Category: Grace

All In God’s Image

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

God Created

All People

To Share the Wonders of Life on This Planet

Through the Lens of Love

Genesis 1:27

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

1 Corinthians 11:11-12

Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God.

Words of Grace For Today

Humans are not totally depraved. We are capable of doing good things, and even loving truly. That requires that God gave us freedom to choose to love … which means we also can choose to do evil things and even things that destroy love with hate. We like to think well of ourselves, that we most often choose to do good, to love truly all that God has given us. Most of us think better of ourselves than is the reality. Part of thinking better of ourselves is that we all look at each situation and try to not find blame with ourselves, but with others. We most easily choose a stranger or someone who is different than us to blame for terrible things we cannot find the cause of, so that we are not blamed for them.

All of us do this blaming. Through all human history because men and woman are identifiably different from each other, the other gender has always been a too common ‘other’ to blame for our own shortcomings. It is so common yet we want to avoid acknowledging it that we have names for it that mislead us from seeing what we are doing to each other. We call it the ‘battle of the sexes’ or the ‘age old competition between men and women.’ It is in fact our sin of blaming others for our own sin at work.

This is not how God created us to be. God created us to live at peace with each other, with equal respect for each other, and with appreciation for each others gifts given by God as gifts for all to benefit from. God intended us also in couples to live in love with each other.

To live, loving others, to live in love with one other person, and to be at peace with one’s own sin, is the most rewarding, purpose giving manner to live; it is how God created us, male and female, to live with each other.

It is the perverted and truly depraved who believe and live as if ‘others’ are all terrible and they and those like them are without fault. It is a terrible thing when men abuse women and with disrespect and lies take away their voice, their honour, and their dignity. It is no fix for this, as is too often done today, when women rise up to abuse men and with disrespect and lies take away their voice, their honour, and their dignity.

It is the mentally ill who blame others, to the extreme, for all their own sins to avoid all culpability, no matter how clear it is that they themselves are truly at fault.

God created people to be able to love.

To sustain the species, as with many other species, God created us male and female. This is a blessing. This does not mean that every man was created to procreated with a woman in love with her so that the children would grow up in a family built on love, or that every woman was created to procreate with a man in love with him so that the children would grow up in a family built on love.

By design, when the population flourishes and procreation is not in the best interests of the species or the planet, some men were created to love only other men, some women to love only women, and many more men and women were created to love either the opposite or the same gender. When the pressures of overpopulation increase, and the luxuries of civilization increase, human history shows that those who choose the same gender as their partners increases … by design, so that the population may decrease. Somehow, so eager to blame others who are different, and so eager to be able to condemn others who are different from us (or so much the same as us, filled with shame condemning them instead of ourselves,) we fail to appreciate that God provides ways for us to love and live fully and for the population to decrease to where the planet can survive us humans.

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God created us in God’s image, capable of love. It is in loving that life has meaning. It is in loving others that we are made able to give all that we are so that others can live, and live abundantly. It is in loving that we can share God’s greatest blessing: to love unconditionally.

Each Day

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

As Darkness Fades at Each Sunrise

So God’s Blessings

Rescue Us Over and Over Each Day.

Daniel 7:14

To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.

Colossians 1:13

He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.

Words of Grace For Today

Daniel’s vision sees God having given dominion to one human-like being, and destroying the greatest beast.

This vision is part of the book, set in the 6th century BCE, written in and about the oppression of the Jews in the 2nd century BCE. Just as God delivered Israel in the time of David, so God will deliver the people then … and now.

After Christ, the one like a human being is understood to be Jesus, for God gave him all power, as indeed Jesus is God, the Son of God, a person of the Trinity, one-Godhead, three persons.

For the people reading Daniel when it was written, the hope created in them was that the evil oppression of their time would come to an end with the rise of a ruler like David, who would throw off their oppressive foreign rulers and assert independence.

Even when Colossians was written this imagery is used to convey the promise provided in baptism, that we are made children of God: we are rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of Jesus. This provides solid hope, that all is accomplished, though I wonder what the people thought as they were hunted down, persecuted, and killed by the oppressive Jewish and Roman rulers.

