He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
Acts 15:11
On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.’
Words of Grace For Today
If we are honest with ourselves and each other, we know our participation in original sin.
It is the opposite of what we wish well for ourselves and others, that we would consider the goodness of life, and what we understand God intends for us.
We know that we deserve all judgments of God made against us, and all punishments and consequences we may encounter.
So it is of the greatest consequence that we know God promises to deal with us NOT according to what we deserve, not according to our iniquities. How wonderful it is that we understand, on the contrary, that we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as all people will be saved by grace.
Now that our salvation is secured, what can we do about all those iniquities that keep piling up? Can we stop increasing them? Unfortunately not, but we ought try with grace and gratitude with all our mind, body and strength.
We can offer grace to all other living people. We can breathe and love and hope.
Life is messy, and we can live with confidence and courage in the face of all kinds of evil knowing God has already dealt with it all. So onward, with what this day has to offer; countering all evil and sin as we can, and bringing God’s grace to bear on all that we can.
Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer; for he said, ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us.’
2 Corinthians 4:8
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair;
Words of Grace For Today
In the midst of Covid 19 challenges, easing restrictions, and great losses already it is not hard to feel the pinch of everything else in life that goes wrong or is done against one just that much more intensely.
Rates of infection climb in the US. Riots and violent confrontation with police continue. Lies continue to have devastating effects on scapegoats. Children get hurt, invisibly and visibly, by parents who disregard them as humans. Despots use anything, Covid 19 as well, for cover for their unjust efforts to maintain control and carry out their destructive plans in countries around the world and even in churches in the local community. Business people make plans to ‘contribute’, which is hardly contributing but will net them an unfair profit.
Even amidst all this, God has equipped Jesus’ followers with wisdom to see not only the truth behind the attempts to deceive and destroy. God gives us the wisdom to see the Holy Spirit at work all around us. Real efforts in many long term care facilities net joy and contentment as unusual plans and policies allow families to reunite for visits. From declining resources families find ways to ‘visit’ with each other across thousands of miles and just across town. Neighbours pay attention and chip in to ensure everyone has enough food, supplies, and regular conversation. Churches, stuck in the mud of privilege and wealth for decades, actually start to care for the homeless in their own communities. Parents develop summer opportunities for children to encounter nature in ways not possible before, now that the ‘regular’ summer activities are not possible.
God has even given us plenty of rainwater, and a cool July … until now!
(Well the last is from my perspective where anything over 25⁰ creates real hardships. Not that I’ll melt like chocolate. I just run out of steam, and the mosquito bites seem to be tiny neutron bombs irradiating the life right out of me.)
You can spring your snowmobile from this point to the lake,
until God brings Spring
and then it’s a disaster to spring here.
Isaiah 43:13
I am God, and also henceforth I am He; there is no one who can deliver from my hand; I work and who can hinder it?
2 Corinthians 5:10
For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.
Words of Grace For Today
How simple it seems: life here and now is a proving ground of who and whose we are. After death or maybe before, God judges us on the basis of what we have done, whether good or evil. No one can deliver themselves or others from God’s hand. God’s work (also of judging us) cannot be hindered by anyone … not even the Devil himself!
It all sounds pretty simple, and devilishly difficult. Proving oneself is an ever failing project. We go from one compromise of good to the next compromise of our souls, just to make it through any 60 minutes of any day. All of what we think, say or do is catalogued permanently without error or omission under our name in God’s never ending knowing and memory.
Who could face God thus? For every single last one of us will fail that judgment. We cannot make it through one hour, yet alone a day, or a year, or a lifetime.
There is a vain hope, held by so many people, that though they have done terribly all through their life, they have somehow managed to say or do something really good, and they hope that good thing or two or even a series of things can somehow outweigh the terrible, unending bad things they have done. The scales are not so weighted in our favour. God is just, basing all judgments on truth and whole truth only. Everyone of us fail, and fail miserably as the scale rapidly hits bottom on the evil side overwhelmed by the weight of our sins.
