When I think of your ordinances from of old, I take comfort, O Lord.
1 John 1:1-4
We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
Words of Grace For Today
It is a fine line between living fully alive and appearing to live though one is in all ultimate matters dead.
It is the line between a) giving God control of all that we are and have, or b) taking (well, assuming one is taking) control of what is God’s.
The Psalmist takes comfort in God’s ordinances from of old. All good and well, except the Psalmist takes comfort not because they are a gift from God or God has guided one’s life to goodness or that God has convinced the Psalmist of his/her own sins and with mercy saved her/him from those sins. No, the Psalmist, with as much arrogance as one can have, takes comfort in God’s law because the Psalmist claims to have kept them all and has the audacity to burn hot with indignation at the wicked who do not keep God’s law!
That’s faith based on hate for others, a total miscomprehension of one’s own place among the worst of sinners, and an attempt to take on God’s role as judge – and turning that role into one of condemning others! Hate-based faith is widespread, unfortunately. It has fuelled, does and always will fuel strife, conflict, and outright wars … and it has nothing to do with God’s communication of reality in many and various ways, and most clearly through Jesus, the Christ’s story, the old, old story of Jesus and his love.
The writer of 1 John puts it more correctly, more life-giving, and without a hate base, if confusedly with so much Johannine imagery of life, light, Word, beginning of time, abiding, revelation, eternal life, fellowship, and complete joy.
How else do we humans speak about that which exceeds our language and our knowing and anything that is of our comprehension?
The meaning of life is simple, using Johannine imagery: it is to live in complete joy, given to us by God, and brought full circle by us sharing it with others. It is to live in fellowship with Jesus, the Light of the World from before time to beyond time. It is to live eternal life now, sharing that life with all other people. It is to recognize one’s place as God’s humble creatures, given the gift of eternal life that is only a gift for us if we share it, testify to it, and include others in that gift.
The meaning of life has nothing to do with judging others, or claiming one’s ability to follow rules, laws or ordinances. The meaning of life is to recognize God’s truth in all things: Grace and Love make life possible. Hot indignation consumes life … for all people.
God, we pray, save us from hot indignation and the arrogance that would have us claim we are better than others, especially our enemies.
Give us the wisdom and patience, the courage and character, and the love and hope instead to endure the injustices that our evil enemies work against us … so that one day they may encounter your truth in our testimony about your Grace: the old, old story of Jesus and his love. On that day our joy will indeed be complete.
As your life was precious today in my sight, so may my life be precious in the sight of the Lord, and may he rescue me from all tribulation.
Acts 23:11
That night the Lord stood near him and said, ‘Keep up your courage! For just as you have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also in Rome.’
Words of Grace For Today
Paul, arrested by the Roman Tribunal (one man, not three), is released to stand with the chief priests and council (who had attacked him to kill him because he taught against their religious rules, faith and power). After Paul tells his story of conversion to follow Jesus and bring the Good News of God’s Grace for all people, the crowd seeks to attack him, so the the Tribunal arrests Paul again, and binds him to lash him. Paul protests that he is a Roman citizen and cannot be mistreated if he is not convicted by a Roman trial. Forty (or more than enough) Jews give themselves to not eat until they have killed Paul. They ask the chief priests and council to ask to question Paul again. They will kill him en route to them. The Tribunal hears of it from a relative of Paul’s and he is shipped off to Caesarea, the Roman capital for the region. That night, as the travel plans are put in place, and Paul waits for what will come next the Lord stood near him and said, ‘Keep up your courage! For just as you have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also in Rome.’
Dangerous times, dangerous message, dangerous travels on foot and sea, dangerous trials: the bring Paul to Rome. That’s the last we hear of Paul.
Yet Paul, imprisoned often for his sharing the Gospel of Jesus’ love, God’s Grace for all people, takes every opportunity to share what he has experienced and then studied to understand: God is gracious to all people. All people can be children of God. All people can follow Jesus’ Way.
…
David has angered Saul, the anointed King of God’s people. Saul has sought David’s death. David has run for his life. Saul has pursued him.
At night David and Abishai sneak under cover of night into Saul’s camp, and instead of killing God’s anointed (and suffer the real guilt that would bring on him) David takes Saul’s spear and water jug as proof that he was there and could have killed Saul, but choose not to.