Can we say the transfer is complete, finalized? I think that any honest person would have to admit that even baptized Christians continue to do evil things, think evil things, say evil things serving the power of darkness, or in Daniel’s imagery, the great evil beast. Is all hope lost?

For those who believe that once they are baptized, freed from bondage to evil, and sanctified as Jesus’ followers … for those who believe it is once done and complete and that then they are not still in bondage to sin at all and never sin … for those who believe that they do not ever again serve the powers of darkness at all … well for these people the realization that they do still sin, and constantly, this realization must undo their baptisms completely, as their house of cards crumbles into a dust heap of cheap, self-made faith. For this reason so many bury their heads in the sand about their own sin, or blame others for their sins. But nothing any human can do will erase their sins.

Those, including us, who believe that we are adopted, yet remain free to choose to love God … and to choose to not love God and all of God’s creation … those who embrace Luther’s statement of faith that we are God-made saints and yet simultaneously sinners … those who accept in humility that only by Grace are we saved, and we must be saved again and again … those who know that as much as we need air to breathe we need Grace to live each moment … these people do not lose hope. Indeed we rejoice knowing that in our weaknesses and sins though Evil seems to win the day, God always wins over Evil and our weaknesses and sins are God’s clear demonstration of God’s power of love, exercised by Grace alone, not by merit.

We hope in what God can do and does do and has done for us. We do not rely on our own abilities. Our hope is sure. We live blessed by God each day.

We rejoice in all that God brings from us, the Grace that we are able to exercise on God’s behalf for other people. We remain every day grateful for God’s mercy and love. Our hope is sure, for we live blessed each day by God, no matter what our enemies try to do to us, no matter what evil or disaster or illness befalls us. We live each day blessed by God.

Profane Efforts to Be Holy

Monday, August 23, 2021

Wood Cannot Become Gold

Nor Can We On Our Own Become Holy.

God Provides Wood That Gives Heat

Which Gives Life.

So Also God Provides Grace

By Which God Makes Us Holy.

Leviticus 22:32

You shall not profane my holy name, that I may be sanctified among the people of Israel: I am the Lord; I sanctify you.

1 Peter 1:15

As he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct.

Words of Grace For Today

Profane and holy, these two ways of thinking, talking, acting describe our lives.

Sigi grew up in a ‘normal’ farm family on the prairies, within view of the grand Rockies. Watching her family work to raise crops and cattle each year she was no stranger to the cost of illnesses, and the benefits of health. She was a bright young girl, brighter than most around her. She saw the discord in her parents’ lives between what they said they believed in and worked at and how they lived their lives. As a young teen, as teenagers are wont to, she resolved to not make the mistakes that her parents made.

Beginning with her own health she believed firmly as her parents did that her body was a gift from God, and also since her baptism, a visible presence of God’s Grace for all to encounter, and for her to benefit from by giving abundant life to others. Her parents said they believed their lives were gifts from God, including their bodies, and then they ate foods that were not healthy. The allowed their bodies to become fat and out of shape, even though they worked hard and were strong, they were not fit. In time the illnesses they allowed into their bodies would show themselves.

At first, when Sigi resolved to keep her body fit, she loudly critiqued her parents, shaming them as best she could. She developed habits that she knew were healthy. Sigi ate only food she knew was healthy for her, only the foods that she needed to be and stay healthy. She exercised everyday and through the week had a routine of various exercises that kept her whole body fit. It was a painful year that her parents endured while she ingrained her habits into her life. She allowed her critique to spread to others in the family, and then to others in the community.

When her father had his first heart attack, she was brought up short. She stopped critiquing her parents, and others. She was bright enough to realize that her critique on her father was a contribution, even if small, to his stress and therefore to his heart attack. She started to realize that being healthy was more than just being physically healthy. So she began a life-long struggle to find, develop, and maintain a healthy mind and a healthy soul.

Six decades later, in her early 70’s Sigi was still struggling with this same struggle. She had seen her father survive 4 heart attacks, many years of good return on the farm, and the two decades of large swings from profitable to huge losses. In the deep trough of the third great loss her father suffered his last heart attack. The farm was repossessed. Her mother moved to town to a small apartment she rented. Her mother’s dementia advanced suddenly in that small apartment and she died within the year.

