The Light of Christ Shows Us What Is in the Curves.
Psalm 71:8
My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all day long.
Matthew 12:34
You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
Words of Grace For Today
What fills our hearts erupts inevitably from our mouths.
I know, the stomach empties its contents normally down the digestive track, but in rebellion it disgorges its contents up and out the mouth.
But when it comes to words, weeeell, our words inevitably (even for practised liars) reflect what is in our hearts, whether our hearts are consumed by greed, self-interests, destruction of others, and all sorts of evil OR our hearts bask regularly in God’s Word and as blessed saints become the embodiment of God’s Grace, unconditional love, and promises for all people.
Our words say it all. They speak less what we try to accomplish, and more what slavery we have bartered ourselves into with the Devil, or freedom we are gifted by God.
So we pray, Lord save us from the Devil and all the Devil’s wiles. Help us so that we can honestly and with gratitude say: My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all day long.
For then, all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well … and indeed all manner of things is already well, with us and with God’s creation.
Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.
John 14:23
Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’
Words of Grace For Today
I am not at all sure that being careful is part of loving the Lord our God.
My experience and reading tells me that loving the Lord our God requires a foolish, even reckless, boldness, fuelled by a wonderful faith (given as free gift by God to us).
There is simply no way to get through life without sinning, though one can do one’s best not to hurt others, and to do one’s best to let God inspire and lead one to be a blessing for others.
God’s promise is that we are not alone. Even in Covid isolation and staying smart about it, we do not live alone. God walks right with us and ‘makes God’s home with us!’
Being careful?
Rather be bold, being all that God created and inspires you to be!
He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem; and the battle-bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.
Philippians 2:9-10
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.
Words of Grace For Today
The chariot and the warhorse and the battle bow are all instruments of war.
These God cuts off. They will no longer continue.
Along with them one could also list fighter jets, drones, nuclear bombs and bombs of all kinds, RPGs, explosives of all kinds, missiles of all kinds, artillery and tanks, machine guns and rifles and hand guns of all kinds, and knives used as weapons … and ammunitions of all kinds and the list goes on seemingly without end.
The meaning is much broader: all instruments of getting the best of others, or using others as means to get ahead, all need to defend oneself against attack … all kinds of aggression and competition and zero-sum-game-winning … and the list goes on and on and on without end …. Doch God will bring it all to an end.
The model of life as God created us to live it is given to us in Jesus’ story: one serves others, teaching, inspiring, self-sacrificing, serving, healing, and equipping … all with unconditional love.
This is what peace is created out of … and even when the world around us roils in aggression, violence, and warring, even with the noise loud in our ears, we are able to live at peace, in peace, and with our gracious and grateful attitude towards all we create peace for those who wish to embrace it with us.
God provides this to us in God’s Kingdom. God’s rule extends from before all time to after all time, from the reaches beyond the universe in all directions and encompasses all that can be in our hearts and minds.
So we pray, Come Lord Jesus, Give us your peace. Shine your light in our days and through our nights so that we do not descend into the violence that the world so easily embraces. Help us, we pray, to acknowledge the gifts we have receive from you far out shine anything we might try to achieve ourselves or for ourselves in this world. In our days, which appear to be short, brutal, and of our own making, help us to rely solely on you as the Giver of Life.
Listen to me, you who know righteousness, you people who have my teaching in your hearts; do not fear the reproach of others, and do not be dismayed when they revile you.
1 Timothy 6:12
Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
Words of Grace For Today
To fight.
To fight usually involves things like fists, rifles, drones and bombs.
Or at least it usually involves scheming, manoeuvring, ruining the other, driving them out of here into exile, leaving them homeless and landless, or setting them up to die an early death.
To fight.
To fight the good fight of the faith to which we are called …
well that is an entirely different kind of fight.
It is a battle again evil.
It is a battle against evil first of all in ourselves, and then in those around us.
It is a battle that we can barely begin to fight … unless ….
Unless God brings us to be holy…
holy saints,
holy saints equipped to bring Grace to bear on condemnation, bold forgiveness to douse reproach and destorying, kindness to undo all violence, and truth to outshine all deceits.
This is the battle of the universe, of which God created us, for which God created us, not that we might die in the battle or bear the burden of the war, doch …
doch (rather) that we might be vessels carrying hearts transformed to know God’s presence with us, God’s righteousness permeating us, no matter what may come.
Shine, Jesus Shine.
Otherwise it is so dark in here!
Shine, with all the candle power the universe has ever known,
Shine in this darkness, and transform those who would destory and destroy us.
Shine, Jesus, Shine!
Sing, Children of God, Sing!
Let there be Light, and let there be jubilation, in every corner of creation, in every darkness of evil, and in every heart.
Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labour has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel.
Matthew 9:36
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
Words of Grace For Today
The great masses of humanity have always lived subjected to those with power and the ability to lord it over them. There’s never been a shortage of those lining up to take on the place of power and privilege and comfort … and lording it over others to have all that.
Jesus, God’s story of God’s amazing unconditional love for all people -especially the poor and the outcasts – sees the crowds gathered to hear the Good News that he preaches, the healing that he administers and he knows their plight.