Given this inevitable negative judgment, some people give up hope, and either more fully participate in evil to get ahead, at least in this short life on earth, or they despair and fail to give a day’s thanks for everything they have, hiding from life as much as they can, with consuming, praying, doing small ‘good deeds’, or – and this applies to the most people, nearly everyone somehow at sometime – they compare themselves to others and delude themselves into thinking that the judgment scale of God is somehow marked on a curve of averages and not absolutes.
Out of this delusion arises the nowadays all too common assertion that truth is never absolute, but it is all relative. We just see things differently.
Well … we do see things differently. God does not. And created in God’s likeness we too can see God’s absolutes more than we care to admit, even to ourselves.
Plato’s Ideals are not a mere figment of one’s imagination. They are real, as real as the water we drink and food we eat to stay alive.
The only way our judgment day[s] – it is likely we face God’s judgment each day and just do not know it – before God goes anything other than real ugly for us, is that God anticipated how we would be, and provided a loving, self-sacrificial manner in which we could understand both God’s firm judgment based on the truth of who we are and what we’ve done, and God’s endless mercy and love, which gives us re-newed life as many times a day it is possible.
It seems that God gives re-newed life more times a day than we are capable of imagining, for we still breathe … and pray in thanks … and share what God entrusts to us. The renewal of life is that Jesus’ record, unblemished and pure, is swapped in for our terrible sinful records, and God judges us as unblemished and pure, pure of heart and able to see God once again in the ordinarily mundane things of life. Those things become sacred. All things become sacred. All people become sacred, for God uses it all, us all, to make good happen, such good that we are wholly incapable of doing on our own. The Holy Spirit infuses renewed life into us, and pulls miraculously good thoughts, words, and deeds out of us.
We actually follow Jesus.
We don’t just practice some random and useless piety, like not smoking in beer country (but beer is great at church potlucks), not drinking in tobacco country (but smoking is great after the services), or as in Minnesota, smoking, drinking and dancing are all to be avoided; but us medical missionary kids knew it was all bunk. We didn’t smoke because it was unhealthy and stunk. We didn’t drink because it messed with our brains and our brains were fine, thank you. We did dance, and occasionally it led to sex, which was just part of life, because children are wonderful gifts from God, so is sex, and so is dancing – we just did not advertise it in front of other ‘pious’ weak-faithed Christians. We did not take sex or children lightly. They were great gifts from God, not to be messed with lightly, but to be celebrated greatly. Again, we did not go out to have sex with a great number of people because we knew that sex was powerful and if you messed about with it, it messed about with your brain, and our brains were fine, thank you.
Somehow growing up in all that lutheranism of minnesota (it is the state religion, or was, after all) many had not faced the challenges of world views that did not include God, and not as a small matter, but aggressively, determinedly denied God because that faith threatened their old, old religion of worshipping ‘things’ that medicine men and women could (supposedly) control. Our faith offered something beyond piety, or setting ‘old’ ways aside. Our parents as medical missionaries came with science and medicine (products of Christianity’s care for the world and the vulnerable and sick – Jesus was after all a healer), both of which set things in order in this world and offered, as Jesus had, healing.
Instead of latching on to some senseless piety that overshadowed faith, we knew out of necessity the essentials of faith, and it certainly was not some useless piety, or false faith. Our faith had to be genuine and authentic, fully dependent on the Spirit working through us, or we’d have been eaten alive by those who stood against this faith.
Back home, our faith had to be genuine and authentic, fully dependent on the Spirit working through us, or we’d have been eaten alive by those who stood against this faith, those that held some false piety as being the core of faith, as if we could behave our way into God’s favour!
No one can hinder God’s work, not God’s work in us or this wonder-filled world.
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe,
Matthew 5:8
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Words of Grace For Today
Bribes are the way of the world.