By then Sigi was married, had a career as a psychologist, had her own three children, and had suffered their teenage years as her parents had suffered hers.

Sigi still struggled to find health in her own thinking, in the deepest corners of her mind, in the darkest valleys of her soul. Her habits were all healthy. She was still physically fit, though her body ached from arthritis, occasionally so bad she could barely move. She attended church. She meditated daily. She prayed for her family, for her church, community, country, and the whole world. She prayed for people around the world. She donated a tithe to her church, and gave even more to aide for people in terrible catastrophes around the world. She practised good, sustainable, and environmentally friendly ways of being on earth: She drove a small, economical car, installed good insulation on her small home along with a solar panel array that provided most of her electricity needs, and composted and reused most of her waste. She had bicycled most everywhere until her arthritis hampered that, and still during the summer she managed to do most of her grocery shopping using her bicycle, now a bike with an electric assist motor to help her up the small hills and rises between home and the store.

When her husband, Vern, had died of a massive stroke when he was only 58, something in Sigi just broke down, and left her unable to find any peace or purpose or health or hope.

Then so many years later, as if by a miracle everything changed again for her (like it had when she was just a teenager realizing that her parents said they believed one thing and lived completely differently). She was listening to a sermon, a simple sermon, not even a very good sermon, she heard words that she’d heard many times before: that Jesus saved us by Grace alone, not by our merits. It hit her like thunder breaking through an invisible lightening bolt and exploding in her like fireworks.

She had worked all her life to be healthy, to honour God with her body, mind, and soul, as she was a visible being of God’s presence on earth for her and others. What she had struggled against all this time was that she just could not make herself completely healthy, not healthy enough; not in her body, not in her mind, and certainly not in her soul. Her failures were as visible as her successes to anyone who knew her well could tell you. Her demands to be healthy had ruined relationship after romantic relationship before she met Vern, and many friendships as well throughout her life.

She realized that she could no more earn God’s blessings by trying to be completely holy, any more than her father could stop his heart attacks, her mother her dementia, Vern his stroke … and on went the list of other’s illnesses, reminding her of her own illnesses and the suffering she had caused so many people with her ‘holier than thou’ attitude.

Sigi regained a sense of purpose in life through more than a year of searching to understand this revelation, that she was saved by grace alone though she did not and could not deserve it, and that she was to be that same grace for others.

She realized that only by Grace could she ever reflect the holiness that God wished for her, only by Grace could she turn to God who was always with her, as the holy companion God promised to be.

She realized that her efforts to be completely holy were as all human efforts done as one’s own, as profane as anything she’d ever witnessed in her life.

Only by allowing God to make her holy, though she deserved it not one bit, could she be holy at all, and only then could her life be a visible witness to God’s holy presence with all people. It was all by Grace, that wonderful thing that God was for all people: giving freely without cost, given with ease to make one at ease, moving one through time with the beauty of a dancer, of a butterfly appearing from nowhere, moving through the heart wrenching challenges and losses of life as if pulled onward towards the goodness of life for others.

Sigi lived her final 2 decades, trusting that Grace was for her and for other people. She moved gently, kindly, sharing God’s unconditional love with all. She still struggled to be healthy in body, mind, and soul, but her struggle was not on her own. She allowed herself to fail, forgiving herself as God had already. She even enjoyed ice cream for the first time in her life, without a guilty conscience, trusting that this enjoyment was also part of a good abundant life. Profane she realized was unavoidable, though one ought not jump into it headfirst if one didn’t have to! Holy she humbly realized in new ways each day was all gift, a blessed gift of God’s Grace, a gift God offered to each sinful person.

Our Efforts Compared to God’s Promises

Sunday, August 22, 2021

The Marvels of Technology

That Made Mobile a Living Space

Hardly Compares To

God’s Love

Which Makes a Living Space a Home,

A Safe Home.

Leviticus 26:12

And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people.

1 John 1:3-4

We declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

Words of Grace For Today

God creates.

God creates humans.

God creates you.

God creates me.

God knows what wretched sinners we each will be.

God still creates you and me and all of us.

