Hear, O kings; give ear, O princes; to the Lord I will sing, I will make melody to the Lord, the God of Israel.
Philippians 4:5
Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.
Words of Grace For Today
It doesn’t take much to be gentle, …
not really.
It just takes everything we can possibly give to …
to respond to …
well …
to respond with Grace …
with gentle Grace to …
to respond with gentle Grace to all the evil that other people throw at us, on top of us, and under us so that we can do no other than slip and slide to our demise.
Yet … first God responds to us and all our sins with gentle Grace,
gentle Grace …
ah gentle Grace meets our sins though we do not deserve anything of it at all,
not at all, and then
because God so responds to us we have hope …
we have some hope of responding with gentle Grace.
It takes more from us than we can possibly give, and only have some hope of responding gently as the Holy Spirit holds, guides and enlivens us with what we simply cannot find for ourselves,
unconditional love.
Ahh, as the sun rises and sets we simply cannot find unconditional love except as God gives it to us and as others, by God’s Grace, extend it to us and for us.
So gently it comes to us.
And so gently God gives us all that is needed to give gentle Grace to others.
Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
Colossians 2:10
You have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.
Words of Grace For Today
Headstrong as we all are, we need some rigorous interruption to our daily routine, to the expected, to the unrighteousness of our lives that we’ve come to rely on in order to make our way forward.
That’s what the suffering servant, and many who have followed who have sacrificed themselves to give others life, and what God in the life of Jesus has done for all: they have interrupted the usual and expected flow of selfishness with their own sacrifice that gives others life. Their sacrifice is simple to describe. They put themselves in the way of corrupt people and powers who seek a scapegoat for their own corruption, lies, and destruction of others … and all manner of sins that clog up the flow of life with their own shtako. These corrupt people easily lie about an innocent person in order to gain some catharsis for the strain the overflow and damming (and damning) their own sins spew across their own lives.
Then as the innocent person is destroyed, the strain of the shtako in their own lives seems to be relieved. Yet it is not at all, not at all. In fact it deepens the clogged up piles that impede life, honest life, blessed life as God created us to live it. … until another innocent scapegoat is slammed into jail or poverty or derision and eventually death.
This seems to be the regular rhythm and rhyme of life … over and over again … and no one seems to care or notice that the innocent are some of the best people alive … until they are no longer.
When God sacrificed life in the death of God-Jesus, God sent a clear message: NO FURTHER SCAPEGOATS ARE REQUIRED for life to flow onward, for the goodness of life to be lived, for the overwhelming, clogging and damning sins of so many to be forgiven.
God dies.
God dies to interrupt our usual.
God dies to interrupt our usual scapegoating to save us from our sins, and to save all those we would scapegoat.
And yet so many people simply cannot bear the thought that God knows their sins, so they keep scapegoating innocent people, and innocent people are jailed, slammed into poverty and derision, and eventually killed … all for nothing more than a temporary cathartic relief of actual, overwhelming, damning and destructive guilt.
Woe to those who continue to scapegoat the innocent!
But for those who have ears, for those who have eyes, for those who have hearts …
ears to hear God’s Word,
eyes to see Christ’s Light,
hearts to receive and live out God’s unconditional love for us all …
For those who the Holy Spirit has given ears, eyes and hearts to receive God, God blesses us with God’s presence each day, each moment … no matter the false convictions, poverty, derisions, or death wishes aimed at us …
and we live lives as God intended us to live them: honest, grateful, generous, forgiving, and steadfast … and as required, self-sacrificial.
We are blessed to be blessings for generations to come
Reflecting God’s Promises of Grace for All
One Day At A Time.
Genesis 26:4
I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and will give to your offspring all these lands; and all the nations of the earth shall gain blessing for themselves through your offspring.
Galatians 4:28
Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac.
Words of Grace For Today
When the earth was inhabited by very few people the promise of offspring was a tremendous promise. Abraham and Sarah receive this promise from God, along with the promise of the land, land flowing with milk and honey.
Isaac is their son, the beginning of the offspring who will be as numerous as the stars of heaven.
For each of us, the promise that Jesus brings to us at our baptisms is that we not only receive the promise given to Abraham and Sarah, but that we are the offspring just as Isaac was. In us God begins the blessing for and of generations.
