From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
Words of Grace For Today
Breathe.
Drink.
Eat.
Work.
Love.
God has blessed us immensely, if we can do this.
God has blessed you immensely, if you can do these.
A person does not have to think they have committed any terrible sin to know they need God’s Grace just to make it through the day.
Everyone, in many ways, turns from God each day.
To breathe the Holy Spirit, to drink the living water, to eat the bread of life, to work in the Kingdom of God, and to be able to love unconditionally, first one needs be forgiven and redeemed, ransomed and rescued, blessed and kept safe from all Evil.
It is truth that many people live, constantly fighting their way free from God’s Grace, to insist, though their sins are many and destructive, that they need no Grace. These people are to be pitied, prayed for, and kept at a great distance as much as one can. When one needs must deal with them, then Grace upon Grace is required, for destruction follows in their wake, yet God’s Grace overflows from ours. To keep their destruction from overwhelming us, we needs must be the conduit of God’s Grace spilling over them.
It’s immensely difficult to face the corrupt destructive intent of an evil possessed person and not want that God would eradicate them from all existence. Yet ours is to be the conduit of God’s Grace. God brings God’s wrath in God’s own time.
Since from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace we pray for one another, the Lord bless you and keep you, safe from all Evil.
The king said to Daniel, ‘Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery!’
Philippians 2:10
He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. 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
What is it that God created us able to accomplish and control?
Everyday life presents us with constant reminders how little of our lives we control. An invisible virus mutates from a previous one, jumps to humans, and spreads around the world. We cannot stop it, so limits and restrictions are placed on how we live and move. It’s a pandemic lock down. Everything needed to stop the pandemic in it’s tracks is known or at least estimated. Yet no one has enough control over others to make those extreme measures happen. It takes only a few people to refuse to comply before extreme measures are wholly ineffective. So authorities implement strict (but not extreme) measures not to stop the virus, but to ‘flatten the curve’, to limit the number of people who have it at one time. That so that health care services are not over taxed, and/or the bodies do not pile up faster than they can be buried (depending where in the world the authorities are.)
Some strict efforts are effective, despite the constant refusal by these people, those people, and oh, those other people, who somehow think they are exceptions. Somehow they think that they do not need to keep distances, or they do not need to stay home when healthy or sick, and their gathering must go ahead, limits be damned.
So the numbers known to be currently infected continues to fluctuate, up and down. Always in the background everyone knows that the count can escalate quickly out of control … as it has in many places around the globe … and the death count escalates out of control as well. Lately 20-40 year-olds have a great increase in infection. They get minor symptoms mostly, and they spread it to the more vulnerable among who the severely and permanently affected numbers climb, as do the deaths.
Survival of the fittest? The natural course of events? Culling of the herd? All this is spoken as if to excuse the hubris and lack of empathy necessary to see the pandemic this way. It takes just one small mutation and those 20-40 year-olds will be the ones dying in droves.
There are many great mysteries in this world, and we encounter plenty of them up close and personal in our short lives on earth. Though the spread of Covid 19 and how people intentionally make that happen is no mystery.
The real wonders fill the universe in all time and space. God reveals them to us many times each day … if we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts and minds to understand.
One great revelation of mystery comes with Jesus’ life. What was a mystery before is how God works and intends us to live and work and play. Jesus is most powerful and influential demonstrates that for us to see by humbling himself. Jesus does not ‘know his place’ as superior to all others. His is God’s place, above all in every way. Yet God sends Jesus to humble himself, to submit himself to the torturous power and destruction of Evil, in order that we humans may understand (at least a tiny bit) for what God created us.
It is not to ensure that we are the ‘fittest’ and that we survive while others die.
God created us to face the unknowns of life, sacrificing ourselves so that others can have life and have it abundantly. Humble sacrifice is Jesus’ Way which we are called to imitate.
Having received life by Jesus’ sacrifice, we praise him for who he is: God, above all else.
