Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone.
Acts 10:34-35
Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
Words of Grace For Today
“… anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.”
Thankfully Peter did not say that only those who fear God and do what is right are acceptable to God, otherwise no one would be acceptable to God.
That would be to deny Grace.
Truth is no one can do what is right and therefore be acceptable to God.
Our duty is to keep God’s commandments, which we can only do with God’s help. Fearing God is the first step.
Luther added to that: we are to fear and love God. This is more complete, in that it brings us to the essence of God’s relationship to us. God loves us and graciously gives us freedom to choose, to forgive, and the ability to breathe, work and love … and hope.
God gives these gifts to every human, without partiality.
Accept who we are and what God gives us, and we enjoy the fullness of life and life eternal.
We can spend many hours, days and years trying to be what we are not, trying to separate ourselves from God. All of it is futile.
God stays with us, calling us to be all that God created us to be.
David said further to his son Solomon, ‘Be strong and of good courage, and act. Do not be afraid or dismayed; for the Lord God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you or forsake you, until all the work for the service of the house of the Lord is finished.
1 Corinthians 4:1
Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.
Words of Grace For Today
If ever there was a time when we needed good people to be courageous and act, it is now. Evil has found a home in so many institutions, so many pieces of civilization, and in so many hearts and minds. The social contract that underpins civilization has been under attack by those who abuse their power and position and wealth for so long, no one can predict how long it will last, as it teeters next to the abyss with one foot on a banana peel. Predictions are that no matter the election results this November in the USA there will be civil unrest and violence. Among many others who are corrupt (including those with power in the Courts, with positions in politics, with wealth from oil and the inflated economy that surrounds it) Trump is trouble, bad trouble, real bad trouble.
Fortunately not everyone is corrupt, yet. Before corruption, well past the critical mass for unrest, reaches so many people that civilization is shredded by it, we need many many many people who are willing to make good trouble, good trouble for Christ.
Martin Luther wrote, shortly after his trial where he was found guilty:
If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitioussinners. Be a sinner and sinboldly,but believe andrejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world]we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness,but, as Peter says,we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousnessdwells. It is enough that bythe riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.
No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sinsby so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.
.
Luther is not encouraging us to sin wildly. He states clearly that we sin already, no matter what we believe, think, do or do not do. The matter is then what? Do we recognize God’s Grace as the ultimate determination of our lives (each breath we take and each action we commit?) When we do, then we move beyond fearing our own sin. We accept it. We accept others’ sins. We exercise God’s Grace for ourselves and for others.
Levelled down to begging God for mercy, then we all can start to act, and act courageously. We can do everything the Holy Spirit gives us the power to do to counter the work of the Devil. So acting courageously we will continue to sin. This does not stop us for we trust God’ Grace.
David instructs Solomon to act, to serve God, for God will be with him.
Paul writes that we are servants of Jesus, stewards of God’s mysteries.
I gave thanks yesterday for water and fire, sufficient safe water and contained fire that keeps me warm, cooks food, and boils water.
It’s difficult to get water. Gas is too expensive to borrow a truck to travel the 25+ km there and 25 km back to get town water. There is no well and the lake water is contaminated far to much to use more than occasionally. No children have emerged from a swim with an extra leg or hand, but it’s bad. I have a bicycle that costs just my energy to run, though it’s not suitable for hauling water in any quantity. I have developed a way to collect rainwater. Since the recent rains I now have nearly full stores of rainwater, filtered and treated.
The stove that keeps me warm burns wood. LOTS of work. Every year the stove needs to be serviced, or more accurately rebuilt, fixed again and again, in order to eek out another winter of warmth from it. I was able to get this done over the Thanksgiving weekend, and it’s ready for the coming winter. There are other things I have to complete, but that one is the primary one.
Now I am set to work at surviving the winter, and living well!
What do we do with all that is life that God has given us?
David hoped his son would be faithful and serve God as Solomon ruled as king of Israel following David’s reign.
Paul hoped the Corinthians would learn to respect each other, not get caught in senseless squabbles, and look to serve (instead of rule over) others.
What do you hope for?
To live without sin and without trouble is not possible.