The next day David yells into Saul’s camp, disclosing that he has spared Saul’s life. Saul relents, admits he has done wrong, and gives up his pursuit to kill David.
Then David utters to Saul these words: As your life was precious today in my sight, so may my life be precious in the sight of the Lord, and may he rescue me from all tribulation.
Mercy on David’s part gives David courage to beg God for mercy; that God would find David’s life precious and that God would rescue David from all tribulation.
Doch
God does not find David precious because of the mercy David has shown Saul. God finds David precious in spite of all the shenanigans and wrong and utter evil David does. God does protect David from some tribulation perhaps, but David brings all sorts of tribulation down on his own head. Such is the consequence of a thieving, conniving, murderous life that David chooses at times to pursue for his own benefit. It does not produce benefit, but great tribulation for David and his family … and God’s people.
Still God finds David precious. We remember him as a broken, sinful, God-made saint and leader. David’s story says less about David’s goodness, and so much about God’s grace, mercy and steadfast love toward David and all of God’s people.
If God can use David to bring this message to us, certainly God will use any and all of us to bring a message of God’s Grace told so well in Jesus’ story.
The price for us is not nothing.
Like Paul (once Saul who pursued, persecuted and killed followers of Jesus) and like David, we will suffer trials and tribulations, even at times unspeakable.
Yet always God will declare to all that God finds us precious, that God has adopted us as God’s own children, that we are blessed beyond all imagination with abundant life. Always God will walk with us.
We get to live filled with gratitude, humbly confessing our sins, courageously sharing the old, old story of Jesus and his love for all people, and responding to all evil done against us and around us with grace. We get to live, walking through life’s trials and tribulations, like a graceful dancer, to the music of God’s steadfast love.
There is no other music so beautiful and inspiring to be able to dance to!
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.
Matthew 5:16
In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
Words of Grace For Today
Abram is, best estimate, a conglomeration of actual historical figures, collected into one archetypal character, our ancestor. Whether the stories belong to one man or many different people, at 99 Abram is old. God did invite Abram to walk before him, and Abram was by God’s grace alone, blameless at that time.
Abraham would go on to cheat, lie, covet, commit adultery, kill (or at least plan to kill, and his own son no less), … a good archetypal character. Doesn’t matter if it is one person or many people’s stories gathered under one name. This is true about Abram: God love him and Sarah. God did exceptional things for them, gave them land and descendants, when they were nomads who left home, and cheated their way to some kind of security, passing Sarah off as a sister, and then exactly their hosts honour and wealth when he treated Sarah as Abram’s sister instead of his wife. They used Sarah’s handmaid as a surrogate ‘wife’ for Abram to secure themselves God’s promise of descendants, and then set Hagar and Ishmael packing into the desert wilderness to die when they did not need them anymore, when God provided Sarah a son, Isaac.
Abraham and Sarah certainly were not ‘blameless’ before the Lord, the Lord who knows everything.
St. Paul had it right, Abraham was reckoned to be righteous by grace through faith. God made Abram blameless before God, and God blessed Abraham and Sarah with all they had.
The danger for us when we forget is that we assume God made Abraham and Sarah perfect people … so we think we can become or be made (even by God) to live blameless for the rest of our lives, or even for a day! We cannot.
God alone makes us righteous by grace alone (that is by God’s doing to us as a free, undeserved gift) through faith.
If we think Abram or we can be righteous on our own, we have to live in great delusion, disconnected for our own reality, and we have to try to remove anyone from this real world who knows and will say honestly how broken we really are. It’s impossible except by faking it and becoming truly evil.
The effort to be perfect after our baptisms has been embraced by many Christians, as a way to control others. It’s all a lie … a huge lie that has lived for many generations.
Christ gives us a little light. Just a little light. And the Holy Spirit keeps it burning in spite of all the sins we commit. We cannot choose to be blameless. We can choose to not hide the little light that Christ gives us. We can actually let Christ work through us in all our days, and pray for forgiveness each morning, noon and night.
Or …
Well the other choice is nothing less than living a deluded, dangerous, and evil life … which God surely knows about and will judge those who so choose to live this delusion.
…
We choose to let our lights shine, Jesus’ lights given to us to carry through our days … not so that people will we awestruck by our having these lights. Rather we choose to let these little lights shine so that others will give God praise, adoration and worship.
