O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvellous things. His right hand and his holy arm have gained him victory.
Colossians 3:16
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.
Words of Grace For Today
When we recognize how great God’s deeds are for us and all other people, there is nothing else to do, than to sing songs to God.
When we recognize for the million-times-millionth time how gracious God is to us, though we certainly do not deserve any of it, the old songs simply will not do. God will give us new songs to sing so that we can tell once again the old, old story of Jesus and his love.
We have so many new songs, a million-times-million, … and today we have yet another new reason to sing!
What is your new song today? Is it like the twins studying their dreams, or Maggie’s parent’s enjoying their dream home?
Or is yours, like mine, a simple song of surviving another day: dreaming as I breathe, eat, drink, rest, work and love enough to make a life abundant, as God walks with me, even though I am too old to study and I am homeless and attacked by relentless enemies who are afraid of truth, for they have built their lives on their lies about me?
It is never too late, as long as you are breathing, to sing a new song in thanks for God’s grace and mercy!
The chief jailer paid no heed to anything that was in Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with him; and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper.
1 Corinthians 3:6
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.
Words of Grace For Today
When God chooses to work with us, things work out well for us.
Joseph is in jail not because he did anything wrong, but because Potiphar’s wife wanted to have sex with him, he refused, she falsely accused him of sexual assault, and he was quickly falsely convicted and jailed.
Not much has changed through the many, many generations. Women can too easily make false accusations of a man and have him falsely convicted and jailed. Happened to me. The worse part of that was everyone knew the reports, charges, testimony, and judge’s decisions were all made up of material lies, obvious lies. Without the lies brought to the courts and those made up by the court there could not have been any convictions. The real damage is not to me, as it was not to Joseph. The real damage is done to the children who were in my care who learned that lies win in court. The real damage is done to those who lied, for to lie about such things, and for courts to produce blatantly false decisions and convictions, costs those people a huge part of their soul, their spirit, their health and well-being, which like cancer grows until there is nothing good left in the person.
Joseph, as I was, is noticed as different, honourable and honest, by his jailer. He is put in charge of many things and trusted with them. God is with him, and it is obvious to those around him. It is not that Joseph or I or the many falsely jailed people through history with whom God has walked are perfect. It is that we are blessed, in many and various ways.
There is a wide stream of hubristic Christian theology and practice that takes the blessing of God’s people, the prospering of our work, the growth of God’s Kingdom around us, BUT it changes this from a blessing to a claim to control God’s Will: namely this heresy claims that those whom God chooses for eternal life (and the rest of humanity is damned eternally) can be seen to be so chosen because they prosper, and by prosper is meant they become wealthy on the backs of other people. This is not God’s blessings at work for them. This is the Devil’s perversion of blessing into curse: Goodness is measured in material wealth, power, or position.
God’s blessings come in many and various ways. God’s blessings sometimes come most fruitfully, most obviously, when one suffers the lack of material wealth, power, or position. This does not mean, as some have turned it around backwards again by the Devil’s wiles to pervert God’s blessing, that one has to be poor, powerless, or an outcast among the homeless or nation-less in order to be blessed.
Paul struggled against great odds to bring the Gospel to everyone, even those not Jewish, and in so many places around the northeast Mediterranean. The congregations that he helped develop were not made up of perfect, or even nice people. A quick read of the Letters to the Corinthians makes this obvious. Yet Paul’s missionary work prospered and was blessed by God. Through his work and many other developments in the flow of time Christianity has become a recognized religion for the last millennium and a half; which is not a perfect development either, marred as it is by as much scandal and war as not.
Still, we say with Paul of his work for Christ and of ours: We planted, others (Apollos) watered, but God gives the growth.
Because God walks with us, and gives growth so that in many and various ways things prosper, we can say Julian of Norwich, even when the world is ‘going to hell in a hand basket’ that all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.
He subdues the ancient gods, shatters the forces of old; he drove out the enemy before you, and said, ‘Destroy!’