So serving Christ, trusting God’s Grace alone to save us, we can be so bold as opportunities provide for us, so that (though we may fail and likely will do something terribly wrong) God’s Grace will be known by many people through our words and actions (not by our sins.)
The point is, we will sin anyway, no matter what. Trying all your life not to sin is a useless consumption of our limited time alive. To do so would guarantee that we did nothing good at all. Not one little good thing at all.
Better to sin boldly.
Better to trust God to be with us.
Better to serve Christ and hold on to the mysteries we know about God.
Make trouble, good trouble. Invite others to make good trouble. We’re going to make trouble of some kind. Best we choose to make trouble, good trouble, serving Christ…
and trusting God’s forgiveness will extend also to us … especially when we need it.
The hearing ear and the seeing eye – the Lord has made them both.
Matthew 13:16
But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.
Words of Grace For Today
Life!
What a wondrous thing we are given.
To participate in it fully, we see and hear, with eyes and ears given to us by God.
It’s blessed to be in this wondrous life, fully in it. To be able to hear and see God’s reality, even as the idiots spin some fake world, some fake history, some fake life ….
Seeing and hearing God’s reality despite so many lies about life is blessed.
And God gives life and sight and hearing to us.
So see! So hear!
And share the Word of God, that gives us breath, and love … and the ability to hope, and hoping we can imagine what is not yet …
and thus imagining, we can be Christ’s hands, feet, and voice for everyone to see and hear how God loves us unconditionally, all of us!
And seeing that, hearing that Word, it makes it possible for us to love others, all others, unconditionally.
What a wondrous life!
That’s everything for which we can give God thanks!
For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
Mark 4:39
He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.
Words of Grace For Today
God Creates with a Word.
Kings’, emperors’, and pharaohs’ power was such that they need only speak and others would make it happen for them! No one dared to disobey.
God speaks and the nothingness of the not-yet-universe becomes something, something firm, solid, and existing. That’s infinitely more power than the most powerful ruler.
The people of Jesus’ time saw the world much differently than we do today. A firmament, a dome and separator, stood in the sky. On our side of it the world existed. On the other side of it was the chaos of not-creation, the nothingness that God created the world out of. The chaos was, as best one could translate it in terms available today, anti-matter, or anti-existence.
The point of all that is that this same chaos-anti-matter-anti-creation came up in the oceans. The water, the deep, was the same thing that was beyond the firmament, which was clear because when the firmament leaked it rained. When one ventured forth on the sea, one was courageous indeed, for one came into contact with anti-creation.
When storms rose up on the sea, the anger of God or simply the chaos of not-creation rose up to consume everything in it’s way. The disciples in the boat with Jesus feared not only the storm that could wash them out of the boat and send it and them into the deep. The disciples feared the power of chaos, the power of not-creation, or antimatter that could swallow up them, their boat and who knew what all else. Anyone caught in a flood will have stories of this fear. It is part of our human DNA.
Jesus is not afraid!
Human that he is fully, he is also fully God. He proves it. He speaks and the chaos of anti-creation is stilled. He commands all of creation and all of not-creation.
Now that is someone we want on our side.
But that cannot and never does happen.
Instead God brings us on to God’s side, and Jesus pays the price to make that possible, and the Holy Spirit moves in and through us to get the work of God to come out of us, in spite of us remaining sinners. Wonders never cease with God working us for the goodness of creation.
Which is good, because Evil never ceases to flow from our sins destroying the goodness of life for us and those around us, and those that come after us for generations.
Next time you see it rain, or the waves rise from the water of a lake or ocean, imagine the truth that those before us knew: this is the chaos out of which God created, which can consume us back to not-creation.
Thanks be to God, the waves are down, the sky up, and the rain is sufficient but not too much. It’s a balance, that involves us as well, if we wish to cooperate with God’s good creation.
Though someone is cutting them down left right and centre
as we are
these still stand
as we will always!
Isaiah 49:4
I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.
1 Corinthians 15:58
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.
Words of Grace For Today
In this world the life of honesty and honour, of sacrificial and unconditional love, and of grace and hope is not rewarded by many. It is by many, even in the Courts, attacked and condemned with blood sport, lies and games with one’s life.