People will say: God chooses those sinful people to carry Christ’s light to the world. The wonders done cannot be because of those people. It has to be God’s doing. They will worship God for God’s great works in us good sinners …
and …
They will know that God can work such wonders in their own sinful lives as well.
(That’s carrying the light of Christ for others to see!)
Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord.
1 Corinthians 2:4-5
My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Words of Grace For Today
God speaks to us in many and various ways.
Prophets reported their dreams, many waking dreams, that they knew were God speaking to them. They warned the people (usually the kings and rulers, but also the common folk) of the sin and evil of their ways and God’s response of ruin and exile. They encouraged the people in ruin and exile to have courage, for God would not leave them abandoned. The warned kings and rulers of God’s people and their enemies of the destruction that would come because of their foolish, proud, arrogant, and stubborn ways of trying to find their own way without or against God!
These words remain as they have been collected and recorded. They are warnings, cautions, and encouragements still for us today.
Even so these words, from dreams and prophetic wisdom given by God, most always work from the power of might that can destroy one’s enemies.
There were many false prophets, people who spoke their dreams as if they were from God, and the dreams and the prophets were not from God at all. Even when the words were wise, or wise of a sort, they were not from God.
Jeremiah compares these false prophets to the straw that is left after the wheat is harvested. They do not bear good fruit, though until the harvest they support the good fruit of grain that feeds the people.
Straw is nothing like wheat in its value and ability to sustain life. Straw is laid down to absorb the excrement and urine from animals in a barn or barn yard. Wheat is ground to make food for people or maybe mash for young animals or as a nutritious supplement for animals. Wheat feeds. Straw once used is set out to rot or to be burned.
So the words of false prophets, even those alive today, are worth little but to absorb crap, and attract crap they do until the dung heap in politics and on the internet starts to rot and stink to high heaven.
Precious are the words from God, as wheat is precious. They give life.
How can we know the difference? Sometimes it is a challenge and we are duped into believing false words of false hope … that drive us further from hope!
The difference is in the power in the words. The power of might that can destroy is not the power of God’s word. The power of God’s word is what God does with our lack of might, our lack of character, our lack of integrity, our lack of goodness, our lack of faith, our weakness of the most miserable kinds.
The power of God’s word is that it addresses our weaknesses and failings with grace, with mercy and kindness, with forgiveness and renewed life. God’s power is made known in how God gives abundant life to even the greatest sinners and the most horrible people. God’s power is made known in the sacrifice that God makes, giving the life of his own son over to the power that would destroy life. God makes this sacrifice in order to communicate to us (in Jesus’ story) God’s love for us, and the lengths that God goes to in order to offer us grace, and acceptance, and renewed life, and a home with all the saints of all time.
Welcome home! This is where the treasure of the fruit of the vine, the kernel of wheat, and the heart of love and hope is made real by God’s love for us. This is where there is food enough for all and a feast for every soul no matter how bruised or beaten. This is where everyone is actually welcome. It’s not just an empty phrase of a congregation looking for like-minded self-righteous people to fill the pews and pay the bills, but hating and condemning those who are different.
Whoever you are … this home is built not with power and might, cement and wood, furniture and cupboards. This home is built on the power of God’s mercy, grace and enduring kindness.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
1 John 4:19
We love because he first loved us.
Words of Grace For Today
You shall … and no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot all the time do what God says we shall … even when it comes to love and especially not when it comes to loving God, yet alone loving God with all our heart, soul, and might.
Doch
because God loves us first, therefore we are able (by Grace alone) to love our neighbours as ourselves, our enemies, and always God.
Loving gives our otherwise meaningless lives purpose and joy … and always brings us pain and sorrow, too.
That’s the colour of love that God gives us, and enables us to live out in our lives, all our days on this wonderful, if lately kind of wild, planet. It’s a full rainbow of colours, even the empty colours of a void … that God gives us and fills with our living in God’s presence.
See now, I am for you; I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown.
Acts 17:28
We too are God’s offspring.
Matthew 20:1
For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard
Words of Grace For Today
I always enjoy the biblical humour: the good news Ezekiel shares is that God is for the people, and they are compared to the dirt of the earth that is tilled and sown in order that something good will grow from it.
The people are, in this metaphor, nothing, just dirt to be trod upon … until God chooses to use them, to turn them over with the plow, to put something good into them that will grow, taking nutrients from their useless dirt, in order to produce food that will sustain others in life. And yet they, though useful to God’s project of providing food for others, and though God is with them, … they remain still dirt.