God has walked with God’s people in poverty and oppression and persecution and exile without homes. God knows everything. God knows the plight of the great majority of humans who have ever lived. God knows the corruption of those who lord it over them. God has, seemingly, abandoned God’s people at many and various times to the clutches of those oppressing, persecuting, and driving masses into poverty. God has always walked, into those times of apparent abandonment, with God’s people. And God has walked God’s people out of those times as well.
God sends the Law, the Prophets, and the Good Shepherd to guide the people out of those times that are like hell. Today God continues to send God-made saints to walk with people in all circumstances, to help them reconnect with the promises of God and to live (even in poverty and oppression and persecution and exile without homes) abundantly. So it is when we live aware that God walks with us.
There is nothing in life that is more blessed, more secure, and more rich than God’s presence and God’s promises that we, too, shall once again walk among God’s people, no longer shunned and falsely accused, but exonerated and honoured.
And those who lord it over others, driving them to poverty, into oppression, into persecution and out into exile homeless … those who lord it over others and live in comfort will face God’s judgment. Whether they too will receive God’s Grace is not for us to say. It is God’s will, which will be done. For now the ‘lords’ breathe only as a gift from God, giving them time for the amendment of life.
For the rest of us, God has compassion and demonstrates it day after day, in the simplest and most profound ways.
Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.
Galatians 4:6-7
Because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.
Words of Grace For Today
Promises.
Promises provide for a future.
Promises from God provide for a blessed future … and happiness.
God chooses us and we become children, heirs of a kingdom like no other. We are chosen, made holy and sent out into the world with the inheritance that all envy and few would if they understood it fully.
The inheritance we receive is to be servants. To serve God. To serve God’s creation and all of God’s creatures, all people.
No great glory in that. It is ascending to … well ascending to the lowest among the lowest on earth.
That is the heritage that the children of God inherit.
Welcome to the children of God, promised great blessings, and sent out to share the Good News that transforms lives and all creation … but
it does not give us power, wealth, renown, comfort, security, or … well almost anything else that we humans would list as what we desire to have in life … except we are guaranteed God’s unconditional love and the huge challenge of sharing it with everyone, even those who least deserve it (especially them.)
Promises.
Promises provide for a future.
Promises from God provide for a blessed future … and happiness.
You shall rise before the aged, and defer to the old; and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
Romans 12:10
Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour.
Words of Grace For Today
The other day on CBC radio I heard a voice describing how the Indigenous People have elders. I’ve known some of this for decades (a nice refresher – I’ve bracketed those particulars that may not have been provided by the voice on the radio) and some was new. [No one can themselves work to become or claim to be an elder. There is no age requirement, only that it takes decades to become wise. Time does not guarantee wisdom, though. There are many foolish old people. It is a recognition given by the community, one person at a time, until it is consented by most that this or that person is an elder.] An Elder does not hold all the wisdom that there is. Each elder is respected and sought out for the kind of wisdom that that elder is recognized for. One may be a spiritual elder, another a story-teller elder, another a healer elder, and so it is for each gift for which an elder is recognized and sought for guidance by others.
The old admonition to ‘defer to the old’ found in various ways in the Bible is not always wise advice to follow in all situations. As above, some old people are still very unwise and some outright foolish. The same goes for respecting one’s parents. Most deserve better than they get from their children. It’s a matter of children rebelling in order to find their own voice and way in life. Some children would be far better off if they had learned some respect for their parents and elders, and learned how to exercise that even while they found their own path in life. Outright disrespect which seems to expand with each generation and becomes so obvious in classrooms, where students do things to teachers that were unheard of just 10 years earlier! On the other hand, some parents, parents that neglect their children, abusive parents, parents that have sex with their teenage children, parents that would as easily kill their own children if they do not do everything to ‘make their parent proud’ … simple said these parents should not be left to be parents … and yet the communities, churches, and courts continue to do exactly that, evil and corrupt as they themselves are.
As in all things in life there are no simple equations or admonitions to provide to anyone about how they should live, from whom they should respect and take guidance, or where their loyalties should lie.
Paul, as many others before and since, provides the guide that applies ALWAYS and in ALL WAYS: we should love and honour each other, all of us loving and honouring all others.
Sometimes love and honour means telling the hard truths even when people do not want to hear them, especially when people do not want to hear the hard truths.
To lie in order to avoid a hard truth is not to honour or respect the listener, nor the abusive person spoken about. To lie in order to destroy someone who tells the hard truths is to dishonour everyone, starting with oneself, continuing on to the person lied about and the [abusive, mentally ill, corrupt, or addicted] person about whom hard truths have been told, to all those involved (for lies seem to spread like wildfire as if we humans lust for rumours about others’ sins), and most of all to the children who hear and live with the rumours, who know they are false and learn they cannot speak the truth for fear of reprisal. Yes, with these wide-spread, destructive lies we teach our children to accept lies as the normal manner of life, especially if one wants to ‘get ahead’, which starts out more basically: if they do not want to suffer at the abusive hands of their parents and/or others.
