God will shatter the heads of his enemies, the hairy crown of those who walk in their guilty ways.
1 Thessalonians 4:14
Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.
Words of Grace For Today
Scriptures teach what everyone knows: God does great and mighty things, awesome things, wondrous and frightening things, life- and hope- creating things.
Life after the end of life, after death, seems a thing far fetched (to some if not many people.) Christians are not the only faithful people who embrace it as the hope of all hopes, grounded firmly in the centre of our faith, namely that Jesus was crucified for crimes and sins he did not commit and that three days later God rose him back to life. By this God demonstrated clearly that evil and death itself are not more powerful than God. By this God teaches that scapegoating (the killing of an innocent person in order to ‘pay’ or cover for one’s own sins) is not something favours. Rather God prohibits it just as God prohibits killing, sacrifice of people, especially children, and a host of other acts all too common among people, acts which all destroy other people, good people, by robbing them of life abundant.
Even though God prohibits these sinful, life destroying, de-storying actions, humans still commit them profusely. The hope in life after death includes the promise that in our new life, sins will be dealt with justly and with grace, and all will be free from oppression, abuse, and de-storying. The Pslamist puts this image graphically: God will shatter the heads of his enemies, the hairy crown of those who walk in their guilty ways.
There are few people, other than those who know they qualify for such an end, who would not hope that their enemies would cease to be.
God’s grace is more complete: God promises that God’s and our enemies will definitely cease to be … to be our enemies, for God will save them and convert them. They will sit with us among the children of God.
We pray: come soon, Lord Jesus, that our enemies will be defeated and we will live in peace. And they will know your peace, freeing them from their obsessions to de-story other people.
This is our story …. Let it be known far and wide.
Who among you fears the Lord and obeys the voice of his servant, who walks in darkness and has no light, yet trusts in the name of the Lord and relies upon his God?
2 Peter 1:19
So we have the prophetic message more fully confirmed. You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
Words of Grace For Today
While most people make their way through life quite sure that they live and work in the light, how is it possible for those who live blessed by the Light of Christ to know that they live in the dark, and yet they fear God and trust God, and rely fully on God?
There is something about this passage from Isaiah that is odd: that God’s people, God’s servants, God’s God-made saints can live in the darkness.
Yet anyone who follows Christ, who lives as God’s servant, who lives as a God-made saint can tell us, there are plenty of moments when, even with the Light of Christ shining bright in our lives, it seems that the darkness has won the day and we will never find the Light again.
There is, though, always a light shining in the darkness, even if the flame is feeble and distant, there is always at least a glimmer of reality, a glimmer of light, a glimmer of hope that Christ will make the world right: dark will be dark, light will be light, sin will be eradicated, justice will be true, and love will be everything, and everything will indeed be made of Grace.
It is those dark days that we live through without dwelling there. Instead as we move on we wait for the day to dawn and the morning star to rise in our hearts,
for we are God-made saints (not self made at all). We are the people who fear the Lord, and more we fear and love God with all our heart, mind, and strength.
As the Snow Covers Everything Announcing Winter’s Dark-Cold’s A’comin’
We Remember God’s Work in Our Past
And Know
That Spring Will Come.
So God Will Melt Our Hard Hearts
To Give Us New Life.
Ezekiel 36:36
Then the nations that are left all around you shall know that I, the Lord, have rebuilt the ruined places, and replanted that which was desolate; I, the Lord, have spoken, and I will do it.
Acts 11:20-21
But among them were some men of Cyprus and Cyrene who, on coming to Antioch, spoke to the Hellenists also, proclaiming the Lord Jesus. The hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number became believers and turned to the Lord.
Words of Grace For Today
God works.
We work.
When God works we often do not see anything happen.
When we work, especially in committees, we often do not see anything happen.
When I work and I don’t see anything happen as a result, it’s a bad, bad day, because my work is all the about the basics of staying alive: gathering wood, building shelter, building systems to support life, hauling supplies like water and food, cutting and splitting wood, feeding the ‘monster’ wood so it produces heat, repairing systems that support life that will stop supporting life if they are not fixed or already have not only stopped but started to endanger life because they are broken, reading and writing so that my spirit does not succumb to my enemies attacks on me, praying, celebrating, resting and sleeping (though the last are hardly work per se.)
