I live as an alien in the land; do not hide your commandments from me.
Ephesians 5:15-16
Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil.
Words of Grace For Today
Wise words and free advice usually end in people trying to fool themselves they are good enough as they destory their neighbours and the aliens in their land: their contributions to the days being evil abound.
Words of free advice and wise words are like rules; whether most people admit it or not the human stance on rules is that they are good. Others ought to follow them all. Themselves are allowed all sorts of exceptions and ‘understandings’ and leaways so that all their bending and breaking of rules is acceptable.
The challenge in life is not really to know what one must not do and what one must do. The challenge in life is to have an attitude towards others and all creation that brings one to deal with it all wisely, as followers of Jesus, as faithful people, as good people, as those who live grateful for everything that is.
To inspire humans to live such lives requires more than admonishments, exhortations, and pithy wise words on how to live. The Word must reach deep in the heart and transform it from greedy to generous. That takes a miracle.
A miracle it is that only God can bring to be for each person.
Jesus’ story is that God does that for each person.
Take that to heart, no matter what the day brings.
Listen to me, my people, and give heed to me, my nation; for a teaching will go out from me, and my justice for a light to the peoples.
1 John 2:8
Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.
Words of Grace For Today
The daylight grows shorter each day, at this latitude markedly, as we are only 20 days from the winter solstice. When clouds and precipitation block the light during the few hours the sun is above the horizon the drear and darkness grows on us, as if the end of time were approaching though we trust that is not so. In these times the winter darkness teaches us well what we may or may not know so well from our own experience: that injustice of the nation is prevalent, here and now for so many people, and the injustice of the world order (or chaos as it really is) tears so many people from life, and even more from living a life respected as a full human being.
Then we read the promise that God will bring words of truth to bear on our world, that Christ’s Light shines already bright for all people. We read these words of promise and hope with eager hearts, though hardly more so than the billions who suffer the chaos of injustice worked for the privilege, comfort, and power of the few.
When people recognize the Light of Christ, the world chaos can but fail as Christ’s way replaces human greed.
For this day we wait, for freedom from darkness, for freedom from blatant injustice, for freedom from all evil, and for freedom to serve Christ fully, without reserve, with our whole hearts, minds and strength. For this day we wait. On that day we will celebrate the coming of Christ as we have not ever yet.
This is the advent of awareness: that Christ has come, is come, and will come again, to bring into the light all that is done now as if in darkness, all that is done to throw others as captives into darkness, all that is done to supposedly ‘set things right’ when the actions are more unjust than those they pretend to correct.
This our advent. Advent as we prepare to celebrate Christ’s coming, again.
Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love.
Luke 12:25
Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?
Words of Grace For Today
On the coin of money is inscribed ‘In God We Trust.’
This is one of the more blatant and dreadful ironies of our lives: the world seeks coin to enable the collection of resources (through payment with the coin) and to ensure the bidding of the holder is done by others (through payment with the coin).
Those of us who cannot or do not have enough coin, worry about our futures: can we keep at bay the despair of hunger, the life-ending extremes of the environment, the decay of life without good medical care, or the loss of sanity as we are isolated (as an easy target for our enemies and separated from the social fabric of life.)
This worry motivates us to work, and to work hard, to ensure some kind of safety in our future, some kind of food supply in our days to come, some kind of health care so that what ails us can be discovered, diagnosed and treated, some healthy connection with other humans who do not wish us harm. Our worry itself does nothing. It adds not even a minute to the span of our lives. What we do to work through our worry may or may not succeed in providing life and life abundant for us.
Life in all its great goodness that God created us to enjoy does not require any of this that we can work for, though. Life abundant requires only one thing and that is God’s steadfast love.
God’s steadfast love moves us from worrying.
God’s steadfast love moves us from worrying about ourselves.
God’s steadfast love moves us from worrying about ourselves to working to be God’s love for others.
God’s steadfast love moves us from worrying about ourselves and on to knowing that we are marked with the cross of Christ, which does not just mark us like coins with the greatest irony of all times. The mark on us changes us from the root of our being to the last days we live in God’s good creation: we become God-made saints.
When our enemies or our shortcomings or the lack of things we require to stay alive threaten our future we can pray: Let your face shine upon your servants; save us in your steadfast love.