God plans that in our wretched sinfulness, God’s power will be made obvious to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to love and live and believe. God does not abandon us to our sinfulness, though we may experience the painful results of sin, of others’ and our own sins, as unending suffering and abandonment by God.

God brings words to the ancient writers minds, words of promise to counter our limited understanding of our own lives and of God’s great goodness, mercy, love and grace. The ancient writers put in words for us to read so many generations since: that God promises to not abandon us, not even to our own wilful sins and their consequences. God promises to walk with us.

This many mystics and other faithful people have experienced in the face of sin’s great destructive consequences: that God walks with us each step of each day, no matter what we do, say, or think.

God’s promises are sure.

We use many things to make life safer for us:

Natural gas for heating, though some of us only have wood heat it is still heat against the winter cold.

Gasoline to power engines to do work for us, mowing grass, clearing snow, moving vehicles to and fro bringing food and other supplies to stores and home from stores.

Coal, natural gas, and water (and a tiny amount of wind turbines and solar panels) to generate electricity to a distribution grid that powers industry, business machines, and home appliances to wash and dry our clothes, wash our dishes, run our computers and TVs, charge our phones; though some of us cannot afford to connect to the grid, and some of us use our own generators run on solar power or gasoline.

Science and engineering accomplishments and implementations that bring water to us and remove waste; that have allowed us to build vertical cities from deep underground to high above the streets; that have given us a system of roadways and railways and shipping systems and air transportation systems including complex trucks, trains, ships, and planes that span rivers, valleys, oceans, and continents; that have provided specialized buildings for research, health care, magnetic imagining that provides details unimagined by even Röntgen; computers with all their benefits and detriments to healthy living.

The list of what we use to make life more secure goes on and on.

Nothing of our own efforts guarantees us a good future.

Our own efforts are so marvellous that previous generations would hardly comprehend what we’ve done, and what we rely on. We rely on our accomplishments so thoroughly that we seem unable to give up any of it, not even to walk away for a few days without that always-at-hand ‘smart’phone. We’ve become so dependent that we by and large equate security with our ability to posses and use these technologies.

Yet nothing of our own efforts can guarantee us a good future. Reliance on them as security for life is a reduction of life to what they provide us; God created life to be so much more than our own technologies (marvellous as they are) can provide. No matter the marvel, no thing can match the power of love, the power of forgiveness, the power of healing with mercy and grace.

Only God’s promises can and do provide us the guarantee we ask for, that today and all our tomorrows be life abundant for us. As God walks with us, God loves us each step through our days, today and every tomorrow. There is no more powerful provision for and assurance of life abundant, even as we inevitably face death, of our loved ones and our own deaths than that God walks with us and love us unconditionally. There is no comparison in all our technologies that enables us so to live and to provide life abundant to others, everywhere in God’s good creation.

Listen Up!

Saturday, August 21, 2021

Sometimes

We Need to Stand Up Above the Fray

And Be

God’s Listening Ears

and

Loving Hearts

For Others

Isaiah 65:24

Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.

Romans 5:8

God proves God’s love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

Words of Grace For Today

It’s real simple:

we don’t deserve God’s love,

God loves us again and again anyway.

We don’t deserve God’s forgiveness,

God forgives us again and again anyway.

We don’t deserve God’s blessings,

God blesses us with renewed life again and again anyway.

Peter and Michelle had a son, Lloyd, who as he grew into his teens went from a kind and gentle soul to an aggressive, vengeful and hurtful angry whirlwind of trouble. More than once the police brought Lloyd home and released him into his parents care.

After a year of that, the police came one morning when Lloyd had not come home for a few days. Not coming home for days on end had become more and more the routine rather than the exception. The police informed Peter and Michelle (on a first name basis by now with the police) that Lloyd had been arrested and charged with murdering an elderly woman. It appeared, the police said, that a group of teens had attacked her going into her home, roughed her up, tied her up, robbed her, gained entrance to her home, looted the place, and then were about to beat her more when a neighbour interrupted them with a lantern and a large stick. Lloyd was in the hospital still unconscious from a blow to the head from that stick.

Peter and Michelle headed out to the hospital in their horse drawn wagon, found Lloyd, and sat by his side. Taking turns returning home for food and to clean up, they spent the next four days holding vigil by Lloyd’s hospital bed.

