Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.
Ephesians 3:20-21
Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
Words of Grace For Today
Be careful what you pray for, and what you wish for;
God has ways of accomplishing more than we can imagine
and calling us to lives that we never imagined possible
working with, for, or because of people we never thought God would make us suffer.
People are full of shtako.
People are full of blessings.
Which will you be today?
Which do you wish or pray for today?
Remember God may fill your wish and a prayer with something more challenging than you can imagine possible!
So are we to simply stop wishing, praying, dreaming, and hoping!?!
Not really, eh!
Just get ready for the ride: living as God’s saints, deliverers and agents of Grace is the wildest ride possible!
Hang on tight to the only thing that is actually secure enough to stand the stresses coming our way: God’s promises, grace, and love.
For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high.
1 Peter 5:5
In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders. All of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’
Words of Grace For Today
It is true that God gives grace to the humble, and I am very sure and proud that I can say that God gives grace to the proud.
The Lord of hosts certainly has a day (or eternity one would hope!) against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high. Just so God has a day against every kind of sin, and no one lives without each hour committing a sin that God has a ‘day’ (an eternity) against.
There is order.
There is order that God created in the universe.
There is order that God created in the universe for us to discover, understand, and use … or rather to learn to live in harmony with. As much as we learn to live in harmony with the order God created life is healthier for us and those around us.
I am not so sure that accepting the authority of the elders is exactly the order that God created, for wisdom does not always come with age or authority assumed and exercised, nor does wisdom come with the freshness of youth. Wisdom is a gift that God sprinkles freely and randomly … and somehow some people seem to come up short, and not just short but kind of a vacuum of wisdom, no matter their age or intelligence.
Respecting each other, now that is a must for health.
Elders respecting youth, youth respecting elders. Men respecting women and women respecting men. Respect among and between all races, genders, faiths, and levels of wisdom even; this is how we live in harmony with the diverse universe God created. Respecting an idiot does not mean obeying an idiot. It is to respect that even the greatest, most powerful, most stupid idiot is still one of God’s creatures, and as long as these idiots breathe God is giving them time for the amendment of life, and we can learn to do so as well, and work to contain the effects of their idiocies on the rest of humanity.
God has a day against …
God has a day against all idiocies and sins, against all lies and false witnesses, and against all corrupt judgments and delusions of power. We need not make that day come sooner, nor stop praying that God’s day will come very soon.
Those with any wisdom want God’s day against their own sin to come soon, very soon, for their day before God is determined already as Jesus’ record will be used in place of our own … we will continue to be God’s saints, free then of sin, free to exercise God’s Grace that is so abundantly poured over us, like a fresh white blanket of snow pours over the darkness of the night.
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
Romans 12:2
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Words of Grace For Today
Original sin comes in many variations, like the Genesis story of the Fall (eating fruit from the forbidden tree, and gaining knowledge of good and evil).
Moving ourselves out of sin comes in many forms, like Romans (appears to) in this short passage: just resist being like the rest of the world (corrupt and sinful), and instead be transformed by renewing our minds in order that we can discern the will of God, the knowledge of what is good, acceptable and perfect.
Of course …
first, that is not the whole story of the Gospel that Paul presents in his letter to the Romans, and
second, knowing what is good (by God’s standards), acceptable (to God), and perfect (as God determines it to be) does not bring us any closer to being good, acceptable and perfect.
Paul makes it clear that we can never be any of that … on our own.
Only by the Grace of God, and then only by the work of the Holy Spirit in us, bringing to be things that we had no idea were possible or that we were in the middle of doing!
God works
God works in us
God works in us in ways we cannot understand
God works in us in ways we cannot understand and sometimes the best we do is
eat the forbidden fruit – do you like apples?
And
plan to transform our minds to know God’s will – do you like the truth of how far you are from perfect?
So we work not to be taken in by the devil’s empty promises.
So we strive to fear and love God in all things.
So we strive to be perfect
all the while knowing that all that is God is only so by God’s own doing, in us, around us, in all the universe.
And we pray our thanks and our petitions that what ails us would be put right, for ourselves and maybe we learn that our enemies need the putting right to happen even more than we do.
Does the snow of Lebanon leave the crags of Sirion? Do the mountain waters run dry, the cold flowing streams? But my people have forgotten me, they burn offerings to a delusion; they have stumbled in their ways, in the ancient roads, and have gone into bypaths, not the highway.
John 15:9
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
Words of Grace For Today
The snow today, which has collected as glaciers for hundreds of years, now does melt away, faster and faster. We, with our carbon footprint so huge, have discombobulated nature’s way. The mountain waters do run dry where they have not in memory done so before.