Luke 1:50
His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
Words of Grace For Today
Lord have mercy on us!
The people, led by Joshua, move across the Jordan into the Promised Land. They are going to take it, occupy it, and claim it as their God given right. They have something of a claim to some of the land, for this is where Abraham and Sarah raised first Ishmael and then Isaac, and their grandchildren, Jacob and Esau, and after them the great grandchildren including Joseph. The 2nd generation of those who ran from Pharaoh’s slavery to be delivered into the Wilderness are all there is left, for those that were delivered from Pharaoh’s chariots and army through the Red Sea, turned against God at Sinai, made a godlet, an idol of their own gold in the form of a calf, and worshipped it.
Now, the story is told that God has subdued the ancient gods, shattered the forces of old, driven out the enemy before them and called on them to ‘Destroy.’
For the Love of God, how can we mess up God’s story for us so badly.
And then Luke continues in the same vein, for it is not a seldom embraced idea that somehow ‘we’ are good or at least ‘chosen’ and ‘blessed by God’ and they (or all others) are bad and not chosen and not blessed, and here as it reads are destroyed.
First off we ought to notice with open minds that the ancient gods are not subdued. They and their supports in force have risen up in the form of ‘new age’ religions.
Second off we ought to notice that God has not driven off the enemy before us. The enemy is still here, doing great damage to so many people. Further, the greatest enemy is not those that work against us; it is ourselves working against God who give power to evil from others and from within ourselves. We end up worshipping that ‘golden calf’ of our own making from our own ‘gold’. We turn from God as fast and thoroughly as any of God’s people ever have!
Third off we ought to notice that humans have used God as an excuse to ‘destroy’ since the beginning of time. The story of Jesus, the old, old story of Jesus and God’s love does not include destroying our enemies. It teaches us that we, like God does for us and all people, are called to love, forgive, and hope that God can save our enemies, as God has saved us.
Lastly we ought to notice that God’s mercy, in so much of Jesus’ story this is made blatantly obvious, extends not to just a chosen few, not to just those who fear and trust God, but to all people, even our worst enemies! God’s mercy extends to all people, from generation to generation.
Those who God has saved, as we are, received abundant life. That is not a life of comfort and abundance. It is life lived, no matter our circumstances, blessed with God’s truth, with God’s Promise, and with the call to extend Grace and life abundant to as many people as we possibly can in our ‘3 score, ten’ that we breathe.
The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.
Luke 12:22-24
Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!’
Words of Grace For Today
I am not sure about this:
You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.
We humans have a way of ‘desiring’ so much more no matter how much we have.
Further the birds, bees, and beasts, and not to forget the fish, struggle under the effects of our ‘possessing the land’, ‘dominating it’, and destroying ecosystems that have taken millions of years to establish!
So?
The truth is God created the world quite capable of sustaining all the life created on it, satisfying the desire of every living thing. God promises to provide for the needs those desires are given to life of all kinds, in order that all life can continue on God’s good earth.
That includes our desires that God gave us so that we could continue to live among all the life on this planet.
How did we screw it up so badly!?!
Well, God loved us, wanted us to be able to love, which means we need to be able to choose to love or not, and …
Well so much of the time we humans have chosen, do choose, and forever will choose to do other than love! Youch, what a price!
We are destroying what provides us the ability to live on earth! It’ll take us maybe 100 or so, maybe only 25 or 5 years, to unmake the earth capable of sustaining life, something God created in 6 days, or millions of years measured in our time.
What power we have … to destroy!
And what power we have, as well, to love, when we so choose. Choosing to love is possible, for any one, for every one, of us … though only as God makes us able.
The beginning of God making us able is to promise that God values us greatly. Knowing that we can choose to act responsibly and responsively to that unconditional, life-giving and life-renewing love!
God willing and ‘the creek not rising’ (maybe it ought to be ‘the oceans not rising’) we may still live on planet earth in 1000 years and more!
God’s Word started this all. God’s Word sustains us all. Certainly God’s Word is able to bring us to that miracle of miracles.