When Lloyd finally started to come to Peter was about to relieve Michelle for the ‘graveyard’ shift. Lloyd took a good hour to figure out where he was. Peter and Michelle repeated for him over and over again, that it did not matter what he’d done, they had always loved him and they always would no matter what.

The next day Peter and Michelle returned to the hospital to find the police interviewing Lloyd, who had very little to say. When they left Peter and Michelle sat with Lloyd, assured him that no matter what they loved him and always would.

That night when they came to share supper with Lloyd, a neighbour, Mr. Platt, and Lloyd’s girlfriend, Ginny, were with Lloyd talking. When Peter and Michelle arrived they shared the details of Lloyd being knocked unconscious.

Ginny started out and Mr. Platt jumped in with some details only he knew. Lloyd had been walking home with Ginny, after a two day trip over the mountains to see her grandmother. Since she was Ginny’s only living relative they asked her for her blessing for the two to get married. On their walk they came upon Mrs. Swenson, tied to a tree. Michelle ran for help and Peter stayed to untie Mrs. Swenson. The neighbour, Mr. Platt, alerted by Michelle, told her to stay with his wife and kids. He went out to find Lloyd bent over Mrs. Swenson and without delay disabled him to ‘free’ Mrs. Swenson from her attacker. Mr. Platt then chased the remaining teens but did not catch any of them.

It wasn’t long before the police came, listen to the whole account by Mr. Platt, Ginny, and Lloyd, and the promised Lloyd all the charges against him would be dropped.

A month later at Ginny and Lloyd’s wedding, Peter and Michelle and Ginny’s grandmother welcomed the same police they had come to know so well, and Mr. Platt and his family, along with many of their neighbours. Together they all celebrated the goodness of God’s grace that brought Ginny into Lloyd’s life, and the night that Mr. Platt ‘knocked’ some sense into Lloyd. It’d been a year since Lloyd had been in trouble, though his outings with Ginny did make it seem to everyone that he was still rebelling and heading down a dark road, so Mr. Platt’s knocking really had not changed anything, except made it known to all what Lloyd had been up to. The following summer Grant was born to Ginny and Lloyd, and the whole neighbourhood celebrated again. They knew it took a whole community to raise healthy children, and they’d done their part with Lloyd, and they would again with Grant, all his siblings to come and all the other children raised in that community.

Sometimes we need good friends to be the ones who demonstrate that God listens to us even before we pray, that God saves us even as we are still wretched sinners. Sometimes we need to be the ones who do the demonstrating of God’s Grace for others.

By Strength in Battle or by Grace

Friday, August 20, 2021

Our Ways

Always Lands Us in the Darkness of the Wilderness.

Even there Christ’s Light Shines

Beckoning Us to Follow

Christ’s Way As

Saints

2 Chronicles 25:8

Rather, go by yourself and act; be strong in battle, or God will fling you down before the enemy; for God has power to help or to overthrow.’

Romans 8:34

Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.

Words of Grace For Today

The way of humans:

Strive, train and become strong to fight, kill one’s enemies and competitors so that all will fear you, get other people to do your will so that you prosper and can enjoy the good things of life and so that your future is secure, trusting that God will reward you for your strength, power, and goodness.

The way of gods since the beginning of time, including those of our ancestors:

(See above for the way of humans.)

The Way of Jesus Christ:

God gives up everything, sacrifices God’s self, and in apparently being defeated by God’s enemies of evil and by death itself God triumphs by coming back to life. The story of Jesus instructs us, that it is not our power that wins anything worth winning. The story of Jesus demonstrates that God wins no matter what, that we need not become strong to fight, kill one’s enemies and competitors so that all will fear you, get other people to do your will so that you prosper and can enjoy the good things of life and so that your future is secure!

Indeed, God uses human weakness and sin, even evil and death itself, to demonstrate that God pours out grace upon all humans, regardless of their goodness; that is God offers forgiveness and renewed life to all people of all time, without respect to any merit. God gives this forgiveness and renewed life without cost or price or as a reward for anything we are or anything we can do. We cannot earn God’s forgiveness and renewed life; we can only humbly accept it … or arrogantly reject it.