Some are blatant, demanded, extracted. Others are offered, subtly, as perks for understood unnamed favours.
The Church is not exempt from this. The Courts are not exempt from this. No part of life seems to be exempt from this bartering of favours for favours. Ideals are set aside too easily as palms are greased and the recipients on both sides enjoy a bit more of life than they otherwise would have. As if life were a zero-sum game, where one needed to get what is there before someone else beat you to it.
Since the Church is not exempt, even the faithful, confessing a faith that is otherwise founded on the cross, behave as if salvation is one more thing to acquire for oneself, as if it were insurance for after death.
It is challenging not to fall in line, as permits to build are denied for no apparent reason, or provided to others even with faulty plans; as jobs come to others (not even qualified) who enjoy high standards of living, and others (more than fully qualified and capable) are left to seek labour outside their field of training; as invitations, social recognition, and being included are offered to the most asocial people, and others dedicated to the well being of all people are ignored, socially derided, and ghosted by nearly all.
God, though, is not a taker of bribes. Salvation is given to all as a free gift. Claiming to be able to earn it can revoke the gift from one’s life. There is no effort, or favour, that one can offer God that would be sufficient to bend God to do other than what is God’s will. Attempts to do so are sufficient to see God’s will exclude one from life.
God is not one among many gods. God is the One and only God, the God above all other gods we may try to create. God is powerful, and loving, gracious and generous with all people. We are to fear and love God …. This is the beginning of our response.
The Promise is made often in many ways. Those who do not trying to bribe or cheat or step on others to get ahead, in a word, those who remain pure, they will see God. Perhaps as Moses did, face to face, turning Moses ashen white from the encounter that few if any others have ever survived. More likely the pure of heart will see God in the everyday. For without a heart that is bent-in-on-itself, bribing, cheating, and trying in every way to ensure it’s survival before anything else – without this bent-in-on-itself, one’s heart remains open to see the wonders, the awesome wonders that God works each day for others … and for oneself.
Wonders of wonders, to see God each day many times over.
That generous gift from God cannot be matched by anything we might try to acquire for ourselves.
Our salvation assured (a gift from God) and seeing God each day, we pray: Give us today our daily bread. Then we work, sweat, and plan to ensure we and others have the basic requirements for life: clean air, clean water, nourishing food, adequate clothing, sufficient shelter, meaningful labour, and opportunity to love and be loved.
One day at a time, life is full of wonders, and God is awesome!
You have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your dwelling-place.
2 Corinthians 3:12
Since … we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.
Words of Grace For Today
Today a crowd of tents overflowed from the Web campsite and filled the Birches campsite with an accompanying number of vehicles so many there is not enough room to park them all, and at least 5 large dogs. Awake, there is hardly room for the correct Covid 19 physical spacing, and sleeping the tents are close enough that one is already within a few metres of at least a few people in other tents, not to mention others sharing the tent you are in.
As the clerk at the drug store said (as sick people come for medicines), she’d had it and she’s done, completely done with this Covid 19 thing.
Wishful thinking until it kills you or someone you love, or compromises your organs for the rest of your life. A personal declaration that your done certainly does not cover it all.
You become one of the most dangerous people on earth today.
Thankfully we have made the Lord our refuge. We dwell in the Most High, and we dwell in a place isolated from everyone, including that dangerous drugstore clerk, every other dangerous carrier of Covid 19, and the fools who walk right up to me at Canadian Tire while I’m quickly finding the one thing I’m there for, having waited a good ten minutes for the two fools to move away from me down the isle 25 feet. While I’m determining which of the five different spools of plastic string I need, they return, walk right up to me and stand over me, breathing heavily and grunting impatiently for me to be done, and then as I stand up they walk within a foot behind me, push my cart out of the way and say I should get out of the way. Later the same two guys nearly run me over as I back up one foot to change course since the isle ahead is blocked by an elderly man on his cell phone. This time I politely ask the two if they could keep their 2 metre distance. They huff that I backed up into them, as I stepped back a half step at most to turn my cart to the left down an isle.