Like the sun rising for a new day, sparkling, dazzling in a field of snow, God renews Christ’s light in us, and we shine, and we sparkle, and we transform the world from misery to happiness, from despair to joy, from hunger to nourished … from lost to found.
no matter the tangles of life the intrude on our days
Therefore We are Able to Be God’s Blessings for Others
Deuteronomy 28:1-6
If you will only obey the Lord your God, by diligently observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth; all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the Lord your God:
Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field.
Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your livestock, both the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock.
Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading-bowl.
Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out.
Matthew 12:50
For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.
Words of Grace For Today
Both passages say clearly enough that it is all up to us: if we do the right things, if we obey all God’s commandments, if we do God’s will, then
then we will be blessed in all ways,
then we will be Jesus’ brother, sister or mother.
That certainly is how the world works and how religious authorities have parsed God’s blessings in their attempts to control their followers.
God is not so parsed, not correctly anyway.
God’s blessings are not so parsed, not correctly anyway.
Jesus’ brothers and sisters and mother are not so determined, not correctly anyway.
But this is the way of the world, and it is our self-centred, familiar, assuring and futile way of working God’s will in our world.
Trouble is, it’s not us that works God’s will and this is God’s world.
God’s way, clearly demonstrated in the story of Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection, is that God blesses us, and we either can surrender to that, or work our way out of the blessings by going our own way. Even then God pursues us, relentlessly, promising to forgive us, give us re-newed lives, and send us out again to be God’s blessings for others.
God’s blessings are not tied to how powerful, wealthy, or famous we are. God’s blessings are contained in the God given ability to be able to love, and love completely and unconditionally. For is love, starting with fear and love for God, and then love for ourselves, our neighbours and our enemies … in love we find life, life’s meaning and purpose and a joy that cannot be marred by circumstances, no matter how bad they may be.
The joy that God gives us is familiar to most people. It is like living life being in love. Some know it as a teenager’s 1st love, or as a young adult knowing this is the one person to marry, or as holding your new born infant, or as guiding children as they grow up, or as playing with grandchildren, or as growing old together and sharing memories as you deal with new challenges.
Most all of us experience that being in love, and loving others, gives us a profound joy.
Being in love with God, fearing and loving God, gives us an even more profound joy. All our times of being in love come to an end. Some endings leave us lost, as if the pathways and walls of life itself have crumbled out from under us.
Being in love and fearing God is markedly different because that love never comes to an end since it is determined not by our capacity to love, but by God’s promises to love us always. God loves us always, no matter the twists and turns we take in life. Trusting that God loves us gives a pervasive joy, a foundational joy.
Today we pray, may we live fearing and loving God as God loves us. May we be God’s love for all other people, so that we do not forget how precious God’s love is.
Let your steadfast love become my comfort according to your promise to your servant.
Luke 2:25
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him.
Words of Grace For Today
Waiting.
Waiting for an event that is so much more than just another everyday occurrence.
Waiting for an event that is so much more than the greatest thing in one’s life.
Waiting for …
Waiting for God to break into the life of humans, and make a statement so clear about God’s love that it will shake all the foundations that humans build on, for everything that humans build.
Waiting for God to reveal how God relates to us, in our broken, sinful, destructive lives, which we seem incapable of setting right.
We wait.
We wait again this Advent.
We wait again this Advent for the celebration of our Saviour’s birth.
We wait.
Yet there is no way that we can wait idly for this celebration, just ticking off the days, eating the chocolates out of the advent calendar, and hoping that this celebration will bring life to us again, renewed life, and God’s favour … after all that we do as humans to one another.
We wait for our enemies to be converted to reasonable, truth abiding, honourable humans once again, if they ever were such people.
We wait … and the Holy Spirit works in us, helping us to see …
Helping us to see beyond the portents of this time, as storms increase in magnitude month by month, as temperatures rise so that glaciers recede at record rates, and so that ice caps melt and ocean levels rise covering islands and seashore cities, as wildfires burn away forests protecting mountainsides and rivers, as earthquakes increase, as droughts grip whole agricultural areas leaving farmers with no crops to sell and people without food to eat, and as rainstorms pour water in record amounts on dry and vulnerable areas flooding homes, roads, and whole cities, and whole mountainsides give way to mudslides that block off roadways halting transport of goods in its tracks, leaving retailers shelves thin, and Christmas wishes changed from a special gift to a wish that our lives and the lives of our loved ones will be preserved.
Helping us to hear beyond the news of these disasters and the ever- mutating and more dangerous variants of Covid spreading to our areas.