There is no battle that we need to train for or enter into or enemies that we need to kill. God simply transforms us wretched sinners into God-made saints (even as we simultaneously remain sinners all our lives) so that we can be the vessels, the conduits, the agents on earth who bring God’s love and grace, forgiveness and renewed life, and fulfilled promises and hope to all people.

There is no battle that we need to train for or anything else that is our human way of ‘getting ahead’ in life, because with Christ as our protector and interceding for us so that God is always for us, we need not strive to make our own ways in life. Our way is Christ’s way, the way of the saints.

There is no glory in this way of life for us, but there is the fullness and abundance of life that cannot be enjoyed in any other way.

God help us if … no, to put it correctly: God help us when we try to find our own ways through life.

Singing and Dancing

Thursday, August 19, 2021

Every Step In Life

Leads Us to Sing and Dance

For God Is With Us

Always.

1 Chronicles 13:8

David and all Israel were dancing before God with all their might, with song and lyres and harps and tambourines and cymbals and trumpets.

Philippians 4:4-5

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.

Words of Grace For Today

When one surveys through memory how God has exercised great grace and steadfast love for our ancestors and for us in this time and place, there is only one response that we can engage in:

We sing and dance before God with all our might.

And we work each day to let our gentleness be the mode of our lives, gentleness that is born of enduring great suffering, and still receiving great grace and deliverance by God’s hand, for God is always near.

So we sing with all our hearts, minds, and strength, singing the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

This is the dance that celebrates everything that is good in creation: God’s grace and love for us all. There is nothing better possible than this in all our lives.

What Do, What Can We Delight In?

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

W hen the Evening Closes In

And The Dark is At Our Door

God’s Steadfast Love

Carries Us

For God Delights In Us.

Jeremiah 9:22-23

Speak! Thus says the Lord: ‘Human corpses shall fall like dung upon the open field, like sheaves behind the reaper, and no one shall gather them.’ Thus says the Lord: “Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight”, says the Lord.

Luke 9:25

What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?

Words of Grace For Today

What are the things that we delight in?

Many of us work for profit, a little more than we have, “Just a little more, please,” we beg God. “Make our lives just a little easier, a little more secure, a little more hopeful! Give us enough that the challenges we face are overcome, our enemies defeated, and so that we know that our futures are secured.”

So we, the wise, boast quietly about our wisdom, trusting that our wisdom will deliver us into a good future. So we, the mighty, boast quietly about our might, trusting that our might will deliver us into a good future. So we, the wealthy, boast quietly about our wealth, trusting that our wealth will deliver us into a good future. Or whoever we are, with whatever we have, we use it all to try to ensure our good futures. It is not actually boasting, we say. But we rely on ourselves and our own.

What are the things that God delights in? It is as God acts, with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth.

These things, by God’s Grace alone, are what can secure us a future that is worth living. Everything else leads to living in futility, struggling on our own to secure our futures, when the whole time we waste the little time we have on earth.

Each days challenges, our enemies’ evil actions, and the unknown in our futures are exactly the opportunities God uses to demonstrate that God walks with us, right with us, no matter what. We can rightfully boast only in God’s gracious love for us. We need nothing more than God’s gracious love to know that our futures, whatever comes, are fully secured in every way that they need to be, in order for us to live life fully as we are created to live it.

As the evening closes in on us and the skies darken, we pray in thanks for all the blessings God provides to us, starting with our daily food, and that we are able to breath, the good work we are able to engage in, and more than anything else we include thanks for all the people we love and who love us.

We lay down to sleep trusting that all is in God’s hands, God is with us, and the morning will come with new opportunities for God to show us and all people God’s steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth.

We strive to make life a little better for ourselves, and all the people around us. We willingly give up the little that is our lives in order to give others the basics of life and to demonstrate to them God’s steadfast love that accompanies us each day. Life is a miracle, a miracle that surprises us each day. Each morning we trust that the coming evening will provide rest after good work of the day, followed by another marvellous morning, or we will wake with God at home with Jesus and all the saints in light.

Not bad for our options, eh?!

Itchy Ears and God’s Truth

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Help Us

To Not Be Lost

In The Woods

Confused by the Devil’s Wiles and Smoke

That Obscures Your Light.