It is too often that striving to reflect the life the prophets called us to, to Jesus’ Way of being in the world, often leads us to the same end as he met: lies, injustice, cruelty, torture, and even death.
Met with this profound malfeasance we are readily able to say with Isaiah: We have laboured in vain, we have spent our strength for nothing and vanity. The work of the Devil meets our efforts to live graciously in response to God’s gift of life abundant. Seemingly the Devil wins every time.
Truth is otherwise. The Devil, all his works, and the people that do his deeds against us and so many others only show how lost and condemned those people are who follow his ways. They pronounce with lies that we are criminal, that we are vexatious, that we are unreliable. Their pronouncements do not reflect who we are, what we have done and not done. Their pronouncements reflect how corrupt they and all the liars are that bear false witness against good people like us.
They use their positions of power to create their own illogical, unreal bubble of existence. They dismiss scientists and science, logic and the laws of physics and other sciences (like gravity and toxicity), and the power of truth, love and hope. In their place they construct a world that serves their own greed, corrupt power, and decadent hedonism.
The devil’s miracle is that so many people accept this fantastical construction of ir-reality as if it were real, true, and valid. They construct religions of destruction of their enemies.
We hold to our faith in God who is all-powerful, Creator, and all-knowing. Our God is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. By Grace alone (not by our merit) God forgives us our sin, adopts us as children, and empowers us to be the voice, hands, and feet of God’s own Son, Jesus, who gave his life to redeem us. Our faith does not condemn others. That is in God’s hands, and God’s alone. Our faith gives life, and promises life eternal to those who believe and accept the redemption worked out for them each day, each minute.
Therefore we are steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because we know that in the Lord our labour is not in vain.
Covid 19 has nothing on the destructive power of the Devil, his works and the people who do his deeds. By Grace we shall live with God walking with us and suffering with us everything done to us, even through all these trying times. Even if our bodies die, we shall live for God cannot be defeated, nor can we be separated from God.
Breathe as we are still able. These are blessed lives God accompanies us through.
Then Joshua said to the people, ‘You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord, to serve him.’ And they said, ‘We are witnesses.’
Colossians 2:18
Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking.
Words of Grace For Today
You have chosen … and are witnesses against yourselves … to serve the Lord!
Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on practices of piety that are claimed to bring you a good relationship with God and salvation.
There are always challenges in life. Covid 19 is one serious one that everyone shares … and everyone suffers from everyone else’s stupidity in not being one who protects against it. It is the community maker or breaker kind of virus. We cannot as much protect ourselves as we can protect others. We must rely on others to protect us. One person cannot protect anyone or any group. The weakest, stupidest link in the chain causes the infection to spread. And many weak links allow the virus to spread like wildfire in a dry, tinder-laden forest.
Covid 19 protection demands of us practices, not unlike piety (for one has to be consistent, one might say ‘religious’, about keeping vigilant with these practices). These practices for other people’s protection must be engaged in to save us all.
While we each can and must do things to protect ourselves, they are not enough by themselves. We each require many other people to engage in the protection practices to keep us safe. We never know who it may be that we need to be consistent and diligent for us to be safe.
We are not in control of our own safety, our own ability to survive this pandemic. It is in other peoples’ hands.
We are less in control of our relationship with God. Anyone who claims we control our own salvation with our choices is an utter fool, trying to entice us down a path of human effort to become godlets for ourselves. Only God can save us from our sin. At most we can strive to respond, and hope that occasionally the Holy Spirit will pull from us the miracle of us actually doing something for God in this world!
We can choose to serve God. We can be witnesses against and for ourselves. It is good to so respond and choose and strive to serve God. As far as our relationship with God and our salvation go, it counts for next to nothing, because we never can be consistent in serving God alone! We continually break away from and work against God. We are, all our lives long, captive to sin. Only God can save us.
That said, God does save us, through the sacrifice of Jesus, the Christ. And by the power of the Holy Spirit God promises to pull out of us miracles, miracles that we, pitiful us, can actually do God’s will on this earth, at least occasionally.
Strive we must. Striving has it’s own rewards, not unlike hard exercise to provide the basics of life for ourselves, our loved ones, and for others, especially our enemies and the needy, the stranger, and the homeless.