Just as we have messed with nature’s balances, so we have imbalanced our own lives, living as slaves of delusions, voluntarily enslaving ourselves to wealth, power, status, and the illusion that we are better than others whom we ruin on our way through life.
There is another way to live.
As God loves Jesus, so Jesus loves us. When we humbly accept that there is nothing else so important in life as being loved by God, and returning that love (by sharing God’s love with all other people) then we live as we are created to live and we contribute to the balance of nature. We do not just lower our carbon footprint. We drastically change how we live and what we expect from life in order to drastically lower our carbon footprint, and we reach as many people as we can to inspire them to do the same.
Maybe some people think that all those who enslave themselves to wealth, power, status and delusions will respond to messages of the impending doom we are creating for ourselves. It rarely works, for their closed looped thought processes cannot calculate how to serve their chosen masters and respond to the impending doom for us all. Instead they ramp up their delusions to accumulate more wealth, power, status, and their favourite delusion in order to convince themselves that the impending doom will not impact them. It will, but deluded they believe it will not, just as Covidiots and Covid deniers and antivaxxers who lay dying of Covid still refuse to believe they have Covid or that they can be dying. They die a painful death, and an avoidable death, leaving so many Covidiots and Covid deniers and antivaxxers ready to carry on in their footsteps.
This is not a good life, and certainly not a good death.
Knowing God loves us, knowing that God knows us completely and blesses us by walking with us, and knowing the Holy Spirit makes us able to love others and walk with them through life’s challenges, rewards, and losses … knowing God’s love gives us hope. And hope gives us life renewed each morning.
For this we can give God endless thanks and praise … and we can be filled with joy, no matter what our enemies do to us. It does not get better.
A chimney pipe plugged with creosote: (who can explain evil?)
This is What Life Looks Like
When We Have No Hope.
…
…
The same chimney pipe after it’s unplugged: (that’s the work of the saints.)
This is What Life Looks Like
When God Gives Us Hope.
It’s Dark in Here,
But Christ’s Light Guides Us Home.
Isaiah 59:21
As for me, this is my covenant with them, says the Lord: my spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouths of your children, or out of the mouths of your children’s children, says the Lord, from now on and for ever.
Romans 15:4
For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.
Words of Grace For Today
Hope.
Hope is that wonderful thing.
Hope is that wonderful thing that builds on the past that has become the present, and finds the future.
Hope is that wonderful thing that takes what is in front of us, projects it into the future, and comes up celebrating all the possibilities that God places in front of us.
God does as much as God knows we need: God makes a covenant with us, a one sided covenant where God does everything including making the covenant and making it something that gives us life!
God places God’s Spirit in and on us, and all around us, and places God’s Word in our mouths in such a way as it will never leave us, not us, nor our children, nor our children’s children, and on to the end of all time.
God’s Word is that all in our yesterdays, all our in todays, and all in our tomorrows will be well.
Since God says it has been, since God says it is, and since God says it will be, no matter what comes our way, no matter what challenges we face, no matter who tries to do us in, all is well with us and with all things we encounter.
This is what God has written.
This is what God has spoken.
This is what God has given us so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.
And hope is that wonderful thing that undoes all that the Devil could possibly do to us, today and in all our tomorrows.
When I thought, ‘My foot is slipping’, your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up.
Luke 22:32
But I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.
Words of Grace For Today
At Jesus’ last supper he speaks to all about who is the greatest and then to Peter, Peter (as usual the arrogant man he was) denied he would deny Jesus, and Jesus tells him of his denial before the cock crows three times.
Jesus does not start with Peter’s failings, for they are legend and well recorded in the Gospels. Jesus starts telling Peter that he will turn back to God (after turning away).
So it is God tells us first of how God will save us, before God fills us in on how terribly we will fail God, deny God, turn against God and God’s people!
Only God’s love, in the face of our sinfulness, deceit, and destruction of God’s children, can possibly move us to confess our sins and to return to follow Jesus, pure and sinless only by the power of the Holy Spirit.
So we begin each day, each worship service, each sermon, each prayer by first recognizing God’s love that saves and our desperate need to be saved from our sins.
Then we proceed to celebrate the grand creation that God places us in and the calling we receive: to celebrate God’s love by being God’s love for all people.
Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! … Ah, you … who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!
1 Peter 2:21-22
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’
Words of Grace For Today
How is it that given all the literature about the corrupt nature of humans, their deceit, greed, scheming, and wilful destruction of other people … how is it that I lived so many years thinking that we had evolved beyond this and that people were basically honest, kind and good?
There are people who are so and I lived as one of them, assuming that all people live so, or those who did not were a minor exception deviating just for the moment under some temptation or variance of life that dragged them down to a darkness that cannot be survived except were one to be rescued.