There are hundreds and thousands of other shoppers I have no close encounters with when I’m shopping.
Brash stupid boldness, like declaring Covid 19 is over because you say it must be, or walking over people with no respect for physical distancing, is not the kind of boldness that Christ gives us, through the hope the Holy Spirit creates in us.
The boldness Christ’s hope gives us is to
– do the right thing when everyone else is not,
– say the right words to a bully, when everyone else is cowering and capitulating,
– risk everything we are in order to save children at risk of horrendous abuse by their parent,
– not work to protect oneself, but to protect others who are vulnerable,
– and many other inspired risky actions,
since we know we need not protect ourselves or make our own security.
Christ has done that already.
All that we are and have, is for Christ, so putting everything on the line to do the right thing is exactly why we live and have anything to work with.
Martin Luther was right, too. We are bold in all we do, unafraid that we will inevitably sin. That knowledge does not deter us from risking everything to do the right thing. We trust that we have been, are, and will always be forgiven by Jesus the Christ. This is not some reckless abandon to do idiotic things to no good end or imaginable benefit. This means that we do not allow the Devil, or the inevitability of our sinning, stop us from trusting that God will guide us to do the right thing, and to know it is right.
We sinners, of course, so often try to justify our own sins. Doch with the Holy Spirit’s help we resist that as well, easily confessing, and re-adjusting our path, our plans, our hopes and our dreams to reflect Christ’s self sacrificing way for everyone we encounter: we sacrifice ourselves, not others.
For those who cannot comprehend the true risk of a virus, compared to the true risk of life and limb in order to save others, compared to the true risk of losing one’s own soul, we must pray and bless them: Lord bless these utter fools and keep them and their deadly virus far, far from us, all of us, humans.
Love the Lord, all you his saints. The Lord preserves the faithful, but abundantly repays the one who acts haughtily.
Mark 10:46-49
As [Jesus was] leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Many sternly ordered him to be quiet …. Jesus stood still and said, ‘Call him here.’
Words of Grace For Today
Last evening a big greyish pickup truck, a deep-throated, noisey Dodge Ram, with flood lights on a roll bar, two burly men riding in the bed, and a beefy grill guard on the front came prowling the dirt lanes, round and round as if looking for someone and not finding their target. An intentional threat to someone, either as a threatening show of force, or an actual hit. Apparently I am not the only one with an ex who is not above breaking or bending the law to end someone’s life.
How can one respond with Grace?
It is easy of course to respond not with grace but with a wish to physically end the threat of violence with greater violence. Pre-emptive revenge. So goes the world. Today one sees the crumbling of the social contract we live inside of, and the breaks in the thin veneer of civilization that we take for granted. Covid 19 stresses us, stresses the social contract, and the social contract starts to crumble.
How is one to respond with Grace and Honour?
The others certainly are beyond that. They act with blatant disregard for truth, rightness, goodness, and preservation of the social contract which serves them as well.
Jesus lived in the social contract of the Roman Empire, which contract was imposed and maintained by force in many foreign lands which were then included in the Roman Empire.
Jesus lives in this contract, giving to Caesar what was due Caesar. Jesus teaches not revolution, but bending down to notice those left on the wayside by the progression of the empire. Jesus hears a nobody, a blind beggar, sitting on side of the road calling to him to have mercy. Everyone else tells the man to be quiet, that Jesus has no time for him. Jesus stops, though, and calls Bart to him, and shows him the greatest mercy possible: he forgives him his sins. And oh, Jesus also gives him sight. Bart can see for the first time.
Jesus does this for all of us. If only we dare see. God’s love, poured without end or restraint over us, is impossible to ignore. Once blind and wretched sinners, we see and can respond. Like Bart we can follow Jesus and love God with all our hearts, minds and strength. We can imitate Jesus, and bend down to see, heal and forgive all those the world has left in the dust.
We can entrust those threatening vulnerable people to God’s care, which may be Grace and new life, or God may give the haughty their due.
Either way, we are Christ’s. We stand by the vulnerable to protect them, even if it means it costs us our lives.
Covid 19’s huge stress on each of us and on the social contract does not make us into violent, vicious animals that we were not before. The stresses of life do not make us different. They show to others more clearly who we have been all along. Let us pray that we have learned how to be who Jesus makes us to be: following his Way of Grace and the Cross.
Your hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments.
1 John 3:23
This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
Words of Grace For Today
Following Christ brings us to recognize we cannot do anything good on our own. Only by the Grace of God carried in us by the Holy Spirit can we do anything good at all.
Choosing to follow God’s commandments is something we can do. Actually fulfilling the commandments that we choose to follow is something else. Choosing to not follow God’s commandments is something we easily can both choose and accomplish on our own.
So when we hear, that we should learn God’s commandments, or obey Jesus’ commands, that may seem a simple thing. It is certainly not. It is impossible.
What does Jesus command us to do: To love the Lord our God before anything else and to love one another and ourselves as he loved us, and to love even our enemies.
Because God steps into our lives and replaces our track record of our past and future with Jesus’ track record, we can not only imagine fulfilling this commandment to love, we can live it in thought, word, and deed.
1 John 3 describes this love:
16We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?
Simple, just choose and do it, Right?
Not so simple, we get to choose and do that, and are aware we can, only when the Holy Spirit wakens us to see through our worldly goods to comprehend our brothers’ and sisters’ needs and our ability to meet them, even if it may hurt us a bit or a lot to help them.
That’s loving with the same love that Jesus loves us.
The words spoken to one’s beloved are precious. They words spoken and not lived are the most powerful destroyer of speaker and the person spoken to. Love is powerful, wield it carefully. Wield it and trust mostly that the Holy Spirit will guide you to love as God loves us all.
It isn’t ‘rocket surgery’* after all.
It’s life.
.
..
…
…
*just in case ‘rocket surgery’ is not understood (since it is a construct):
the idioms are rocket science and brain surgery, both needing a great deal of knowledge, skill and even an artist’s creativity. Used as examples of work that is beyond most people.
Rocket surgery is a comic’s play of an idiot’s mix of the two, (though some say it was Don Cherry’s mix, go figure) which makes it even less attainable by the speaker, or as I have used, it is accessible for even the most confused.
Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.
Luke 1:49
The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
Words of Grace For Today
All through life we learn how to respond to challenges. We learn to tie shoes. Maybe not, since more and more shoes are just Velcro. We learn to make allowances for others while we play, then as we study (if we learn to study), then as we raise a family (if we have children), as we mature with a spouse (you get the idea: if we mature -:), as we work, and as we age, retire and kick the bucket (stubbing our toe as we most always do).
All this supposedly gives us common sense, which seems less and less common. All this supposedly gives us knowledge, which seems less and less based on reality for many. All this supposedly gives us opportunity to fill our lives with goods, which we throw away for newer, maybe better goods as if our own worth were dependent on our goods.
God, in many and various ways, keeps trying to communicate to us, hard headed and stiff-necked that we are, to show us all of this is inside-out, up-side-down, or of no consequence when it comes to being part of God’s good creation, and the goodness we are to be (in thought, word, and deed) for others and our own souls.
How great it is that God keeps communicating with us, generation after generation, day after day. Only God who is holy could bear us rascal sinners with such loving patience and grace.
It is not complicated. It is so simple that this way of being (sacrificially loving, forgiving and renewing others) can easily come from infants and young children.
We get to unlearn the world’s lessons, and practice the foolish truths that a child’s perspective on the Goodness of Creation can teach us.
Thanks be to God.
Covid 19 places huge challenges before us. The blessing in these challenges is that we have to re-orient our lives and have therein opportunity to practice again that foolishness of Christ, which brings life to all people.