So what are we going to do today, with God’s love?
Take to heart all the words that I am giving in witness against you today; give them as a command to your children, so that they may diligently observe all the words of this law. This is no trifling matter for you, but rather your very life; through it you may live long in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to possess.
John 6:63
It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
Words of Grace For Today
May Day
God has spoken, commanded, given wisdom so that we may live long in the Promised Land.
God’s Word gives us life, renews our spirit, revives the body, and calls us to live abundantly.
God’s Word created this wondrous world we live in and are working so hard to destroy in order to provide ourselves comforts and luxuries un-dreamed of by most of all our ancestors.
Yet, on this first day of May, God’s Word comes alive, as it often does for those who care to listen, breathe, and respond to the call to live, and live abundantly.
What a marvellous thing to wake up, without having had to have a fire going to keep things from freezing, to light the fire laid last night, and walk about under the trees down to the lake, in the sun and in the shade absorbing warmth in the just above freezing fresh air and the cool breeze from the ice piled on the shore from yesterday’s westerlies.
What a wonder that the air moved as wind is powerful enough to move the weight of the ice against itself and pile it up four and six feet high on to the shore, exposing crystals formed last fall to the open air and camera lens.
What a wonder it is that these tall trees (tall for Alberta at 40+ feet) can stand against gravity and those winds, until they do not. In the recent high winds (the new norm) more than a few have had their tops snapped off falling to the forest floor they are so weighted. Old trees have been knocked clear out of the ground, broken at the root. One green and budding 50+ foot poplar is snapped clean off just above the ground, falling through everything on it’s way to bounce not at all off the ground, around 1000 lbs of tree become dead become wood at the onslaught of one last wind. Other trees in the nearby woods similarly have taken it ‘on the cheek’, or rather ‘off the root’.
It is a glorious morning time, before the noise of the day, of human activity and campers’ abuse of the woods, of oil industry traffic dimming in the distance to be replaced by the dull roar of the plants processing heavy bitumen into heavy oil, thinned enough to pump through pipe networks to gas plants and shipping ports.
For now all is still here near the lake and far into the woods, until the birds sing and flit about, the birds on the ice screech and geese honk, the owl hoots a few last times before the day’s rest. Shadows from the sun reaching past the bare tree trunks reach the grass and leaves on the brown and green grass, striping it with stark lines pointing toward the water.
The one huge pain of this tree budding season lays in wait ready to ambush my body’s immune system, overloading it, scratching at my eyes, piercing my sinus with pain, running fluid into my throat and into my lungs. Allergies will sap more than half my energy as my body fights an invisible, unknown, unassailable opponent for more than the 60th season, giving it everything and losing it all to not even a tie-breaker. Medicine will relieve the losses, day by day, and take days off the end of my life, even now leading to infections in my lungs, bronchitis which robs me of my breath, and occasionally pneumonia laying flat on my back inches from needing a hospital’s oxygen to survive.
This is a glorious morning, with it’s inherent promise of surviving another -30⁰ and colder winter that will still come my way, God willing and ‘the creek not rising’, and it’s twinges in my nostrils and scratches in my eyes that foreshadow the battles to be fought and lost yet again against an invisible, unknown and unnecessary foe.
This is a glorious morning, a blessing provided by God’s unending Grace.
This is a glorious morning, which I will enjoy and be profoundly grateful for, for God has rescued me so that I can survive the lies, the scapegoating, the gaslighting, the false testimonies and affidavits, the injustice, the false convictions, and the cruel rulings that benefit no one, especially not the children.
Breathe.
This is a glorious morning in and by which God continues to bless me.
Breathe.
And prepare for the days’ hard labours, which keep this aging body able to move against arthritis, decay, gaslighting, and cruel injustices.
Breathe.
…
…
…
God has spoken, commanded, given wisdom so that we may live long in the Promised Land.
God’s Word gives us life, renews our spirit, revives the body, and calls us to live abundantly.