How is it that I lived so long assuming that other pastors, bishops, church leaders and people friendly to me were basically good, and not basically corrupt at the core, taking advantage of anyone and any situation possible to advance their own greed, lusts, covetousness, and to fill the void in their pathetic souls?
But I did. Thanks be to God?
A more complete extract from Isaiah tells of the consequences to the corruption so rampant: Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! … Ah, you … who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!
Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as dry grass sinks down in the flame, so their root will become rotten, and their blossom go up like dust; for they have rejected the instruction … and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.
There it is: it is so often a story lived out and told, retold and preserved that we can learn from it … and yet we simply do not! The corrupt continue their corruption and those naive like me continue to live naive until some corrupt, mentally ill, pathological liars use me yet again and scoff at me as if I were the one, and not they, who were so corrupt (as not to supposedly recognize the reality they make up where light is dark, dark light, bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter – which is a definition of hell).
How are we to live then?
The answer is simple and impossible:
We are to live as Jesus the Christ lived: follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ … For to this we have been called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example … of how to live!
Pure and blameless, no sin, no deceit at all. Perhaps those of us so wired as not to be able to be deceitful can approach having no deceit (which is seen as some kind of abnormality! by the world.) DOCH there is not one of us who can be pure and sinless!
So what are we to do!?!
We can only rely on the Grace of God to use Jesus’ record in place of ours when we are judged. Knowing that God exercises exactly this Grace for us, not just at the end judgment but every day, we are free to choose …
And we are then freed to be able to choose … not to deceive others, not to turn reality inside out, not to destroy others, and even not to sin!
We are able to do these not on our own, but only as the Holy Spirit enables us to choose and to do these. We get no credit for living this way. We can only give God thanks and …
We GET to choose to exercise this same Grace for others.
We GET to be the agents of God’s Grace for others.
We GET to be the ones who set others free from their past sins and to live by Grace.
We GET to leave the judging to God, in God’s time, in God’s way.
And We GET to rejoice that God has given us eyes to see evil in and all around us, and to respond with the only response that can change the world back to light being light, dark being dark, bitter being bitter, and sweet being sweet.
We GET to live in God’s reality, in God’s kingdom, by Grace alone.
Then Moses said to Aaron, ‘This is what the Lord meant when he said, “Through those who are near me I will show myself holy, and before all the people I will be glorified.” ’ And Aaron was silent.
1 Corinthians 3:16
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
Words of Grace For Today
Nadab and Abihu ‘offered unholy fire before the Lord, such as he had not commanded them’ and the fire on the altar came out and consumed the two.
Then Moses spoke to Aaron. And God showed how holy God is by consuming the two. That’s a verdict that cannot be undone, a verdict that we all deserve. By grace, though, God forgives us and gives us renewed life.
For God created us not just to live, but to live as vessels of God’s holy Grace, God’s temple’s, inhabited by God’s own Spirit.
What a life!
And what a difference knowing that God has created us to be so holy, the instrument of God’s own Spirit.
How … how can some people behave so unholy, so deceitful, so corrupt? How can we find God’s Grace for those people?
…
Then if God can find grace for us and make us so much more than we are by infusing the Holy Spirit into us, body, soul, and strength, how can God somehow not find enough Grace for all the evil in those people!
…
Mensch! What a life! … What a life they turn away from! What a life we get to see miraculously happening all around us … and in us!
Your sun shall no more go down, or your moon withdraw itself; for the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your days of mourning shall be ended.
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
Jill sat in her well cushioned rocking chair between the light lunch she’d shared with friends and the book club meeting she would join by zoom. She marvelled at how things had developed in the last two years, so devastating with Jack’s diabetes sending him to his Covid and pain wracked death as he drowned in his own fluids for hours, his son, Bill, suffering a heart attack months after a light Covid cough and fever, her daughter’s eldest daughter taking a severe of Covid just not quite needing to go to hospital but it never really went away as she fought to wake up each day and move even to wash and dress herself and then needing to lie down even before half the morning was by, and all her older friends and Jill herself isolated and cut off from each other … and
then …
How most of them had discovered Zoom on their computers and talked with each other at least once a day, checking in to make sure everyone was alright, helping shop for each other, and getting help when someone needed their drive shovelled or in the summer their grass cut.
And …
all the things they learned to do by Zoom, like the book club, and even a bridge club, playing computer bridge together
and the visits with the great grandchildren that seemed to be the highlight of every day for the kids and for the kid in her.
Looking out the window Jill realized that the closed in feeling over her heart and mind that morning reflected the low and dark overcast sky as if threatening rain or snow as the thermometer outside her window showed it hovered barely above freezing.