Psalm 119:43

Do not take the word of truth utterly out of my mouth, for my hope is in your ordinances.

2 Timothy 4:3-4

For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

Words of Grace For Today

The time is coming, or it has arrived already, when society will fail, because “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Of course this was said by Socrates who lived from 470 to 399 BC, more than just a few generations ago … and it has been true in many generations (among the privileged of the world) ever since.

The time is coming ….

In every generation about many and various failings of humans it is repeatedly said (as if it were said for the first time) For the time is coming when people will [and then fill in the sinful thing of humans since the beginning of time.]

Some people of all generations have always refused to put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they have accumulated for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and have turned away from listening to the truth and wandered away to myths.

The truth has always been knowable if one would humbly listen to God’s Word, provided to us in many and various ways, and most clearly in the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

The danger in life is that one not only refuses to acknowledge that disaster has been part of human history since forever, but one builds up habits of denying reality (when reality is something one does not want to deal with.) The danger of this refusal is that one chooses to remain ignorant about what history can teach us, and ignorant one acts stupidly and often dangerously for oneself and those effected by one’s actions (which can be those distant in place and in time!) The danger of denying reality when one does not want to deal with it is that one ‘allows the lion’ to consume one’s family and oneself, and more significantly, one loses the ability to see God’s reality: that God created everything and everyone, oneself included. With that one loses the ability to know anything real of God, and anything real about oneself. One is truly lost in the clutches of the Devil’s hell on earth.

One is then not only a danger to oneself, but to everyone!

So we pray: Do not take the word of truth utterly out of our mouths, for our hope is in your Word. Save us from seeking comfort for our itchy ears in myths and falsehoods. According to your promises to us, guide us and use us as vessels of your truth and grace which brings life to all people.

All by Grace …

Monday, August 16, 2021

No Matter

How Grand Our Accomplishments Appear to Us

They are Only Like Weeds

That Blossom When Watered and Given Sun

By God’s Good Grace

Psalm 115:1

Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness.

Romans 12:3

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

Words of Grace For Today

I woke to mow back the weeds and grass to keep down the mosquitoes and give fewer places for wasps to hide and surprise me when I’m out walking and working.

Do I get credit for putting in the sweat time, going back and forth across and up and down the hill? Why not? After all I was the one up before 6 am to be out before the hot sun heated the meadow and hillside to over 30⁰C when mowing risks heat stroke, swarming by black flies and an unwanted encounter with wasps.

George lived his whole live long working hard ‘in the trenches’, sometimes literally, for the city. He started out as a labourer and ended up a labourer who knew more about the infrastructure of the small city he lived in (especially what was where underground) than any other person alive. Others could access the plans and records. George had been there to install, upgrade or repair almost every bit of what lay underground. Even in his 70’s George was exceptionally strong, stronger than four or five men his size and he was not short at 5’11”.

Does George (like other hard manual labourers in the world) get the credit for a life of good, honest, hard work providing services to people who knew little of his work or how it provided them water, sewer, electricity and gas into their homes and business?

Sue raised two sons and two daughters in some of the roughest conditions possible, moving from the wilderness of northern Minnesota, to the heat of Arizona, to the wild temperate climate of a very rural part of Alaska sort of near Anchorage. Her children all married, became productive contributors to society, and had their own children. Sue travelled back to Minnesota to care for her elderly and aging mother, to her children spread across the west, and provided a home for her husband, most often with a gentle and firm honest kindness. Does Sue like so many mothers and fathers actively raising children get the credit for the goodness in her children and the kindness she provides to so many people?

The world would answer these questions of credit and say of course! Each person gets the credit for the good they do … and the bad they don’t do. And likewise those who do evil things get the discredit for their deeds. It is simple to measure a person’s goodness or evil by what they have accomplished.

This measure is not God’s, and God’s answer to who gets the credit for all these good things done over different lifetimes is not the person who lived the life. The credit goes to God and God alone for creating, forgiving, sanctifying (making holy, into saints), and renewing life in these people so that they would not be caught as prisoners of their own sins, instead they are freed to do good things in God’s creation.

For by the grace given to us we know that it is not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness.