the best we can make at the time, and even then always imperfect, yet made perfect by the Grace of God alone.
And that same Grace, as only God’s Grace can, will make a difference, a real difference, for ourselves and all living on the earth, and for the course of human history.
So Moses prayed for the sinful people, and God continued to write God’s story with the lives of God’s people, bringing us to each new day, as a miracle-gift, for each of us.
No New Year resolution will carry us to a better life. Only God’s resolution, covenant, promise will carry us, as it has, into the best life ever, the life of God’s own children, God-made saints, given breath and time … to be God’s Grace for others, especially our cruel enemies.
Yours is the day, yours also the night; you established the luminaries and the sun.
Romans 13:12-13
The night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy.
Words of Grace For Today
Knowing from long experience as humans we know that enough people will violate the goodness of social order, so we create laws and police and courts and judges and jails for such people.
What ends up happening is that the laws are written by people who will as readily as anyone violate the goodness of social order to ensure that they stay in power to write the laws, so that they are not held responsible for the evil they do.
The police are more than ready to violate the goodness of social order, justifying their lawlessness for themselves by saying that they must keep order and they are not given enough tools to do so.
The lawyers who work to convict and who work to protect those charges are ready to violate the goodness of social order, justifying their lawlessness to themselves by saying that they must do what is necessary to play their part in keeping good order and they are not given enough tools to do so without cheating the system.
The judges who are supposed to work to ensure that only guilty people are convicted and sentenced are more than ready to violate the goodness of social order, justifying their lawlessness to themselves by saying that they must do what is necessary to play their part in keeping good order and they are the ones who determine what is just and what is not.
What is lost as all these people, supposedly do their part in keeping good order, is simple: truth is lost and with it all possibility of good social order. The real criminals continue to rape society of it’s goodness, it’s wealth, it’s equality for all; and they put others in jail who work at the bottom of their ladder of corruption; the drug dealers, the killers, the violent rapists, at least all those that are not smart enough not to get caught.
So for whom do we build jails? We hope they are for real criminals, and we trust at least some real criminals end up there. But the real criminals are the ones who process other ‘less successful’ people who violate the goodness of social order. There are no jails that can hold these people and keep us all safe from them.
God will judge all people, and these criminals will eventually pay for their crimes against us all.
For God’s is the day and the night. God created all. The darkness of night is passing, and the day of Christ’s light is near.
So we pray God helps us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; help us live honourably as in the day, in the Light of Christ.
O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.
Luke 1:78-79
By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Words of Grace For Today
By the tender mercy of our God …
Everything that is blessing and gift in this life is
By the tender mercy of our God.
…
By the tender mercy of our God we learn to treasure all that each day brings to us:
The sunrise, the sunset.
The COLD outside (-46⁰C), the HEAT of the furnace’s chimney (2000⁰C).
The relentless attack of our enemies’ (lies to destroy, destory, and kill us – by which we learn to trust God alone) and the gracious response of truth, both exposed by Christ’ light (by which we learn to hope only in God’s tender mercy).
New food allergies and intolerances (that increase our food costs and teach us with pain how to eat well) and the plethora of good and nutritious food available from the food bank and the grocery stores (from which we can choose how to deal with new dietary limits.)
The skills of many decades of capturing the good beauty of life in photos, of writing words that inspire hearts and minds to live better, to live well, the dancing steps to music and through the snow and woods and atop the roofs, the knowing of languages from ancient times, of foreign lands and using ‘artificial intelligence’, the piloting precision-decision-making over and under clouds, around obstacles on the ground, and between hills and mountains and leaving & returning to earth, the melding with machines to accomplish work and travel safely in all kinds of conditions, and the seeing God present walking with us each moment (good and terrible).
And most of all the miracle of being healed so that we are able to love those that love in return and those who return for love betrayal, who return for love hatred and evil, and even for those who corrupt justice for so many giving privilege to the wealthy and connected.
By the tender mercy of our God we live filled with hope for our tomorrows, and for theirs.
You say, ‘I am innocent; surely his anger has turned from me.’ Now I am bringing you to judgment for saying, ‘I have not sinned.’
1 Peter 1:13
Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed.
Words of Grace For Today
It is one thing to sin terribly. It is another degree of a thing to then claim that one has not sinned. That leaves one unable to redeem oneself.
Even then the only thing that saves us, that can save us, is what God has demonstrated through Jesus. Jesus’ story is clear and simple: God always has loved us, been ready to forgive us, and given us everything we need to know how God is always gracious towards us.
So our hope is set on Jesus Christ’ grace.
We are thus prepared for the action that the Holy Spirit calls us to do, namely living out grace for all other people.
It’s quite a life God has for us, and quite a life we have to offer others.
Maybe no records there, It’s been that way in each generation.
Psalm 109:21
But you, O Lord my Lord, act on my behalf for your name’s sake; because your steadfast love is good, deliver me.
Acts 7:59-60
While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he died.
Words of Grace For Today
Courageous of Stephen to forgive those who killed him without just cause. They were filled with hate at someone different, someone with hope, someone who knew Jesus as his Lord and Saviour.
So they gathered around him and threw stones at him until he was dead. Blunt force trauma, repeated, and repeated, and repeated by a mob.
We think that we do not do such things today, but …
My story and many like it give clear evidence (denied by most – what can one do for the mob?) prove that mobs of many kinds exist today. Women trying to assert themselves make up stories about good men so they have a man to abuse, ruin, and kill … and feel like they have gained power over men. Cops who need to bully someone like they are bullied so they encourage civilians to create damning false stories about their target. Cops who lie in court. Lawyers who leave the cops’ victim defenceless in court, and judges who love to add their own lies to the blatantly false evidence in order to convict good people, just because they all can. Just because they hate life. Just because they fear truth. Just because.
We should cry day and night to God to act on our behalf. Our only hope, as ever it has been, is that God’s steadfast love is good and God promises to deliver us.
Christ was born, and killed for being good, a threat to corrupt, dirty and evil powers, and simple fear and hatred of what is good in life.
So we live, pray, and hope, also these c…c…c…cold days that God would deliver us, from the hatred in us, from the fear in us, and from the hatred and fear in those who would kill us by any means possible.
We pray, God let not our enemies triumph. Rather show your steadfast love as more powerful in the weakness of forgiveness and steadfast love.
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favourably on his people and redeemed them.
Words of Grace For Today
As we begin this evening to celebrate Christ’s birth, not the first time at all, not at all, the temperatures are set to drop deep below -30⁰. That cold will not hinder the blessed warmth that God’s story of Jesus’ love for all people provides for all the faithful.
Candles are lit on the wreath, one for each Sunday of Advent, reminding us that Christ comes and brings light to all the darkness of our lives and of this world, all the darkness that robs us of life.
Yet, this year, again, for all those intelligent to act wisely, there will be no worship service with great crowds, music, and candles lit while we sing Silent Night.
How God moves us through the challenges of life!
In the cold, in the wilderness, in the dark, in great solitude, the blessed quiet of the woods next to the lake, there is always great reason to celebrate all that God provides us.
Breathe.
Pray.
Give Thanks.
Hope.
…
It will all be well, very well, all manner of well … for all us God-made saints.