God turns to them, and they are tilled and sown.
So it is with us.
The dirt of the earth are we, and yet God uses us, tills us with the plow turning us over into something that lays bare the darkness of us, and then God puts good seeds in us, they grow, and food is produce for others, and we remain only dirt, the dirt of the earth. In this metaphor if we become or are and remain the salt of the earth, nothing will grow in us, and others will have no food. Best we are simply dirt, so that others may live.
This we are, the dirt of the earth. Still God claims us as offspring, as God’s own children. Is it really a jump to a completely different metaphor. Yes, but no not really.
God’s children are only something special and good for the rest of creation because God makes it so. God’s children are saints … only because God makes us saints. We remain stains on the face of creation, sinful stains, even as God makes us saints.
The real story is that out of such dirt and such stains God demonstrates everything about God’s love for us: God makes saints out of stains, out of sinners, out of dirty old dirt. That is God’s miraculous work, that God can make saints out of us.
It may seem humorous to be compared to dirt as Ezekiel pronounces God’s blessing of turning toward us, humorous for the unexpected impossible comparison … but then that is what God does all the time. God surprises us with the unexpected.
God blesses us and claims us as God’s own children … though we certainly do not deserve it.
Now what are we going to do with this unexpected blessing, this daily unexpected, life-giving, astounding blessing!? What else other than to share it with as many people, especially those the world would call unfit, unacceptable, incapable of being a blessing for anyone.
God calls for workers, to care for the vineyard, to bring in the harvest, and make the wine. That’s us, dirt, children, and workers.
My eyes are awake before each watch of the night, that I may meditate on your promise.
Luke 2:19
But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.
Words of Grace For Today
Tina was beside herself, as Arnold insisted again she had to tell her ex to stop asking the church to pray for his brother would had a rare and deadly form of cancer. Though she had no inkling how terrible it would become she felt everything was taken from her already. This was unbelievable. Arnold had done everything possible to drive her ex from town, and to erase all traces or mention of him, and now it included the mere mention of his brother’s name in the bulletin, even when Arnold refused to go to church.
It was just last year, when for months as she volunteered to care for Arnold’s neglected children, he had given her very kind attention and then focused attention, and then long conversations after she put the children to bed with tea and his oldest son sitting with them. Then his son no longer was around for the late night tea conversations. He volunteered to help her with a difficult project she had building a fence to hold her goat and dog who ran after cars. He displayed his strength and eagerness to help her out, though he did bring the children along and left them with Tina’s husband who was working writing to a deadline. The children, grieving their mother who’d killed herself just a year ago, were out of control, playing and fighting, making writing impossible for her husband.
The turning point came when Tina was out working on the fence with her daughter and a friend, who knew Arnold all too well. He texted her a brief and desperate message that as he was returning from a counselling session in a town 2 hours away, he’d collapsed at the wheel, pulled over where the cell reception was poor to nil and had called 911. The message was cryptic. At first Tina ignore it and went back to work on the fence. Then it sunk in, if Arnold texted her he must have no one else to ask for help. He had given her his wife’s set of keys for everything, with even the safety deposit box key on it. Tina stopped the fence work and started driving. She called 911 and was told that Arnold’s car was parked off the road, but it should be picked up as soon as possible, and that he had been taken to the nearest hospital, which was closer than where his car was parked.
Tina stopped at that hospital to let Arnold know she would get his car with the keys he’d given her. Instead Arnold wanted her to take him home. So she did. She and her husband returned later that day to retrieve his car. Tina had become Arnold’s only confidant and person to call in an emergency.
In the next month’s Arnold found every situation possible to be with Tina, to help her, to ask for help from her. He was romancing her. And it worked. They started a sexual affair, though the emotional affair was in full swing months before. Arnold was charming, too charming. Tina dismissed as survivor’s guilt his confession that he’d driven his wife to kill herself. He begged her not to just have an affair with him, and they planned to get married after Tina divorced her husband.
It had seemed so wonderful, Arnold telling her in every text 20 times a day that he loved her. Her husband had long since taken her for granted and said very little that was romantic. Everything was work for him. She’d always come in second to his work, but he was kind and they loved each other in simple and profound ways that had worked for them for 24 years and two children who were grown up.