Our tomorrows remain as unknowable as the mysteries of our todays. Yet we are secure in God’s hands, secure as no other effort or perspective or … anything.
So we are able to comply with the pandemic restrictions, remind others to keep complying even when people are fed up with them, and we work to save everyone without excuse … for we are all in this together.
Humbly complying with restrictions and ‘standing together’ for each person, we may survive. But if we all proudly ‘stand alone’ in our failing to comply with the restrictions asked of us, then more of us will surely fall.
Choose, deadly pride or life giving humility. Sometimes life’s choices are clear and possible for us to make.
It is he who remembered us in our low estate, for his steadfast love endures for ever.
Hebrews 13:3
Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.
Words of Grace For Today
It is so easy to forget our past, when we were so much less than we are now. Become wealthy and soon one easily forgets what it is like to struggle to survive without enough money. With God and God’s people it is different, though.
Become educated and it is easy to forget how it is to be ignorant and vulnerable. With God and God’s people it is different, though.
Yet as one becomes more educated one learns that one really did and still does know so little. This is closer to how it is in our relationship with God, if we care at all for the Truth of Jesus’ love and life for us.
When God forgives us our sins, it may seem easy to forget our sins, now that Grace has saved us. We can easily pretend or delude ourselves that we somehow no longer need forgiveness, though as we grow, if we learn to be honest with ourselves then we recognize that we still sin, and more profoundly and profusely then we care ever to admit. We desperately need to be forgiven, more it seems each passing day.
When we learn this anew each day, then it makes sense to give thanks to God for all that we are, for we have and are nothing on our own. Only by God’s hand do we have anything given to us as stewards of it, nor are we anything other than the chemicals our body is made of, except that the Holy Spirit breathes life into us each day.
As we remember how much we daily depend on God’s good Graces, then it is not difficult to remember each day to pray for and work to support those in prison.
Yes, there are some real criminals in prison. They are people capable of great destruction to property and person without much thought of the damage they do. There are also many minorities, especially men, who have been taken advantage of and invited into a world where crime is the only way of life. There also are a great number of people, men and women, who are falsely convicted and never did anything to deserve to be put in prison.
Someone decided they would be their target. They would be lied about, false witnesses would be found against the person, and false reports and charges are brought against them … and judges easily lie about the evidence before them and convict people, on the basis of easily identifiable lies. The measure of correct judgments is that a fully informed, reasonable person would agree with the judge’s decision. But one has to be willing to lie, and reasonable has to be not that the person is actually guilty, but someone with enough money or power wants this person convicted, and the fully informed part of that has to be understood as meaning one had to understand that someone with wealth or power or a sadistic habit has to be satisfied … and yet another innocent person goes to jail.
We are to remember all the people in jails, not from our place of comfort and privilege, but as if the prison director had us in custody and was using the guards, some violent, some friendly, to sadistically ‘play’ with us, to torment us. And that some health care people working in prisons go out of their way to provide inappropriate, even deadly health care to prisoners/us; because if we are in jail then surely we deserve no good health care.
For people tortured, well it helps to have been tortured at some point, so that we can not only empathize with those who are tortured, but that we can also remember what it was like to be tortured.
If you have made it thus far in life without being tortured, then watch perhaps 12 Years a Slave, for an insightful presentation of what being enslaved is like, and to be tortured, having one’s life taken from one, piece by piece.
Then we can wake to each morning, give God thanks for all we have, and fervently pray for others’ in real need. One does not need much to be thankful. One needs only eyesight to see the world’s beauty. Or eyes to see the people in the neighbourhood. Or ears to hear the loons’ cry echoing across the water. Then one can be thankful, that one has something, has eyes, has ears.
stripping the bark to kill a living tree for no good purpose is evil.
Isaiah 53:5
But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
John 11:51-52
He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.