When God works, and we open our eyes, sometimes we see the results: nations are moved, mountains are levelled or reformed, planets and stars are created or destroyed or transformed, hearts are enlivened after being hard as granite, people eat and drink and celebrate who were thirsting and starving to death, people are healed and given new life, saints are called home and given their reward for eternity, and the beauty of creation comes crashing into our minds transforming us from despairing to caught in wonder.
When we work and we see results, our efforts and results are minuscule in comparison. We sell things to people with pets, or without. We buy things that we need or do not need. We use or abuse resources and are renewable or non-renewable. We pollute ourselves to death burning coal and natural gas, consuming disposable plastics, or setting radioactive atoms to react hopefully always in a controlled manner but that is not our record. We set people against people with weapons capable of destroying whole populations and de-storying masses (genocide.) We construct highways and airplanes and rocket-ships that invite people to increase their carbon footprint – because ‘it’s there.’ We build cities that will flood as the planet warms and the oceans rise, a result of our carbon mega-footprints and billions of smaller footprints that add up to more than than our host planet can accommodate without changing even that which we rely on for life. And our ‘marvellous’ accomplishments fill a listing that seems endless … and always has an end that reads ‘which leads to the extinction of humans on planet earth, and before that the cessation of human and animal life as we know it.’
Is there any hope for us?
Is there any hope for planet earth?
Is there any hope?
Thank God, God responds to our destructive, sinful ways of working by promising: I, the Lord, will have rebuilt the ruined places, and replanted that which was desolate!
God works … and it is always good.
We work … and it is almost always destructive … unless God directs and we cooperate as the Holy Spirit moves in and through us.
Is there any hope?
Only because of God’s promises to be Gracious with us … again and again and again. And when God works it happens, sometimes from the most surprising corners of the earth as foreigners come to share the Good News with us, we who hunger and thirst to hear and know the old, old story is for us, too.
Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.
Galatians 4:9
Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
Words of Grace For Today
Self help gurus and advice abound. Almost all include some kind of self affirmation to promote the ‘best one can be’ to emerge from one’s thoughts, words and deeds.
And it is all futile. Sometimes it produces great results in people who produce great things, BUT it’s all built on a lie and like a house of cards it is always one little whiff of reality, one puff of truth, away from collapsing under it’s own weight of falsehoods.
Some people say that building a life, a ‘successful’ life, is always about overcoming the underlying sense of being a fraud, of ‘learning to fill the shoes’ of those who have done your profession or ‘life’ before you. Some people actually do feel inadequate, or fraudulent, in their work even though they are actually well qualified. That’s a different challenge to overcome. When one builds one’s life on an ever increasing set of lies, one does not meet the qualifications at numerous steps, exams, and milestones towards qualification. Instead one cheats at each step, on many if not all exams, and is a complete fraud at the milestones, presenting oneself to be someone one has never qualified to start being. There are lost of people who do this. My ex never trained as more than a low level nurses’ aide, immigrated to Canada, applied, took the test and qualified (without further training) as a registered nurse. She continues to falsify her yearly continuing ed requirements. So many people know this and allow her to continue because there is a shortage of registered nurses and she works hard. It’s not that she’s not intelligent enough, its that she’s not capable of doing some of the things a registered nurse must be able to do.
How do so many people come to live such fraudulent lives? How do people learn that cheating pays off, that lies work better than real and hard work? How do so many people get away with it? They get away with it and learn this ‘shortcut’ to life from all those who have gone before them, also frauds. Like the STASI in East Germany, who kept files on almost everyone, filled with reports from so many sources, mostly from ordinary citizens, many who used reports to tell lies about their enemies and competitors … and anyone they were angry at. The STASI knew most of it were lies. They created their own false reports aplenty and ruined many, many good, honest people … just because they could.
Which is what Canada’s own RCMP and Justice system does because they can: from the false citizen reports solicited by the RCMP, to false reports created by RCMP, to lawyers who knowingly provide lies to the courts, and on to the many judges who make unsupported decisions and remove exonerating evidence from transcripts and knowingly allow people, even experts, to perjury themselves with impunity. All because ‘they can’.
But they cannot … they cannot just get away with it. Someone always knows, someone always speaks up, and someone always blows a puff of truth on their fraudulent ‘house of cards’ and it all comes tumbling down. Trouble is when it tumbles it takes out a lot of innocent people, even whole societies when the fraudulent systems is allowed to continue so long one cannot remember when or how it did not function fuelled by lies.