After she moved in though it was challenging at first. Arnold wanted to rewrite their history, insisting that Tina and her husband’s marriage was completely broken, that Arnold had not caused their divorce. He tried to get Tina to say things that simply were not true. She danced around the issue as much as she could. Then Arnold insisted that her husband had brought her to town this past year just to get rid of her to him, the new widower. A bit later Arnold insisted that Tina’s husband was doing things that Tina knew he’d simply not bother to do, things that were unkind to other people he worked with. Soon Arnold started telling made up things about others that he worked with, that he’d known through his wife. The stories were ugly. He had lots of stories of being abused by his wife. Tina was sympathetic, not knowing how much was Arnold’s making up lies about others to cover terrible things he’d done.
Right away Arnold started to isolate Tina from her friends, her extended family, and then from her own children, and her ex-husband. Then he made her call her ex and tell him to stop having the church pray for his brother or someone would get hurt.
Then within months Arnold started to tell stories to Tina about Tina herself, things that Tina had supposedly done that she knew she had not done, or did she, it was hard to know anything anymore with all the things that Arnold told her about others and herself.
She started to hate herself for what she had ‘done’ that Arnold told her she’d done, or for how terrible she dressed, or how she did not take care of the home correctly. It was always something, something small. Together though it was too much to bear. She turned to counsellors for help. All of them were of little help. She turned to her doctor who was also Arnold’s doctor. The doctor kept prescribing more and more medications that had side effects that required more medications and treatments and even a breathing machine for nights. Night sweats started to drench Tina each night. She was tired all the time. She lost 60 pounds in two months. She tried to read and could not focus. It was a living hell. Always Arnold was there to tell her she was not doing things correctly. She noticed that when Arnold did something wrong he often blamed her as if she had done it. But he loved her, so he would not do that would he? She told herself it was her fault or he was grieving the death of his first wife. When her divorce was finalized Arnold refused to plan a wedding. He just promised that it would be just like they were married.
Tina planned for months to finish this and that for Arnold and then she was going to kill herself. Arnold told such great stories about his first wife, even though she abused him! It was the only way Arnold would start to love Tina.
The planned day was coming up that week, but Arnold laid into Tina and she moved her plans ahead to that day. She bought a bottle of alcohol, and later that night after the kids were put to bed, she took half the 38 sleeping pills left in her prescription bottle, sat in her truck in the drive (so as not to devalue the home as Arnold’s first wife had), locked the doors and drank the alcohol.
Fading in and out of consciousness Tina noted that one of the children found her, later that the oldest came and did little to help, then a friend of Arnold’s showed up, a mean conniving man. Finally Arnold showed up. He and his friend dragged Tina inside. On the couch the friend said they should just let Tina ‘sleep it off.’ But Arnold insisted they take her to the hospital. It was too late.
Too late to pump Tina’s stomach. She woke up three days later.
The doctor took her off the medication that Arnold had suggested she take, which had the possible side effect of making one suicidal. She was free!
Free of all the fatigue, the depression, the unrelenting anxiety. She was not free of Arnold’s abuse though. She did not recognize the abuse for what it was, yet. She struggled each time Arnold told her she was going to kill herself. He wanted her to try again, and succeed this time.
Each time Tina was beside herself, though she had no inkling how terrible it would still get.
She prayed each morning, each night, and many times each day. She called on God’s promise to be with her. She remembered that Mary had heard promises, and suffered terribly as her son was crucified. She worked to be a blessing, to recognize the blessing God gave her, that she had enjoyed for years and that she had survived her attempt to escape. Not even now was she free.
She knew she was immune to killing herself. She knew the dark whirlpool of darkness that had sunk down over her, and would again if she let it. She practised each time it showed up at resisting even the shadow of that darkness. She knew she was immune to killing herself. She told Arnold exactly that as many times as he accused her that she would kill herself, tried to drive her to it. She would survive but she had no idea what Arnold would do to her.
She pondered all the things she knew, and to this day cannot comprehend the cruelty of all the people Arnold convinced to do her harm, as if she were the one that was a threat to him! She still cannot believe the lies that Arnold told and tells; and the illness that he must suffer to be able to lie so and convince himself and others it may all be true, or at least true enough to have fun at her expense.