God’s Word created this wondrous world we live in and are working so hard to destroy in order to provide ourselves comforts and luxuries un-dreamed of by most of all our ancestors.
Yet, on this first day of May, God’s Word comes alive, as it often does for those who care to listen, breathe, and respond to the call to live, and live abundantly.
Breathe even, and especially, in these times of new normals.
With joy they celebrated the festival of unleavened bread for seven days; for the Lord had made them joyful, and had turned the heart of the king of Assyria to them, so that he aided them in the work on the house of God, the God of Israel.
Luke 10:20
Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.
Words of Grace For Today
There is great reason to be joyful when those who rule over you turn their hearts to you and aid you in your nearly impossible, but necessary work, whether that work is to provide a house for the Lord where people can gather (after Covid 19) or to provide a home for a new family (like a refugee family or a new couple) without a home or to provide a home for a homeless person.
The disciples nearly impossible work is to cast out demons, to renew the ill people’s spirits, to give life. As they work the ‘spirits submit to them’ and they are able to give life to many people. We are to follow suit today, bringing renewed life, full life, abundant life to as many people as we can.
So the people of Israel celebrated the festival of unleavened bread (the Passover?) for seven days.
We have great reasons to celebrate our festivals as well. Usually we merely take a break, a pause, and focus on our own enjoyment, or gathering our families – or we used to before Covid 19.
All this, Jesus reminds the disciples and us, is barely cause to celebrate.
At first glance we do have to shake our heads, trying to clear them of some unknown cobwebs as we try to make sense of Jesus’ words. Certainly bringing life to others is THE reason to celebrate. Or is it that the disciples and we celebrate not bringing life to others, but rather the power they and we are able to exercise in order to accomplish our tasks?
That power is not ours. We have no right to claim it, nor to celebrate as if it were ours. That power remains God’s and God’s alone. We exercise it for others, doch it is God would exercises it for us for them.
God exercises that power, like many other life-giving powers at work in the world around us, along with our efforts, because God has written our names in heaven as God’s holy workers.
Therefore our celebrations are most life-giving for us, when we celebrate not that we ‘have’ power or can ‘exercise’ power. Our celebrations are most life-giving for us and all people when we celebrate what God has done for us miserable beggars and sinners: God has written our names in heaven, claiming us a God’s holy people.
Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God.
Matthew 6:21
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Words of Grace For Today
I never understood young men who spent so much time working on their old trucks or muscle cars, fixing, tweaking, and adding 8 track tapes and speakers to them. (That dates me if nothing else does!)
I had to get old to read that whatever one spends a great deal of effort and time at, one falls in love with. So those young men, who invested so much time in their vehicles, fell in love with them, which brought them to spend even more time with them, until they did things that were not reasonable or logical or purposeful. They were continuing beyond all that into the realm of love.
Who would of thunk?
Thus it is that we humans assign value to things in our lives, which in and of themselves have no more than utilitarian value, if that, simply because we invest time working on them.
I can only imagine that someone who spends a lot of time accumulating wealth, power, or fame ‘falls in love’ with that as well.
What we treasure, owns our hearts, and brings us to do things that are not reasonable or logical or purposeful.
So it is in God’s creation. We humans, like the rest of the universe, operate on the principals of love.
This is God’s love permeating through the entire universe.
There is no power equal to the power of love, to heal, to give life, to give hope, to sustain life.
Once God has spoken God’s love to us and we have heard it once or twice we come to know and trust that power belongs to God, the real power that holds the universe together and gives us our very life and breath.
We can also, by investing our time and effort into things and projects and ideas that do not give life to us and others, ‘fall in love’ with evil and destructive forces that rob us and the world around us of life.
God intends, though, that we invest our lives (every bit of time and energy we have) into providing God’s care and unconditional love to other people. Thus we ‘fall in love’ with God’s creation and God’s people.
Then our hearts are found invested in the treasure that God created for us to live for: people, and people of all kinds.
When we live for other people, life never gets dull or boring, and we remain ‘in love’ with God and God’s creation, no matter how old we get. No matter how old or tired, or ill, we remain fully alive and in love.
Thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.
Romans 8:31
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?
Words of Grace For Today
The challenges of our days can overwhelm us.
The challenges of Covid 19 can overwhelm us.
Other people’s lack of compliance with restrictions in place to protect us all from Covid 19 and it’s debilitating long term effects can not overwhelm us, it can maim us for life, or kill us.
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?
We may be terribly afraid of what can happen to us, or what others will try to do to us, even when we have done nothing to warrant such threats to ourselves.
While we may seek security in all sorts of manners and means, there is only one real source of security, no matter our circumstances, no matter how luxurious our ‘boat’ through the waters of life and Covid 19 may appear to be: Our only true security is God’s blessing and claiming us.
What does God say?
Thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.
We can relax, think clearly, plan and work as best we can, be thankful and generous with all we have, even our lives … for we can trust that we are in God’s hands.
When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
1 Thessalonians 5:18
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Words of Grace For Today
When one lives in ones own land, owns a home, has possessions that provide food security and financial security (or the appearance thereof), and has seen increases from generation to generation then…
then it is all too easy to forget one’s past.
It is all too easy to forget one’s sins.
It is all too easy to forget God’s great miracles that have and still do deliver us all daily, because it may appear to us that we are captains of our own fate and that we have delivered ourselves and worked hard to earn all we have.
All possessions, position and power, security and safety can disappear in a minute.
There is no real life that forgets one’s past, one’s ancestors’ past, and God’s good works in the past … and in the present.
The only real life that is worth a moment’s participation is to live filled with gratitude for all God provides.
Breathe.
Breathe again.
Breathe deeply and slowly … and again.
That is God’s gift most basic: that we can breathe and their is air that sustains life. Everything else that sustains our lives are also gifts from God.
Real living is wonderfully experienced as God’s overly generous gifts for us, though we deserve none of it, and only because God finds that we are precious.
God finds all other people precious, and in our thanks for all God gives us, God asks us to be the conduits of God’s demonstrating to all others how precious they are.
My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they stand at attention.
John 1:1-3
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
Words of Grace For Today
God, who comes to our rescue, who delivers us again and again, who sanctifies us making us holy and thus wholly capable of bearing the Good News of Grace to all people … God, who loves us, is the One who spoke a Word in the beginning before anything including time, spread out a right hand to create the heavens, laid the foundation of the earth.
The universe was not created by some godlet. Nor is our God some inconsequential being, to be ignored or dismissed.
It’s more than ‘turtles all the way down’ that the earth is founded on; it is founded on unconditional love.
In the beginning was the Word. We later came to know this Word as Jesus, the communication from God in a human life; the language we can understand.
The heavens and earth may come to attention when God summons them. God did not create us so bound to God’s Word. We get to really mess up terribly, ignoring the Creator and the Word if we so choose … which we humans do all too often.
The Word came to communicate that God accounted for our rebellion and sin and evil. God forgives us our rebellion and sin and evil, and sets us right with God our Creator and Sustainer. Thus we may forge ahead each day, each minute, not hounded and horrified by the depth and breadth of our past rebellion and sin and evil. We may live free of that, and bind ourselves anew to receiving God’s blessings in such an abundance that they spill off us to those around us; they flow through us to others even emptying us … purifying us and taking the life right out of us as we become the bearers of God’s Good News of Grace to all people: God loves us!
Now with God standing with us, why would not the hoards of armies surrender to us making noise? Why would the walls of Jericho not crumble at our trumpets’ calls? Why would the chaos of un-creation void (the ocean waters) and the storms of chaos breaking in through the heavens not obey the Word spoken: ‘Be still!’
May our hearts be also stilled this and each day, from the chaos of fear, false pride, jealousy, and greed, so that we can calmly face the challenges of each day, even if it is one day among many of a pandemic.
Breathe deeply
Relax
Meet the challenges with patience and assurance that God is with us, saving us, guiding us, inspiring us to do holy things for all peoples.