Again and again, scriptures calls God’s people to Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.
So lift your voice, tell the truth, expose the lies, blow the one card out that you know is a complete fraud, and let the ‘house’ fall before it takes out the whole country.
It is not that anyone of us does not participate in at least some small way to this ‘house of cards’ and for that every single one of us needs to start each day with confession of our sins. Only having confessed our own sin to God, and breathing each moment only because God is gracious to us forgiving us and renewing life in us, are we then able to ‘announce to our people their rebellion and sin against God.
All will not be lost, no matter the challenges our enemies may work against us for telling the truth, for the power [of Christ] at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine … both saving us from our enemies and saving our enemies from their own lies and fraudulent lives.
Soon and very soon, come Lord Jesus and accomplish the work of bringing ordinary citizens, RCMP, lawyers and even judges to speak the truth in the face of so many lies.
Soon and very soon, come Lord Jesus and accomplish this work, so that our whole society does not collapse because of one puff of truth.
Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour.
Ephesians 3:20-21
Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
Words of Grace For Today
Be careful what you pray for, and what you wish for;
God has ways of accomplishing more than we can imagine
and calling us to lives that we never imagined possible
working with, for, or because of people we never thought God would make us suffer.
People are full of shtako.
People are full of blessings.
Which will you be today?
Which do you wish or pray for today?
Remember God may fill your wish and a prayer with something more challenging than you can imagine possible!
So are we to simply stop wishing, praying, dreaming, and hoping!?!
Not really, eh!
Just get ready for the ride: living as God’s saints, deliverers and agents of Grace is the wildest ride possible!
Hang on tight to the only thing that is actually secure enough to stand the stresses coming our way: God’s promises, grace, and love.
For the Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high.
1 Peter 5:5
In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders. All of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’
Words of Grace For Today
It is true that God gives grace to the humble, and I am very sure and proud that I can say that God gives grace to the proud.
The Lord of hosts certainly has a day (or eternity one would hope!) against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high. Just so God has a day against every kind of sin, and no one lives without each hour committing a sin that God has a ‘day’ (an eternity) against.
There is order.
There is order that God created in the universe.
There is order that God created in the universe for us to discover, understand, and use … or rather to learn to live in harmony with. As much as we learn to live in harmony with the order God created life is healthier for us and those around us.
I am not so sure that accepting the authority of the elders is exactly the order that God created, for wisdom does not always come with age or authority assumed and exercised, nor does wisdom come with the freshness of youth. Wisdom is a gift that God sprinkles freely and randomly … and somehow some people seem to come up short, and not just short but kind of a vacuum of wisdom, no matter their age or intelligence.
Respecting each other, now that is a must for health.
Elders respecting youth, youth respecting elders. Men respecting women and women respecting men. Respect among and between all races, genders, faiths, and levels of wisdom even; this is how we live in harmony with the diverse universe God created. Respecting an idiot does not mean obeying an idiot. It is to respect that even the greatest, most powerful, most stupid idiot is still one of God’s creatures, and as long as these idiots breathe God is giving them time for the amendment of life, and we can learn to do so as well, and work to contain the effects of their idiocies on the rest of humanity.
God has a day against …
God has a day against all idiocies and sins, against all lies and false witnesses, and against all corrupt judgments and delusions of power. We need not make that day come sooner, nor stop praying that God’s day will come very soon.
Those with any wisdom want God’s day against their own sin to come soon, very soon, for their day before God is determined already as Jesus’ record will be used in place of our own … we will continue to be God’s saints, free then of sin, free to exercise God’s Grace that is so abundantly poured over us, like a fresh white blanket of snow pours over the darkness of the night.
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
Romans 12:2
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Words of Grace For Today
Original sin comes in many variations, like the Genesis story of the Fall (eating fruit from the forbidden tree, and gaining knowledge of good and evil).
Moving ourselves out of sin comes in many forms, like Romans (appears to) in this short passage: just resist being like the rest of the world (corrupt and sinful), and instead be transformed by renewing our minds in order that we can discern the will of God, the knowledge of what is good, acceptable and perfect.