Words of Grace For Today
We humans understand how innocent people or animals are sacrificed to ‘pay a debt’ and free us. There are two kinds of sacrifice, one destructive evil, one gracious goodness.
Rene Girard developed a few ideas that many have applied and adapted. At the core is his mimetic theory that we ‘remember’ we desire something by seeing others having it, which causes senseless competition between even friends. Competition leads to conflict and conflict cannot be between friends, so the friends use a scapegoat (an innocent, vulnerable bystander) on whom they pile fictitious blame. This cathartic release of blame onto a third party relieves the conflict between the two friends and they continue on, the desire that caused the conflict resolves into the senselessness it was at the beginning. The friendship is saved, the friends continue on.
The vulnerable, innocent scapegoat is destroyed.
This is the destructive evil sacrifice.
Girard interprets the story of Jesus’ sacrifice for us as God’s clear statement that scapegoating innocent, vulnerable people is not acceptable or needed, just as God’s clear statement by calling Abraham to the mountain to sacrifice his only son Isaac, and then stopping Abraham, was that God did not want any child sacrificed to himself.
God clearly does not want destructive evil sacrifice by any humans.
God does send his son, Jesus, to live, preach, teach, heal and sacrifice himself to the corrupt power of his time, the Roman empire and the Chief Priest. This is the sacrifice of gracious goodness. It is chosen by the one surrendering to sacrifice. The sacrifice does not destroy innocent and vulnerable people. Exactly the opposite, it gives life to all.
Jesus calls us to wisely sacrifice, sometimes little, sometimes everything, in order that other people will be able to live. We do not send someone else to be the sacrifice. We go ourselves, knowing that all we are and have is a gift from God, and if God can use us to give life, then as followers of Jesus we can give of ourselves, and even give everything of ourselves, in order that others may live, and live in the abundance of Grace, Love and Hope that God created us all to enjoy.
So much in life tries to get us to strive to achieve and receive at others’ cost (the destructive evil sacrifice). This is not the way of life for the followers of Jesus, and for all the children of God.
Let your eyes be open to the plea of your servant, and to the plea of your people Israel, listening to them whenever they call to you.
John 14:14
If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
Words of Grace For Today
Praying to be heard, and a promise to be heard carte blanch.
Being Gaslit taught me much, much that I would hope no one else would have to learn: what it is like to have one’s children and one’s beloved turn on you, telling lies that are beyond abominations; what it is like to be condemned in the church, community and courts for things you’ve never done; what it is like to be silenced so that no one will listen to you, no matter what you do there is no one, and talking to one’s self goes nowhere. It is to be ghosted by everyone.
And then I was made to sit and listen to the unending lies about me with no way to interrupt and prove they were lies. And when I was given opportunity to speak I was bullied, harangued and Gaslit even more.
So much to say. So many lies told that others use to define me.
My prayer was desperate: to be heard. God listen as you know the truth. Let me speak and make these people listen. Give me your ear, Your heart, and at least a sliver of hope that this nightmare, this twilight zone will end.
But it never ends.
At least now I can speak, though no one listens. People still ghost me. I know the lies do not define me. The lies define those who told them, and those who, knowing truth still used the lies as if they were true, and those who do not stop to think that the lies are not truth.
How terrible it is to be defined by the lies one has told, lies that destroyed other people, and hurt oneself as well. How ghastly it must be to be such a person, where no direction is down or up, or right or wrong. Everything is winning and surviving and having more money … no matter who you destroy in the process.
When I speak the truth, people run and then ghost me.
God when will it end!!
Then Jesus’ words give this hope: If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
God, I ask, as all people have since the beginning of time, hear me and give me meaning and love and hope …
hope that truth will prevail,
hope that the children will be safe from abuse and gaslighting and from being brought to sacrifice truth for money, and life for money, and love for money.
Gideon said to them, ‘I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the Lord will rule over you.’
2 Corinthians 10:18
For it is not those who commend themselves that are approved, but those whom the Lord commends.
Words of Grace For Today
Many strive to achieve for themselves great position of authority and power. For example one needs only look at all the bishops our church has had who seriously wanted to become bishops. They were disastrous for the church, each in their own special corrupt way.
The best bishops were those who did not want the work, nor the honour, nor the heartache of presiding over a church in decline.
The church remains in decline.
What does that say to us other than God has plans that are not those of the church which wants to grow … according to our measure of growth.
There is no shortage of people trying way too hard to make their plans into God’s plans for the church. All are dangerous and destructive.
What we need is leaders like Gideon, who though offered control and rule, chose instead that the people would be ruled by God.
To be ruled by God is something, not anything like being ruled by a code of what someone has determined is ‘for sure’ God’s will (though it looks like a terrible subset of faith, reduced so that that it is worthless.)
To be ruled by God is something, not anything like being ruled by a person who supposedly can speak God’s will. We’ve had no end of despots, also in the church.
To be ruled by God is something that will lead us in places we cannot anticipate, into adventures we cannot imagine, and to share life with people we had never known before as God’s people. It’s a wild ride.
Hang on tight
to the Holy Spirit’s fire and breath.
That’s all God gives us most of the time, everything else we see as solid is an illusion we create for our own sense of (false) security.
They asked, and he brought quails, and gave them food from heaven in abundance. He opened the rock, and water gushed out; it flowed through the desert like a river. For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham, his servant.
Ephesians 1:3
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,
Words of Grace For Today
Blessings and gifts that give life.
The basic necessities of life: air, water, food, clothing, shelter, meaningful labour, and love. God provides all of these, like manna on the wilderness ground in the morning, quail in the camp at night, water gushing from the rock, forgiveness promised even before we know we need it, and breath … breath to take when we need
to
remember,
to remember as well Abraham, Sarah, Naiomi, Leah, Rachael, Isaac, Esau, and Joseph, Paul, Peter, Augustine, Bonhoeffer, Niemöller, Romero, among so many
who have modelled life abundant in faith.
It was hot this day as I write this. Nearly the hottest of the summer so far. 35⁰C when 25⁰C is already hotter than normal.
Still in the midst of all kinds of heat, God’s promise is true: God blesses us with all the we need in Christ Jesus.
As the cool of evening settles, the fresh air promises a good night, and a refreshing rain tomorrow.
My foot stands on level ground; in the great congregation I will bless the Lord.
1 Corinthians 14:26
What should be done then, my friends? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.
Words of Grace For Today
Standing on level ground: building up the gathering of followers.
Out hiking in the mountains, more so as the years accumulate on one’s frame, one needs to take breaks from the steady walking forward, upward in order to catch one’s breath, to regroup one’s commitment and to let one’s body catch up on the energy output so slight for each step, yet so great for hours and hours of steps forward and upward.
A cool drink of water, or juice, and a handful of trailmix or cheese or pemmican helps the body and the spirit rejuvenate.
While one rests it is the first obvious thing, one seeks out a level spot, perhaps with a log or rock on which one may sit to rest. Experience will teach one that sitting is best kept brief, and that standing or walking easily about, catching any great view available, is the best way to rejuvenate one’s spirit for the arduous labour of one step times thousands per hour.
So also it is best to find one’s place in the congregation standing on level ground, orienting oneself to the view, toward God in our midst, and toward the people gathered, and toward all the people who are not present but are out there. So oriented one can assess the circumstances and discern God’s work, and with all that one brings to the congregation one can ensure it will build up the congregation, each person and all of us together.
What does not build up has no place in the congregation.
Paul had an earful of what the people in the congregation at Corinth were capable of, which did not build up, but rather divided the congregation.
Paul did not give up on the congregation, nor anyone person in it. He writes with clarity about the divisions and actions of the congregation that tear the congregation apart, that tear it down. And he points to ways the congregation can work to build each other up, to provide for each person, and not to continue hubris practices that divide and destroy the congregation.