Not only are we blessed, but we are made to be blessings for every other person alive and for all generations to come.
Not that we need worry about the burden of carrying all the hope of future generations. The Holy Spirit is with us and working to bring us to each task, each person, each hope that we need bring to others. It’s a huge job, and it’s a wonderfully completed task, completed by God through us.
Do not now be stiff-necked as your ancestors were, but yield yourselves to the Lord and come to his sanctuary, which he has sanctified for ever, and serve the Lord your God, so that his fierce anger may turn away from you.
Luke 14:15
One of the dinner guests, on hearing this, said to him, ‘Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!’
Words of Grace For Today
Yield ourselves to the Lord, do not be stiff-necked as our ancestors were.
Great words of advice, and if the reward for yielding and not being stiff-necked is to have God’s fierce anger turn away from us, well…
well then, who in their right mind would ever be stiff-necked, and who in their right minds would not yield to the Lord??!!
Except we do all the time, holding our own rights up high, our own abilities out in front of our journeys in life, our own accomplishments of wealth, power, renown, and all else we are proud of and depend on each day to provide us security from the vagaries of life’s journey. Our own accomplishments are of course reached by stomping on others, taking from others, ensuring others remain oppressed, persecuted, abused, disadvantaged, cast out and not wealthy, powerful, or of great renown.
Ahh, we humans and our little games of stealing life from others so that we can have more … but
but more of what?
More security we think, but it can disappear in a flash.
More solid reputation we think, but our underbellies just keep getting bigger and bigger and more and more vulnerable and the chance of us being exposed as frauds and cruel people grows with each of our efforts to secure our own journeys.
More power we think! More wealth we think! But power and wealth can disappear overnight when we are not alert or even as we are watching very alert.
Even so all our wealth, power, renown, and security, and all that we have accumulated and accomplished for ourselves still leaves us as failures, empty shells of the living, creative, loving, enterprising creatures God created us to be … and there remains a void in our heart of hearts, at the centre of our minds, and in the space all around us … no matter what we try to fill our hearts, minds and spaces with. We simply are not made to be filled with anything other than …
other than, well, adoration for our God and Creator:
an adoration that brings us to yield at each step to God’s will.
an adoration that brings us to sacrifice ourselves (yielding even our stiff-necked pride) so that all other people will have the necessities of life, and so that all other people will know God’s unconditional love … through us.
an adoration that brings us joy even as we face the greatest challenges in life and the worst attacks by our enemies.
And we will have enemies, if we practice God’s unconditional love for all people, because God’s love exposes the futility and destruction inherent in the common human way of accomplishing our own journeys at other’s great costs.
God’s fierce anger is what God’s love looks like to stiff-necked people, because God’s love dissolves into ashes and dust all that we think we have accomplished, freeing us from the false securities which own us. The more we rely on our own accomplishments the more we lose, the more we fear losing, the more we attack those who love unconditionally.
God save us and help us to yield everything we are and can do to your unconditional, self-sacrificial love for which you have created us.
‘But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’
1 John 4:9
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
Words of Grace For Today
There is the complication of communication between such different kinds of beings.
Science fiction has dealt with this in many ways: humanoids that have varying degrees of bodily appearances: facial hair, skull protrusions, different finger counts, different leg articulations, antennae, and on go the differences imagined. Then there are the other humanoids who require different atmospheres and must use equipment to provide their atmosphere when present with humans in theirs. And then there are the greater differences: the aquatic and air based life forms, and then the energy life forms, and more and more. Always there is, if not at first, some way for communication between the life forms.
What kind of communication can there be between the being whose power exudes greater than the sun, the creator of the universe? How can we imagine, even in science fiction terms, that we could stand inside the sun, or close to the sun, close enough to talk to the sun? What would the sun use to communicate to us, when a small burp would wipe out us and everything within millions of kilometres?
The creator of the universe did not leave us creatures clueless about our creator. Creation teems with evidence of God’s creative powers and God’s beauty and God’s Grace. Patterns are everywhere. Order is there to be recognized and understood and applied to improve our lives. Science and technology are possible because God created the universe so that we could understand and apply our knowledge in many and various ways. God also sent the Law, the Prophets, and the Son.