Of course …
first, that is not the whole story of the Gospel that Paul presents in his letter to the Romans, and
second, knowing what is good (by God’s standards), acceptable (to God), and perfect (as God determines it to be) does not bring us any closer to being good, acceptable and perfect.
Paul makes it clear that we can never be any of that … on our own.
Only by the Grace of God, and then only by the work of the Holy Spirit in us, bringing to be things that we had no idea were possible or that we were in the middle of doing!
God works
God works in us
God works in us in ways we cannot understand
God works in us in ways we cannot understand and sometimes the best we do is
eat the forbidden fruit – do you like apples?
And
plan to transform our minds to know God’s will – do you like the truth of how far you are from perfect?
So we work not to be taken in by the devil’s empty promises.
So we strive to fear and love God in all things.
So we strive to be perfect
all the while knowing that all that is God is only so by God’s own doing, in us, around us, in all the universe.
And we pray our thanks and our petitions that what ails us would be put right, for ourselves and maybe we learn that our enemies need the putting right to happen even more than we do.
Does the snow of Lebanon leave the crags of Sirion? Do the mountain waters run dry, the cold flowing streams? But my people have forgotten me, they burn offerings to a delusion; they have stumbled in their ways, in the ancient roads, and have gone into bypaths, not the highway.
John 15:9
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
Words of Grace For Today
The snow today, which has collected as glaciers for hundreds of years, now does melt away, faster and faster. We, with our carbon footprint so huge, have discombobulated nature’s way. The mountain waters do run dry where they have not in memory done so before.
Just as we have messed with nature’s balances, so we have imbalanced our own lives, living as slaves of delusions, voluntarily enslaving ourselves to wealth, power, status, and the illusion that we are better than others whom we ruin on our way through life.
There is another way to live.
As God loves Jesus, so Jesus loves us. When we humbly accept that there is nothing else so important in life as being loved by God, and returning that love (by sharing God’s love with all other people) then we live as we are created to live and we contribute to the balance of nature. We do not just lower our carbon footprint. We drastically change how we live and what we expect from life in order to drastically lower our carbon footprint, and we reach as many people as we can to inspire them to do the same.
Maybe some people think that all those who enslave themselves to wealth, power, status and delusions will respond to messages of the impending doom we are creating for ourselves. It rarely works, for their closed looped thought processes cannot calculate how to serve their chosen masters and respond to the impending doom for us all. Instead they ramp up their delusions to accumulate more wealth, power, status, and their favourite delusion in order to convince themselves that the impending doom will not impact them. It will, but deluded they believe it will not, just as Covidiots and Covid deniers and antivaxxers who lay dying of Covid still refuse to believe they have Covid or that they can be dying. They die a painful death, and an avoidable death, leaving so many Covidiots and Covid deniers and antivaxxers ready to carry on in their footsteps.
This is not a good life, and certainly not a good death.
Knowing God loves us, knowing that God knows us completely and blesses us by walking with us, and knowing the Holy Spirit makes us able to love others and walk with them through life’s challenges, rewards, and losses … knowing God’s love gives us hope. And hope gives us life renewed each morning.
For this we can give God endless thanks and praise … and we can be filled with joy, no matter what our enemies do to us. It does not get better.
Then you will delight in right sacrifices, in burnt-offerings and whole burnt-offerings; then bulls will be offered on your altar.
Luke 15:21
Then the son said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”
Words of Grace For Today
Getting it right before God.
Oh, how we have tried through the generations.
We’ve tried sacrificing our own children, but more often someone else’s.
We’ve tried sacrificing our own goats and lambs, but more often someone else’s.
We’ve tried sacrificing our own cattle, but more often someone else’s.
We’ve tried sacrificing our own birds, but more often someone else’s.
We’ve tried sacrificing ourselves, like the so called prodigal son, who really is only prodigal in his waste of life’s limited resources. This son comes and confesses his sins to his father, hoping to get work as a servant or slave, for then at least he will eat well enough to survive. His ‘prodigal’ waste has left him so broke and dishonoured that he cannot even get work that pays enough to provide himself food, even when he feeds other people’s pigs food that is more than he has to eat.
And it’s all wrong, oh we get it wrong.
God uses Abraham to declare that NO God does not want Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, not at all.
God uses someone anonymous in history to teach us that God does not want blood sacrifices (or maybe we just got lazy, for this sacrifice is messy and quite wasteful.)