Helping us to trust …
Helping us to trust God’s promise that God’s steadfast love will be our comfort …
a comfort like no other.
Thus comforted we are able to reach out to save many people, people we know, people we do not know and people who are our enemies …
saving people from disaster with needed, real-time help,
saving people from the wiles of the Great Deceiver with needed, real-time love and hope.
Helping others to trust God’s promise that God’s steadfast love will be their comfort …
Wondrously show your steadfast love, O Saviour of those who seek refuge from their adversaries at your right hand.
1 Thessalonians 5:23
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
The movie Blood Diamonds, the story of Solomon Vandy, ends with a simple lesson: let us applaud those who live to tell the truth … in a world where lies reign over so many hearts, where greed drives people to perversions that move them beyond love, hope and life.
There is, as histories told, and truth written in literature and scientific studies bears witness, no end to the people who would destroy others in a vain attempt to get ahead. Ahead of what is not important other than to those who sacrifice their lives to those insignificant markers of gain, which is gain that so easily disappears, which gain eats at the hearts of those seeking it until they have no heart to love, hope or live left. Then live, a shells of humans, that only destroy and accumulate … and do not die soon enough.
For those who live as we do to tell the truth, we pray Wondrously show your steadfast love, O Saviour to those who seek refuge from their adversaries at your right hand. For to live to tell the truth is to seek refuge in God’s hands.
The temptations are so great, to stoop to the level of those who use lies and destruction to accumulate their gain; gain that provides power, pseudo-security, comforts, and hedonistic excesses as it gulps down their hearts, minds, and strength. The temptations are great, for who would not want just a bit more control, security, comfort, and pleasure in life. Resistance is exactly like that to the Borg, it is said to be futile, until one calls on the one source of power that can save one from such temptations: God’s own blessings. Therefore …
Each day, each hour, we pray: May the God of peace himself sanctify us entirely; and may our spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We also pray that God would save our enemies, so that their perverse and relentless need to destroy us and the truth would cease, and so that they could learn to love, hope, and live again.
I will heal their disloyalty; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.
John 21:3-4
Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.
Words of Grace For Today
When our efforts come up empty, failed, and we are about to go hungry …
When we have turned from God, served other gods, and ourselves as godlets, chased after futile dreams, and knowingly made deals with the Devil to achieve our selfish goals (even those we see as ‘trickling down’ benefits to others!) …
When we have known God’s Grace, lost sight of God walking with us, and turned back to our old self-sustaining, self-serving, self-centred ways …
What is a person to do after all, when God disappears on us, when the promises God makes are slow in being fulfilled, when enemies are knocking at our doors, or have us in custody already, or are in our heads and hearts creating intolerable anxiety? Should we not head out on our own in this beautiful, wonderful creation to make our own way, to provide for ourselves reaping bountiful rewards for our own efforts, enabling ourselves to escape the daily struggles to survive, to enjoy the comforts and luxuries we’ve earned (at others’ expense, even at the expense of other’s lives, even those who loved us!), and to gain status among the people?
When we return to our selfish, self-centred ways, we turn our back on God, God’s promises, and the Grace that saves us from our own sin giving us renewed life at Jesus’ expense. We ask, as if to justify what we know is wrong, what is a person to do? Surely we can be our own godlets, determine our own lives, and make a future for ourselves and our offspring for generations to come.
Then the cost for our selfish, self-centred ways becomes apparent and no denial of the cost is believable by any sane person any more. Nature rebels, angrily kicking up more and more extreme storms, fires, floods, eruptions, and mudslides. Our self-made security dissolves before our eyes, and often our loved ones, our offspring, with it.
How does God react to our rebellious, self-centred, selfish, destructive ways?
God is faithful.
God is faithful to God’s promises.
God is faithful to God’s promises and God heals our every illness.
God is faithful to God’s promises and God stands at the edge of un-creation that could easily consume us, or from which we could gather live-sustaining food for so many bodies, minds, and hearts.
God heals us, and guides us to fish the bounty of God’s blessings for all that we require to live and to live truly abundantly (not over-consuming luxuries while others starve, not resting in comfort when their is Christ’ work for us to do, nor building our hopeless securities that always fail falling around our ears.)
God does not disappear on us, ever. Our vision fails to see God when we turn in on ourselves and forget to see Christ in every person we meet.
God does not disappear on us, ever.
As God promises us, God does not disappear on us, ever.
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.
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.