Whereas the sun will incinerate us long before we can approach it, the Son is a human just like us, and yet is still completely God. Those living at the same time as Jesus interacted with him just as with any other human, even though this human was different in how he lived, healed, loved, sacrificed himself, and rose to life again. Jesus’ life lived among us created a story. That story provides us the keys to understanding the universe and God’s Will for us in it: the Son’s power is unconditional love that forgives, generosity that heals and gives life abundant, and self-sacrificial love renews life and provides an example of how to respond to God’s call to live, live well, and to live fully in this universe.
Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.
John 8:31-32
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’
Words of Grace For Today
Lead me in your truth and teach me …
You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.
Life is not a journey with a final destination that we can reach or achieve or earn or miss out on. Life is a journey always becoming in the next moment what is next, whether that is new, old and oft repeated, or old and first for us. So we look forward with goals and plans that guide us, yet always these goals and plans are secondary to celebrating that God gives us the journey each day and walks with us no matter what we encounter, no matter what our enemies do to us, no matter anything and everything. Our goals and plans are chosen to reflect that everything we have and everything we are right down to the latest breath we’ve taken God gives to us, freely, lovingly, wonderfully.
When I was much younger I worked at the airport in Fargo, on the line of a small flight school and charter service. The chief pilot (the only pilot) drove his black Grand Prix out on to the apron where fueled up the airplanes on day, got out and started chatting with me. Usually I was not even noticed other than to be given orders on what to do with my time.
He pointed to his car. I wasn’t impressed. Cars were not something I was interested in other than as a means of transport. Airplanes of course were a different matter, though even they were for flying somewhere fast, or getting somewhere and being able to land with little to no runway, or doing aerobatics in.
He continued with his tale that he’d dreamed of having one since he was a young teen. Other than becoming a pilot that was what consumed him. He’d dreamed and planned and dreamed and worked. Finally he had one. He was in his early thirties, growing a bit of a paunch. He never had been athletic. The business he worked for was owned and run by his friend, and it turned out it was losing money hard and fast as the two of them ran it into the ground. It had been a gift to the friend from his father who’d built it up from nothing and now was not wealthy but comfortably retired.
The chief pilot finally got to the reason he was telling me his story about his wonderful jet black Grand Prix. “Now that I have it I don’t know what else to do with my life.”
I worked there a few summers during college, and then one final semester when I audited classes since I had more than enough credits to graduate (in 3.5 years) but there was nothing like graduating at any time except after the spring semester. So I was waiting for graduation, and then I’d be off to Yale Divinity School, except a full scholarship year in Germany sandwiched it’s way in first.
I did not understand a life focused on attaining a thing, a piece of metal, plastic, and rubber, as fancy as we humans have been able to make things of a great number of materials.
I can understand it sort of now, but not really. That kind of a life is, as the chief pilot said, pretty empty after one attains one’s dreamed goal. In fact that orientation for life empties life of life itself step by step as the goals is pursued. Things just do not make life worthwhile. They never have and never will, and there are countless stories from history that bear witness to this.
What we know, as followers of Christ, is that all the things in the world cannot fill one’s life with meaning. We receive things, skills, and everything else as gifts from God so that we can give life, abundant life, meaningful life, blessed life, to others.
Continuing in Jesus’ Word is not a choice we make, though our choices, especially our choices of goals and things we hope to attain or achieve in life, reflect whether we have surrendered and continue to surrender our own will and hopes and dreams to God’s Will for us each day.
We pray that we will continue in Jesus’ Word, giving as Jesus gave of himself, so that others can live and living they can know (as the Spirit teaches us) that God’s abundant, unconditional love, is the guide to a meaningful life.
This is the truth that frees us to know that God walks with us each step of our journey from the present into the next present, giving us stories of blessed lives (no matter what our enemies do to us).
As they go through the valley of Baca they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools.
1 Corinthians 16:13
Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong.
Words of Grace For Today
There are many journeys, or sub-journeys of life, that we embark on or simply end up on rather unplanned.
I’m not sure if any humans just walking through a valley can make that a place of springs! That would be to reach deep in the ground, make pathways for the water through the ground, and direct the water to follow those pathways to the surface where springs would appear.