The story Jesus came to live, preach, die and be resurrected in order to give us is a simple and full story: God loves us all unconditionally and gives us renewed (forgiven and equipped) lives so that we can exercise that same unconditional love for all other people.
So we love and honour each other … starting with the truth, even the hard truths we would rather not face or speak out about.
Love and Honour, even our elders, and even the foolish people, no matter their age, and even those that are corrupt, evil and abusive.
Save us, O God of our salvation, and gather and rescue us from among the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name, and glory in your praise.
John 17:11
And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
Words of Grace For Today
We pray in many and various ways: God, come and save us and protect us. Give us a place in your glory so that we may, as a strong and feared people among the nations and among our enemies, sing your praises and give glory to your name.
The church has prayed this and sought this and achieved this in many and various ways. As a strong institution among it’s enemies, and among the nations, it has played the part of a element of life to be feared … by individuals who the church could ruin by exorcising them (making killing them legal!) or today simply by ostracizing them without due process (so that they are denounced by many based on false rumours and false charges, usually that the person is ‘mentally unstable.’ Sounds like what was done to the prophets of old!) … and by organizations and nations who the church has stripped of all power simply by denouncing them though today it takes a bit more than that so the denouncing is done by political leaders who serve the will of the church.
What we, as individuals and as a church, have failed to do is to remain humble, vulnerable, meek, servants of God, living out God’s unconditional love for all people, and loving all people with a sacrificial love that may cost us everything as it opens the possibility of life abundant to all people.
It is not surprising that the church has become less and less attractive to people struggling in a more and more secular world. That is: the church is less and less capable of engendering fear or deserving respect across huge swaths of society, and even faithful followers of Christ in ever greater numbers are disillusioned with the corruption and blatant hypocrisy of leaders and followers alike that is rampant inside the church.
In many and various efforts to regain it’s fast dwindling numbers the church has tried and still tries to reach the expressed needs of the people, serving as a secular social club (with no real Word of God permeating anything about the club) or serving up ‘fear of others’ as a basis for a made-up faith/religion or passing off a fervent self-serving piety as the basis of faith … all which garner great responses … sometimes.
Still the numbers of members and churches plummets as it has for decades.
So the books written and the ‘new’ ideas of how to make the church a success … at least number-wise.
All of it is empty of course, because it tries to gain God’s glory by plan and scheme and effort. There is no human effort that can gain God’s favour, or gifts, or blessings.
That’s God’s choice and doing.
We have so long ignored it that we simply do not understand: Our purpose is not to succeed, but to fail, and in failing God makes plain the Grace that sustains us and all the world.
Yet we pray, as a church and as individuals: God, save and protect us. Help us to be the greatest of your disciples so that we can sing your praise and give you the glory in all things. But what we mean is God save us and protect us from failure so that we can exercise our own power in this world over others, live comfortable lives, and plan for a good future (of power and influence) for our children and grandchildren and many generations to come.
What God answers is: No.
God is our salvation, but not so that we can ‘Lord it over others.’
God makes us one with the destitute, the starving, the outcasts, the ostracized, the imprisoned, the persecuted, and the failures of human history … so that we will finally better understand: it’s not at all about us and our successes or failures. It is all about sharing all that God has given us as free gifts.
So as the church declines into irrelevancy God’s Word lives as the most relevant word in a world inundated with words: God Loves us all unconditionally, and renews life for all people, and sends us (who hear the call and give thanks for the renewed life we have) to share God’s unconditional love and full life abundant with all people, especially the poor and our enemies.
My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Words of Grace For Today
We all seem to have something that we want to be proud of, that we want to be recognized and respected for. Some of us even have skills, accomplishments, and events in our pasts that we could be very proud of and that other people could recognize as good contributions to God’s good creation …
except.
Except our skills, accomplishments, and events in our pasts … in fact our everything about us … are gifts given to us by God.
Each day, even when the temperatures drop below -44⁰, we always have great cause to give God thanks, to rejoice in all that life is for us, and to pray …
to pray for what seems to be missing or lacking or challenging us beyond our imagination and our perceived abilities.
Often we might pray the wonderful quote from Mother Teresa: I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much. … But
But it was never Mother Teresa who said it. It’s a false attribution. So
So are we going to pray it. Probably not.
God gives us the abilities to handle as much as we can, and the truth that all humble and honest people know is that life can quite often throw up in one’s path more for us to handle than be can deal with.
Exactly then we learn our limits and …
we learn that giving God thanks, rejoicing, and praying constantly ARE things we can always do.
Well, that rejoicing part maybe not, or at least not with any exuberance when we lose those we love or we lose more of life than we thought we ever could and still stay alive. There’s grief. It’s real. It excludes the ability to rejoice. Most grief has a half life, but it can just as easily rejuvenate itself into our lives with no warning. That’s grief.
Grief and all kinds of suffering keep us humble, and teach us to pray also in our most desperate times.
What humble people can do and do perhaps better than the proud, is listen … listen to God’s Word and promises, and trust them. As God frees us to hear we live renewed and we can be glad … no matter what life puts in our way forward in time.