God uses Jesus to teach us that we should not sacrifice other’s well being to make up for out own sins, in other words we should not scapegoat others in order to relieve the stress and conflict in our own lives.
Jesus uses the prodigal son and so many other parables and characters to teach us that we first can hear God’s promises to forgive us and restore us as living saints doing God’s grace for all people, and then we can confess our sins, expecting not to be made slaves or servants. Doch God rather restores us to live as God’s own children.
This God promises us, and tries to teaches us, and forgives us, and tries to restore us to full life … and still we try to make it through life like the prodigiously wasteful son, burning through the limited resources of life available to us and when things go wrong we still scapegoat others, destroy others, and try to make others pay for our own failings.
Well, some or maybe most of us that is. Some of us are blessed to have figured out how not to scapegoat others, or maybe we never learned.
The rest … ah what misery they create for others and themselves!
God have mercy on us, and keep these people far, far, far from us again this day.
God have mercy.
God have mercy on us, and teach these people soon of your promises, forgiveness, and Grace.
Whether Buried by Snow or Standing in the Chilly Air.
So Also God Knows Every Last Minutia of Us,
And …
Psalm 63:7
You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.
1 Corinthians 13:12
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
Words of Grace For Today
It is a terrible thing to not be seen at all, to have others look right past you and never notice that you exist. It is a terrible thing to be reduced to a thing that can be manipulated and used, everything extracted from and then tossed out with the garbage (as has been done to me). It is a terrible thing to go asking for help from those certified and paid to help, and to be ignored, as if it were okay that one be left to die unnoticed (as the doctors, nurses, and staff have done to me with lies about what I supposedly did to justify their lies and abuse.) It is more horrendous to be the ones who abdicate their privilege and responsibility to provide help, to see and to work to heal. For by choosing to refuse help and care to those in need, they become instead of privileged, they become cursed by their own lies and hard hearts. While there is a cure for many diseases and ailments, and while God promises to heal us of every disease of our hearts, minds and strength; there is no cure for these kinds of lies and hard hearts, not without God intervening … but they refuse to hear God’s promises and they refuse to acknowledge their lies and hard hearts, and in so doing they refuse the only help that could save them, God’s Grace.
To be seen, to be helped, to help others, and to heal one another in body, mind and heart; this is what God created us for. This is a marvellous way to live; being saved and forgiven and healed by God so that we can be that same Grace for others.
It is a terrible thing to be silenced (as I have been), told you are someone you are not (as I have been) and told you have done things you did not do (as I have been). It is to be gaslit, and then silenced, to have your reality and voice stolen from you (as was done to me – by so many people including the courts – and most of the people who did this to me did not do it by accident or negligence or by error – they did it with eyes wide open intention). While it is horrendous for the person silenced, it is long term more devastating for the people who gaslight and silence others, for their reality is based on lies, a whole pack of lies, and they will never escape the horrors they create for themselves until they seek, find, and admit the truth of what they have done … and that is so unlikely to happen. Instead they create more and more lies, creating a bubble of completely falsehoods from the bottom, to the top, to all sides around them. They separate themselves from reality and reality is not for them, but against them in every way.
Those who are silenced know well what the Psalmist writes of ‘You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy’ for God comes to help us, save us, and give us new life.
Those who gaslight and silence others cannot know God’s saving hand, can they! God reaches out to them, promises them forgiveness (as God does for all people), yet they refuse to acknowledge their lies and in refusing to recognize what they do they refuse God’s promises, help, forgiveness, and renewed life. What a waste of life!
To be heard: that is a precious thing. To be able to speak the truth and have people listen and respond: this is what God gave us eats, minds, and tongues for.
To be un-seen, and un-heard are terrible things.
To be seen and heard is precious and needed for life.
To be known … that is yet another infinite degree of precious, for it is beyond most people’s ability to know others well and even less so to know themselves. Paul describes this inability we share as ‘seeing dimly through a mirror’ and a very imperfect, misty mirror at that. But for another to know us, down to the last detail … and to love us in spite of it all … well that is something that only God can do.
And knowing that God promises to know us, all our past, present and future, the good, bad and the ugly about us, … and for God to promise to still forgive us, heal and renew us, and to send us out into the world to be that same forgiveness, healing, and renewing for others … well there is nothing so spectacular in all the universe and …