Then the king was exceedingly glad and commanded that Daniel be taken up out of the den. So Daniel was taken up out of the den, and no kind of harm was found on him, because he had trusted in his God.
2 Corinthians 4:9
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;
Words of Grace For Today
The challenges of this life, Covid-19 being a relatively small one, can kick the breath right out of us. Sometimes, like Daniel thrown into the hungry lions’ den, we get a small reprieve before our enemies’ tools/animals of destruction tear us apart and consume us limb, by limb.
Fewer times than we notice other miracles during our short lives on this marvellously created planet, sometimes we survive the tools/animals hungry for our pieces, together which make up our lives. At those times, like Daniel, it is good to have friends in high places with real power, like kings and queens.
When it comes to the challenges of life beyond this life, in the battle between the Devil and God, we have no chance at all to even be effective on the playing field, the stage or the battle arena. The Devil always gets his devouring ways with us – unless the Holy Spirit steps in and defends us.
At that time it is good to be baptized, because in spite of all the doubt the Devil and his minions can create in us, we have a sure sign that God steps in for us, we bear the Cross of Jesus on our foreheads, emblazoned their never to be erased.
That cross does not fend off discomfort, doubts, physical hardships, or assaults of enemies. It does guarantee us that God never walks away from us. We can even turn on God, trying to create our own way forward, and God is still there, carrying us, caring for us, nurturing us back to full health.
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.
This is a two-fold promise: first that we will not be crushed, driven to despair, forsaken, or destroyed.
Second it is Paul’s full disclosure that following Christ, our enemies will afflict, perplex, persecute, and strike us down.
It’s good to have a cross on one’s forehead to remember, rely on, and especially to have a saviour in the highest places, as well as in the lowest places and everywhere in between.
Trust God. Everything else is a passing illusion. Trust God, no matter that you will not get out of this life alive; but you will live eternally, starting the day you were baptized.
There is no photo of justice observed and righteousness done at all times.
It cannot exist, except by GRACE
Psalm 106:3
Happy are those who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times.
1 John 2:17
The world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live for ever.
Words of Grace For Today
The way the world teaches it’s children to live is not to observe justice and do righteousness – just do not get caught.
The desires that fuel that kind of thinking are endless, in number and because of our inability to satisfy them. Our living experience of them is that they continue, as sure as the rock under our feet as we stand on a high crested mountain west of Edmonton.
Yet from God’s perspective that rocky mountain is a fleeting feature of earth, along with us living on it, and the entire planet as it spins around the star we call our sun will soon pass into oblivion.
The question for us all is how do we live in this fleeting moment, that lasts generation upon generation for us.
Observing Justice and doing righteousness at all times.
First that is impossible, a dream for some, and for all of us mostly wishful thinking.
We are saved by Grace alone. None of us are able to do other than sin, and we wretched sinners can only hope that Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection will save us, for there is no other hope for us.
So as long as we live, if we can always observe justice and do righteousness at all times, then we will be happy.
Since we cannot do that, is it true that we will never be happy?
I’d hope not, but …
… now is the moment when one needs to have prayed and trusted God, and paid a little attention in Confirmation Class.
We can be happy, because even though we cannot observe justice nor be righteous all the time, Jesus steps in for us, sets his record in place of our own.
Not on our own, but transformed by the Grace of God into saints, we can be happy, not just merely happy, but the happiest that we can ever be.
Able to observe justice and do righteousness always, only because Jesus steps in for us, the guarantee that we will be counted to have done exactly that cannot be more sure.
Happy hardly begins to describe how grateful we can be, relieved that we need not count on our own abilities, and exhilarated that life for us is wonderfully blessed by God.
Happy are we who have God doing justice, and observing righteousness, for us, for our record.
No matter our sins, as we trust God, we can join the many people who for so long have learned even amidst great grief to Sing Hallelujah Anyhow.