She pondered, and prayed, and held on to God’s promises. None of that would save her from the amassed cruelty that would be focused and dumped on her. So many people joined in the lies, knowing it all to be lies. They recorded their laughter, their fun, their lies, even the judges that convicted her. She had no idea how cruel people could be to a kind, loving, caring step-parent.
…
This also is the life God gives us, that people are free to choose to turn from God, from truth, from reality, and then to torture others trying to force them into exile or to death.
To counter the power of evil that is real and powerful against goodness and us in this life, we need to pray at each watch of the night, meditating on God’s promises so that we can treasure all God’s words and ponder them in our hearts each day.
Only by Grace can we survive the onslaught of evil that will be worked against us, like Tina and so many others, though perhaps in more or less obvious ways.
God promises us this Grace. Hang on to it, for our lives depend on it.
Do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof.
James 3:17
The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.
Words of Grace For Today
Wisdom is hard to come by.
For oneself and even harder to find in others, almost impossible to find in others who have power and position. Partiality and hypocrisy run rampant in humans, especially those who live with much whether that is power, position, wealth or possessions.
The wisdom that God would have us live out with our lives is not complicated, nor difficult to find, and it is not even rare to see (at least glimpses of it anyway.)
What is impossible is for us to live by it everyday in all circumstances.
An abundant life includes that we strive to live by this simple wisdom: God loves us, is gracious with us, forgives us, gives us renewed life and sends us to be all that for other people … not once or twice or a hundred or a thousand times, but without end. Because God is gracious to us without end we always have grace to give to others.
Getting to live this simple wisdom does not happen without God disciplining and reproofing us. Getting to live this simple wisdom brings us to receive and give peace, gentleness, mercy, and willingness to yield and to accept and produce good fruits of labour (God’s, God’s people for us, and ours for other people.)
Simple and impossible to live by … yet nothing is impossible for God, and for God to do with us for others.
It’s a wonderful, adventurous, and enthralling life, one that takes all our everything and returns to us more than we thought life could ever possibly provide … except God is the provider and the life is always more than we could imagine.
These are God’s gifts to us, for which we give thanks each morning, and each night.
But you, O Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, and the one who lifts up my head. I cry aloud to the Lord, and God answers me from God’s holy hill. Selah
Luke 1:49
The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is God’s name.
Words of Grace For Today
God is our shield, our glory, the one who lifts up our heads. We cry aloud to the Lord and God answers us.
God, the Mighty One, has done great things for us.
God’s great work for us give us great hope and sustenance each day.
This is good, for the assurance that God does good things for us begins with a simple word ‘but’, which indicates that it is not so with others.
Others do other with us so that we need God as a shield around us!
Don’t we all know it … if we are paying attention.
Because God hears us, cares for us, shields us, walks with us, and forgives, redeems, and renews us … because God gives us all we need for life …
Therefore we receive all that God has for us, share it with all we can, pursue a life of kindness, and sing thanks with Selah!
The Thorns of Life to the Goodness God Intends for Us All
Genesis 13:8
Then Abram said to Lot, ‘Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herders and my herders; for we are kindred.
Romans 12:10
Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour.
Words of Grace For Today
Tim’s father, in the movie About Time, has one line written for him that reflects a simple wisdom that many generations have discovered and passed on (from the umpteenth best man’s toast at Tim and Mary’s wedding):
We’re all quite similar in the end. We all get old and tell the same tales too many times. But try and marry someone kind.
When you marry, or you have relatives you did not choose, or friends you may or may not have chosen most everyone’s flaws and faults can be dealt with graciously … if both people are kind.
This is the quality of a relationship that one person in it cannot make up for in the other. One can try to forgive the lack of kindness, but eventually one will run out of energy and succumb in one way or another.
So the wisdom that Paul knew well and recommended to even strangers in a new (potential) congregation in Rome, and the wisdom that is carried for generations in the Abraham and Sarah stories is quite simple, basic, and essential to living abundantly: be kind.
In other words, show honour to each other, let there be no strife between you and your people and others, love one another with mutual affection.
Simple wisdom that is impossible to achieve at all if one is not well practised in being kind.
Being kind is a matter of choice … for a few times each day, but being kind always in all things to all people is impossible except by Grace the Holy Spirit inspires us to be like Christ for other people.
So we are kind … as we are able … and we pray that God will help us to be kind always …
that it may go well for us and our people in the land that God has promised us …