That’s right up there with terra-forming barren worlds so that they can support human life.
We need water, that is for sure. A valley filled with springs would provide good, naturally filtered water (unless the ground has been fracked, in which case no ground water is safe: even if one day it tests good, the next it may be poisonous.)
This day is another sub-journey, yesterday’s is past, tomorrow’s is yet to come. Today is now. Whether we think or hope to direct our journey is moot. We cannot and do not; at best we fool ourselves.
The guide for this day’s journey, as for every other day’s journey, is to stay alert, to stand firm in our faith, to be courageous, and to be strong, strong with the power of Jesus’ self-sacrificial, unconditional love.
As we face each day, strong in our faith and inspired to love unconditionally, then we will see the Light of Christ in each person’s face whom we encounter; we will see the wonder and beauty of God’s creation in all that surrounds us; we will feast on the nourishing presence of Christ and share that feast with all other people.
Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; they say there is no one who does good.
1 John 5:20
We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.
Words of Grace For Today
Fools have long since pretended to be wise saying that God does not exist, and that, in their corruption and abominations that no one does any good.
Fools we are, all of us, though we are fools by a different measure. Those are the true fools who measure us as fools because of our faith in Christ, and our unlimited capacity to suffer and still trust God and rejoice with God among us, in us, God suffering with us. We are gladly, according to the ‘norm’ of perverse thinkers and doers, to be called fools for Christ.
In Christ we have come to know that there is truth that God gifts us with the ability to recognize, discern and separate out from what people call ‘your truth’, relative truth, or situational truth. This truth enables us to clearly discern lies told by true fools.
This truth enables us to clearly know Christ Jesus, and the promises God makes to be with us always, now on earth and into all eternity.
Truth is as valuable as love, and it is so readily corrupted by those who are corrupted themselves, in an effort to hide their corruption. Doch, God is not fooled. God demonstrates truth and true love in the life, ministry, healing, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Truth is so powerful as love is so powerful, that they give us life, even when our enemies would leave us to die.
Fools think that they can live as if God does not exist.
Fools for Christ know we live only because God exists, and chooses to love us unconditionally.
And that’s the truth that brings life as a free gift to all.
May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.
Words of Grace For Today
Valentine’s Day.
The day we celebrate love,
Sharing special times with our beloved.
…
And praying for those who use love as a cover for greed, avarice, and predatorily making their way through life, no matter the cost to others.
Love.
Love is a tremendous things.
Love is a terribly powerful thing that can defeat death and grief and hopelessness or
Love is a terribly powerful thing that abused can defeat life itself and all that is good in it.
The thing to note is that though a person who used love as a weapon against others certainly destroys many, many other lives, but first … first that person destroys their own life and everything that makes life worthwhile, which leaves them swinging at whatever they can hit to try to establish that they exist at all … which destroys even more of life in and around them.
Love, though embraced with awe and gentleness gives life to oneself and one’s beloved and so to all who witness this love, not least of all to the children who absorb into their lives that love is possible and life is good, and gratitude rather than greed is the key to life’s success and indeed to it is the key to life itself.
But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap.
Revelation 3:20
Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.
Words of Grace For Today
Each day, each moment of decision, we can respond to all that challenges or threatens us with our wits and strength, ready to fight for ourselves,
or we meet all challenges and threats first resigning to God’s Will.
In our resignation we can either expect the almighty God’s wrath to wipe us off our feet with a mighty cleansing fire, leaving little left of us,
OR we can resign and expect to celebrate and feast with Christ.
The choice seems simple: struggle and death or feasting and celebrating with God!
Yet we cannot on our own make the choice other than to engage our wits and strength. That requires trusting God, whom we think we cannot see, whom we know will let us suffer defeat and death for we have seen so much defeat and so many friends meeting their death.
So how is it that we can hear Jesus knocking and actually open the door? That is the question of life … or death!
It is only possible for us to hear and answer if God has given us faith to hear, faith to trust, faith to know how to resign ourselves to God’s way of unconditional love and forgiveness and blessing and gratitude and generosity and living abundantly … no matter our circumstances, no matter the challenges we face, no matter the threats made against us.
Thank God daily for the faith given to us, for we hear and see the door opened … by faith. And we feast with Christ each day.