For generations now those words, and unfortunately those circumstances, resonate as people stand against each other, against faith with integrity, and for their own limited vision of what the church is. We still pray: God save us from division. God grant us unity.
and then we whisper: my kind of unity, thank you God.
We really need to take a break, on level ground, give God thanks, and celebrate what the Holy Spirit has made of each person.
Together we can pray: God save us from temptation and deliver us from Evil.
For I know their works and their thoughts, and I am coming to gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come and shall see my glory.
Romans 10:12
For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.
Words of Grace For Today
God knows everyone’s works and thoughts. No one slips under the radar of all knowing God. Everyone, no matter their nation or tongue, will come to know God’s glory, power, and God’s knowledge of their everything.
God’s full knowledge of Jesus’ followers also applies to everyone, no matter Jew or Greek (or in today’s word – white or coloured, rich or poor, powerful and connected or isolated and expendable). God knows everything about everyone, and Jesus’ followers come in all types, no bias.
All that can be terrible news for those who are guilty. … Well that is everyone.
That can be terrible news; that is the 2nd side to the sharp sword of the Gospel, the sword that cuts us free from our sins; and it cuts to the heart of the matter to show up our desperate need to God’s Grace.
Thankfully God is gracious with everyone, and generous with grace for everyone who calls on the Lord. Jesus answers everyone who calls.
Sometimes the answer is that Jesus will be with us as we continue to suffer what we want to be free of, the lies about us, the weight on our shoulders.
Other times the answer that Jesus gives us saves us from the evil that threatens our very lives.
No matter the answer Jesus gives us, whether we continue through the suffering or are freed, life abundant is nevertheless ours. We can Breathe.
We can give thanks.
Jesus is generous.
We can share the blessedness Christ’ gives us with all people (no matter the person or nation) and we can share generously.
You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness.
2 Timothy 2:15
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.
Words of Grace For Today
False witness.
Truth witness.
Martin Luther, the victim of a false conviction achieved by many false witnesses and corrupt judges, equated bearing false witness with murder.
Spreading rumours is essentially the same as bearing false witness. The audience is the open community instead of the confines of a court.
An old story recounts how a student asked his teacher what was so wrong with rumours. The teacher, on who effectively used illustrations and demonstrations as much as lectures, instruct the student to take two feather pillows, place them outside on his neighbours doorstep, and slit them open and return with the pillow cases. The student did this and returned to report to the teacher asking what this could possibly mean. The teacher instructed the student return the next day. That next day the teacher directed the student to take the pillow cases, collect the feathers, and sew up them closed to be used as pillows.
The student stood aghasted. It will be impossible to collect the feathers now. The wind has blown overnight. More than a handful of feathers will be impossible to find, yet alone collect.
The teacher said, so it is with rumours (and false witness). Once rumours are spoken the spread like wildfire in the community and beyond so that nothing can undo them, true or not. They destroy like invisible poison not only the person they are told about, but the people who spread them. In that way they are like Covid 19.
False witness, like rumours, once told are sins for which little restitution can be made to the person they are told about, and certainly not to all who hear them in the community or the courts. They are an indiscriminate poison that kills both body and spirit.
Thus we followers of Christ are not called to speak falsely of others.
We followers of Christ are not called to silence, rather we are called to speak truth. Always truth begins with what God has done for us, Jesus’ story, our salvation and daily renewed life, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Against rumours and false witness: we can do no other than to forgive as we can, to bind sins for God to judge, and to clearly speak the truth in the face of all false witness and rumours. We can expect that those caught in rumour and false witness will expend every effort to end the truth, and us with it; history will continue to repeat itself, and good people will be killed to protect the lies of corrupt and sick people.
Life following Christ is not safe, and never boring. It is life abundantly blessed, even when one is caught in life threatening poverty.
