Christ reconciles us to God, no sacrifice required!
We have a blemish free record, no matter how many ‘gloves’ we’ve lost.
Isaiah 43:24-25
You have not bought me sweet cane with money, or satisfied me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins; you have wearied me with your iniquities. I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.
Colossians 1:21-22
You who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.
Words of Grace For Today
The sacrifices made to God have changed through the centuries and generations. Once we offered birds, animals, and before that other people, even children. We knew that, having done something wrong, having sinned, we owed God payment for our sins.
When we know we have sinned our minds recognize how estranged we’ve made ourselves from God. Knowing what we’ve done we become hostile to God as well.
We ‘dig our own grave’. Yet God does not leave us there.
No sacrifice by us is sufficient to pay for what we have done, and continue to do, and will do. God knew this, knows this. God sent Jesus, his Son, to sacrifice himself, the one last sacrifice needed to set things right between us and God, between all humans and God.
Nothing is needed on our part.
Now since God sets us right with God, holy and blameless … well the possibilities are astronomical, and wondrous.
Jesus calls us and the Holy Spirit equips us to be the voice, hands, and feet of Christ on earth, extending unconditional love to others, providing justice based on truth combined with mercy and wisdom, and blessing all people with more than just the basics of life. As the Holy Spirit equips us we can offer others abundant life. That may require sacrifice on our part, yet all we have is given to us, so it is not really ours to give up, it is ours to share with everyone.
Makes for a wondrous life for us, and for all people.
Hannah prayed and said, ‘My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in my victory.
Luke 1:46-48
Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.
Words of Grace For Today
It would be more comfortable for us, if Hannah’s prayer ended before she says her mouth derides her enemies. Not that we do not understand her prayer. We just wish it would not be ours, or recorded as prayed often by the saints in light.
But that is sin, and we cannot deny it.
For exactly this moment Jesus came to command us to love our enemies, so that we would recognize the sin in Hannah’s prayer, and in our prayers. It is sinful to wish that we ‘win’ at the cost of others, enemies or not.
It is a sad fact of human existence that too often in order to survive we must be victorious over our enemies. Even then Jesus’ example is that our victory is no victory if we are not gracious with our enemies, as God is gracious with us. We need must remember our place. We are desperate sinful wretches, no better than slave traders and mass murderers, for our thoughts would have disastrous results for so many people, were they to become reality just in the wishing.
In the middle of a prayer/wish like Hannah’s we recall Mary’s Magnificat: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
We pause in our sinful prayer/wish we remember our own lowly position, and with humble gratitude we recall how much favour God has poured over us!
God helps us remember Mary, the saint, who for generations we have called blessed, for though being Jesus’ mother put her life often in danger more often in pain … and she watched him unjustly suffer crucifixion at the hands of the priests and the soldiers.
Enemies. They are our collective misunderstanding of God’s Grace and purpose for us all.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Mark 14:3-6
While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her. But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me.
Words of Grace For Today
Waste.
When one has too much, wasting things is easy, and commonplace. Oil companies flowed with money as oil sold for over $90 a barrel, and office chairs with one broken, easily replaced, caster were thrown out and a new $450 chair replaced the not-broken-but-needing-simple-repair chair.
God blesses us with God’s abundance. God has plenty. We sit with our enemies at God’s table prepared for us where God’s oil marks us as holy and God’s Grace flows over us. Our elegant or plain glass, or any vessel or receptacle we could bring cannot contain God’s generosity. God ‘wastes’ Grace on us, on all of us, even on our enemies! There is so much, so much that one need not worry about what spills over. What we still hold in our vessels Jesus shows us by example is not to be hoarded or held tight. We can empty everything we have and are; and God will always fill us back up full and overflowing with Grace.
An the unnamed woman comes to anoint Jesus with her expensive ointment, though the disciples would have the money instead of the wondrous aroma giving Jesus the honour of being cleansed with such gloriously expensive suave. So they scold the woman and try to shame her for her generosity.
Jesus knows all about God’s unending generosity, and our ability to live without limit to our generosity. Jesus calls his disciples to stop their derision of the woman and to accept that he is so honoured.
How often we claim God’s generous Grace all for ourselves and use it as a club against others! Still God comes and remains faithful and generous and gracious with us.
God hopes we just might catch on. Life is not a zero sum game. It is, when we sacrifice for one another, unlimited in it’s blessings for all.
What a life God calls us to recognize is ours, all of ours!
Those of low estate are but a breath, those of high estate are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath.
1 John 5:14
This is the boldness we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.
Words of Grace For Today
The thin veneer of civilization provides some, the privileged few, the illusion that they deserve and have earned a better life than the majority of other humans.
This is a delusion. A very powerfully destructive and persistent delusion.
Most humans alive today, and most who have ever lived, have lived in conditions we in Canada would define as abject poverty. In them God has invested the breath, the wind, the fire of the Holy Spirit. This holy Ruach gives each of us life. Without it we remain dust.
Those of us who have not, through delusions and veneer, forgotten who God is and who we are in God’s creation, can live with a boldness, extending ourselves every hour even beyond our apparent limits to empathize with, love unconditionally, and care for all other humans around us.
We can also boldly face all the uncertainties of each hour and every future day, knowing that we can ask for what we need from Jesus, who gave his life that we might be rescued from our sins. We can boldly trust that Jesus listens to our pleas, and provides all we need to continue to empathize with, love unconditionally, and care for all other humans around this whole earth.
From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
Words of Grace For Today
Breathe.
Drink.
Eat.
Work.
Love.
God has blessed us immensely, if we can do this.
God has blessed you immensely, if you can do these.
A person does not have to think they have committed any terrible sin to know they need God’s Grace just to make it through the day.
Everyone, in many ways, turns from God each day.