She tried to think of things that had made her life and the ever more limited horizons of her world more joyful, or enjoyable, or at least tolerable.
The darkness seemed to press in on her as she read the verse from Isaiah: Your sun shall no more go down, or your moon withdraw itself. Wouldn’t that be a radical change, she thought.
When she was a young person in the 50’s, they didn’t even have a television. The rich people sometimes had one, and all her friends considered themselves lucky if they had a good radio and a record player at home.
Now … well now with computers and the internet and email and Zoom … it was just a wildly different world. Still her dark days seemed to be longer and and more frequent than ever before in her life. There were always challenges in her life, and more than a few dark weeks and even years, but lately with Jack gone, the moon was hard to find and the sun barely shone at all.
As she read the passage from Luke she saw a glimmer of hope, of light maybe returning to her life somehow as Jesus said: I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness.
She had always been faithful, honest and kind, and until Jack died she’d counted on the light of Christ to guide her and light her way. Now though ….
Then she remembered her friend Tina, and what Arnold had done to her, gaslighting her, trying to get her to kill herself and almost succeeding (like he had with his first wife), and the web of lies Arnold and the police and even the pastor at church had spread about Tina. She remembered how Tina found joy and light and Christ present even as she lived homeless in the woods by a lake. If she had ever heard of a brass verdict, Tina certainly would never wish that for anyone. She’d have said those kind of verdicts were God’s and God’s alone. Even so God’s judgment would be harsher than a brass verdict that ended in death, it’d last for eternity. On the other hand God always gave people time for the amendment of life. Jill knew Tina was right about all that.
It was time to start her computer to join the book club Zoom, today about a court mystery, a murder mystery, and her heart lightened when she decided she was going to share Tina’s story, and try to share Tina’s joy, light, and Christ’ gracious presence with the others in the club. That would be the best answer to the injustice and the ugly resolution the book provided, a resolution that was as terrible as the injustice that it pretended to ‘solve.’
She sat waiting for the introductory matters to be covered off and then as the moderator started them off she jumped in and said she had a real life story to share, one that helped her understand not only this book’s comments about how the courts were so unjust, but also a better solution to injustice and how one could find the best of life no matter what came one’s way, betrayal by loved ones, injustice from courts, or the destruction of lives by Covid. She thanked Tina silently for what Jill called God’s Golden Verdict of Grace for all the world’s evil.
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness— on them light has shined.
John 16:24
Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.
Words of Grace For Today
November is the month when the short days, long nights reach their 4 month long dark winter, lack of light, phase. As one who suffers a slight attitude problem with extended darkness (slight SADS) I prepare well, plan to be in the daylight as much as possible, and save for gasoline to run the generator to supply electricity for the many lights set to stun the living daylights back into me. I often unscrew a few bulbs from the set of 8 that shine from each end of my warm space (warm if the furnace is burning hot enough!)
Before I heard about and understood the effect of the lack of sunlight on my mind, I loved to joke about the darkness, and about the light at the end of the tunnel. … I still do, though now the humour is a bit darker, since I know ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’ is most likely a freight train of Covid19 delayed goods, running late and fast and long and heavy, coming this way … and we’ve got no where to go to get out of the tunnel, so throwing ourselves between the tracks on the dirty ties, and keeping our heads down is probably the best way to survive what’s coming at us. Except keeping our heads down pretty much means giving up on life until the train leaves us in the tunnel in the dark, marching, marching, marching over the ties to get out of the tunnel. The advice fits well: when you find yourself having/having-been marched into hell, keep moving until you are out!
This is only a caricature of the deep shtako that so many people through history and in so many places have found themselves. It is the deep darkness that Isaiah and many others speak about. It is the darkness that can be forced upon us by our reaction to the dark seasons, by other people’s intent to destroy and de-story us, and by the cascading and accumulating effects of sins massed into evil that simply consumes all life in its wake.
We need the promise that Isaiah and so many others have provided: on them and on us a great light has shined. Even in the darkness consuming us and those around us, there is a light that shines, a great light that shines in every darkness, a light that exposes and overcomes all darkness: every lie, every deceit, every greedy theft, and even death. It is the light of Christ.
This light provides us simple respite from the darkness: we ask. Jesus delivers. We live in the light and are the saints who reflect Christ’s light to all around us.
November is the month when the short days, long nights reach their 4 month long dark winter, lack of light, phase. There is a light that overcomes all darkness, and we are God-made saints who get to reflect that light in the darkness to all people around.
Christ has dealt with all our past sins. Christ has overcome all the past evil and darkness. Christ has prepared us and all the saints for every coming darkness no matter how dark it gets.
That’s a promise to live out today! Work hard for the coming winter. Prepare well. And always trust Christ to be with with us, no matter what comes!