It’s another day. Another night. Every day has its opportunities and beauty. Every night its beauty and rest for recovery. Hard work is before us. May the Holy Spirit use it to accomplish God’s will also among us!
Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live?
John 12:46
I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness.
Words of Grace For Today
There is an immense amount of corruption and evil in the world, starting right here at home in Alberta.
It is easy to think someone needs to eradicate those responsible, somehow or other; to cut the legs right out from underneath them, to stop them from doing what they are doing; and for us to pray that God ends their evil by removing them from the face of the earth.
God works in different ways than eradicating evil. God rescues the person doing the evil, saves them from their own evil self, their own evil intention and corruption. That way there is no need for another evil death.
Instead there is a double victory: first that the evil stops being done to us. Second, that the person ceases to be evil.
That sounds terrific, though we humans tend to like revenge, so we hang on to the possibility that if the evil doing people do not repent, then perhaps God will remove them after all.
There are people who regularly are bullies, cruel bullies, who threaten other people’s lives as often as they can, and since they have, their whole live long, lied and cheated to get power they have lots of power to threaten and more, to kill other people … and not even be charged with murder.
God knows what they do.
God chooses to rescue them.
Most of us are not so evil. Our sins are run of the mill, which does not make us any better in God’s eyes, it’s just we do not commit crimes. If we are convicted of a crime it’s a false conviction. Some measures of the world would consider us really good, honest, trustworthy, and productive citizens. Still we sin against God. So from God’s perspective we are just as evil as those who falsely convict, bully, threaten, and kill people from their positions of power, safe from prosecution.
Thank God for God’s Grace, for we are all rescued from our sins.
It’s just we certainly wish the cruel bullies that kill us with immunity would be stopped, if not today, then already yesterday.
God can you help us with that? Please.
Jesus commands us to love our enemies, so we do.
Even as they actively seek to kill us with their threats, bullying and cruel exercise of their power.
God, save the children from learning from this that they also must lie and cheat to have enough power to be the ones who threaten, bully, and treat others cruelly, even killing them, in order to keep it from being done to them.
When we are lost in the darkness, God rescues us. This we trust. God’s Grace is what the Light of Christ brings us to be able to always see, for ourselves, for our loved ones, and even for our enemies. Threatening, bullying and being cruel to others, even to their death, has no part in us after Jesus rescues and brings us into the light.
What will you be this day? Are you one to teach children sacrificial love, even of one’s enemies, is the key to life as God’s creatures? Or do you teach children that cheating and lying are the only way to become one who threatens, bullies and kills others … all in order that it not be done to them. The price, of course for cheating and lying to get through life, is the terror of guilt that never stops. The price for living sacrificial love will inevitably and eventually be that one loses one’s life to save others.
I will never again hide my face from them, when I pour out my spirit upon the house of Israel, says the Lord God.
1 Corinthians 12:4-7
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
Words of Grace For Today
During Covid 19, like many times before though for some much more intensely, we need to be careful for each other.
The kind of care is not to avoid some great big monster of a villain, who invades our lives and leaves tracks and vivid images of the him/herself in our memories.
This villain is a teeny, tiny virus that can get us mildly sick and contagious, or very ill so that we feel we are dying, to killing us … and what many seem to forget is even if one survives, this little virus can leave it’s surviving victims’ health compromised for the rest of their lives. The compromise can be as little as an irritation to deal with, to major health issues that alter how one can live through a normal day.
We cannot know, if we are in an proximity of other people (and very few of us live anywhere NOT in close proximity to others through a normal week), if we or someone else is infected and contagious, or what air space is filled with contaminated microdroplets containing the virus, or what surface has the virus waiting for contact to infect us. And we cannot know for sure when we are leaving the virus behind for others to be infected from us.
Stupid is the infected President who waves to people from the balcony, takes of his mask, and turns to be in close proximity to a number of his staff … and they test positive a few days later!
Stupid is a lot of what people do nowadays!
Stupid and deadly for some people, debilitating for others, inconvenient for others.
God promises not to hide his face from us, again.
So God endures these stupidities with us.
God has given us all many gifts of great varieties, and to all of us God has given the Holy Spirit for the common good. Each and every one of us has received the gifts to not have to be stupid about Covid 19.
We may be sick and tired of the limits and restrictions. Still we can and must comply with health restrictions and recommendations to keep each other safe.
It’s better to be sick and tired of the limits, than to be sick and tired, out of breath, and incapable of living fully for the rest of our lives, simply because we or someone that came close to us, decided to be stupid about being sick and tired.
God, save us from stupid! Especially from those who have authority and means to provide for our safety (individually and collectively) … and they do not.
He said to me: Mortal, all my words that I shall speak to you, receive in your heart and hear with your ears.
Hebrews 2:1
Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it.
Words of Grace For Today
Our ears hear so much. The internet offers even more to hear than even 40 years ago we could imagine we could ever hear in one lifetime!
The question of our lives, over-filled with sounds and information is: What do we choose to listen to?
Music can inspire our hearts and minds to greater good … or evil.
Words can move us from complacency to action for good … or evil.
We must choose which is which, and which we wish to participate in with our ears, our minds, and our hearts.
Jesus gives us a commandment, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind and strength; and to love one another, especially our enemies.
Can we choose to listen to Jesus’ Word each day anew, with ears attentive, minds focused, and our hearts receptive? We can, by the Grace of God through the Holy Spirit empowering us; though on our own we certainly cannot, and when we think that we can on our own then we surely error in choosing to listen to and work for Evil.
The Word of Jesus provides us living water, daily bread, and all we need to move into the future, fully aware that we move from past to present as God’s children, blessed to be blessings to others.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
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
The world demands that we strive to prepare, possess, and secure for ourselves all that is necessary for the best life we can achieve. We are taught: Trust possessions, wealth, fame or at least good reputation, and your own knowledge and intelligence to provide a future of the best and and greatest comfort available to you.
God created us and provided us creation for an entirely different way of living. We must strive. That is a given. But we are created to strive to connect with our Creator and Saviour, and with other creatures of God. This includes working to provide ‘daily bread’, the necessities of life. We provide them not just for ourselves and our own. We provide them also for the needy, the poor, the strangers, the refugees, the outcasts … and for all the people the world prefers to forget.
This is to prepare our minds for action, to discipline ourselves, to count on God’s Grace alone, to trust the Lord with all our hearts, to acknowledge God. To count on Grace alone and to acknowledge God enables us to prepare for action and to discipline ourselves to be Christ’s hands, feet, and voice of Grace for the ‘forgotten.’
Covid 19 restrictions and precautions have taught us once again that ‘we are in this together!’ It does no good to protect just the wealthy and the privileged. The poor and the homeless need to be protected as well or no measures are sufficient. To protect the poor and the homeless requires first that we ensure the basics of life are available to them as well.
Long since recognized is that it costs less to provide homes for the poor, than it does to provide all the other services, like emergency services, minimal health care, etc for people living without a home.
In homes, people are better able to care for themselves, even when some cannot do that well, caught as they are in addictions or circumstances beyond which they can resolve. People caring for themselves, from a level in a home, achieves greater results than from the street or woods level. ‘Homes’ does not mean an apartment in a run down, dangerous, crime controlled place of squalor. ‘Homes’ means a place that anyone would be eager to live in: a safe, warm in the winter, cool in the summer, dry, pest-free, friendly neighbourhood. That’s why homes for the poor need to be built in every community, sprinkled in as part of life, in all our lives. So NIMBY has no place in this world. God calls us to say YIMBY! and YIOBY! and YIYBY! Yes! in Everyone’s ‘Best Yard’!
When we trust the ways of the world, or our own insights, then we settle for much less than we are capable of, less than providing well for all other people.
Trusting God alone, and God’s Grace alone, moves us to be in ways and to do things that we could never have imagined we were capable of being and doing.
God’s ways with us are wonderful, awesome, and down right frightening – unless we trust God. Trusting God they are wonderful, awesome and enthralling – inspiring and life-giving!
Breathe!
Now comes the adventure of your life.
Today is Sunday, a day of rest.
Which may be a calm day, a break from work.
Or
It may be God’s day to get us to provide for the rest of the poor people in our city, county, M.D., or community a home, food, clothing and love!
It may be God’s day for us to get the rest of God’s work finally done! (or well on it’s way.)