To breathe the Holy Spirit, to drink the living water, to eat the bread of life, to work in the Kingdom of God, and to be able to love unconditionally, first one needs be forgiven and redeemed, ransomed and rescued, blessed and kept safe from all Evil.
It is truth that many people live, constantly fighting their way free from God’s Grace, to insist, though their sins are many and destructive, that they need no Grace. These people are to be pitied, prayed for, and kept at a great distance as much as one can. When one needs must deal with them, then Grace upon Grace is required, for destruction follows in their wake, yet God’s Grace overflows from ours. To keep their destruction from overwhelming us, we needs must be the conduit of God’s Grace spilling over them.
It’s immensely difficult to face the corrupt destructive intent of an evil possessed person and not want that God would eradicate them from all existence. Yet ours is to be the conduit of God’s Grace. God brings God’s wrath in God’s own time.
Since from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace we pray for one another, the Lord bless you and keep you, safe from all Evil.
The king said to Daniel, ‘Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery!’
Philippians 2:10
He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.
Words of Grace For Today
What is it that God created us able to accomplish and control?
Everyday life presents us with constant reminders how little of our lives we control. An invisible virus mutates from a previous one, jumps to humans, and spreads around the world. We cannot stop it, so limits and restrictions are placed on how we live and move. It’s a pandemic lock down. Everything needed to stop the pandemic in it’s tracks is known or at least estimated. Yet no one has enough control over others to make those extreme measures happen. It takes only a few people to refuse to comply before extreme measures are wholly ineffective. So authorities implement strict (but not extreme) measures not to stop the virus, but to ‘flatten the curve’, to limit the number of people who have it at one time. That so that health care services are not over taxed, and/or the bodies do not pile up faster than they can be buried (depending where in the world the authorities are.)
Some strict efforts are effective, despite the constant refusal by these people, those people, and oh, those other people, who somehow think they are exceptions. Somehow they think that they do not need to keep distances, or they do not need to stay home when healthy or sick, and their gathering must go ahead, limits be damned.
So the numbers known to be currently infected continues to fluctuate, up and down. Always in the background everyone knows that the count can escalate quickly out of control … as it has in many places around the globe … and the death count escalates out of control as well. Lately 20-40 year-olds have a great increase in infection. They get minor symptoms mostly, and they spread it to the more vulnerable among who the severely and permanently affected numbers climb, as do the deaths.
Survival of the fittest? The natural course of events? Culling of the herd? All this is spoken as if to excuse the hubris and lack of empathy necessary to see the pandemic this way. It takes just one small mutation and those 20-40 year-olds will be the ones dying in droves.
There are many great mysteries in this world, and we encounter plenty of them up close and personal in our short lives on earth. Though the spread of Covid 19 and how people intentionally make that happen is no mystery.
The real wonders fill the universe in all time and space. God reveals them to us many times each day … if we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts and minds to understand.
One great revelation of mystery comes with Jesus’ life. What was a mystery before is how God works and intends us to live and work and play. Jesus is most powerful and influential demonstrates that for us to see by humbling himself. Jesus does not ‘know his place’ as superior to all others. His is God’s place, above all in every way. Yet God sends Jesus to humble himself, to submit himself to the torturous power and destruction of Evil, in order that we humans may understand (at least a tiny bit) for what God created us.
It is not to ensure that we are the ‘fittest’ and that we survive while others die.
God created us to face the unknowns of life, sacrificing ourselves so that others can have life and have it abundantly. Humble sacrifice is Jesus’ Way which we are called to imitate.
Having received life by Jesus’ sacrifice, we praise him for who he is: God, above all else.
Our tomorrows remain as unknowable as the mysteries of our todays. Yet we are secure in God’s hands, secure as no other effort or perspective or … anything.
So we are able to comply with the pandemic restrictions, remind others to keep complying even when people are fed up with them, and we work to save everyone without excuse … for we are all in this together.
Humbly complying with restrictions and ‘standing together’ for each person, we may survive. But if we all proudly ‘stand alone’ in our failing to comply with the restrictions asked of us, then more of us will surely fall.
Choose, deadly pride or life giving humility. Sometimes life’s choices are clear and possible for us to make.
You are wearied with your many consultations; let those who study the heavens stand up and save you, those who gaze at the stars and at each new moon predict what shall befall you.
Matthew 18:1-3
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.‘
Words of Grace For Today
We humans tend to get agitated by the trouble that may befall us tomorrow.
We go to all sorts of lengths to try to secure our tomorrows. All that is in vain. There really is nothing that can secure our tomorrows, not wealth, nor power, nor status, nor anything under the sun, not even education or integrity.
In Isaiah’s day, and still today, people look to the stars and moon to predict their tomorrows. This also is a futile effort.
Jesus points to the way of his followers. We are to become like children. We trust like children the Word of God. We hope like children for our tomorrows.
We are able to celebrate today and tomorrow, as children, in the moment.
For God promises we have everything we need to live abundantly and blessedly.
Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offences.
John 13:35
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’
Words of Grace For Today
See yesterday’s Words of Grace: love is God’s attitude toward us. Jesus’ record replaces ours and God sees us, just as we are, with Jesus’ unblemished record in place of ours. Wonders upon wonders is God’s love for us, all of us.
Our response to such wonders can be to choose to imitate Jesus’ sacrifice for each other, and for the strangers, among us and around the globe. That love is remarkable. It is rare. It is denounced. It is maligned.
All because it is feared, for it changes everything. It unseats power and wealth and privilege.
It establishes new order, God’s order, and old order. An order not based on greed or competition, but rather built on empathy and care for each other, and all others.
Hate is the opposite of love. Hate is a piece of death that grows and consumes us.
Love is a mystery.
Love is no mystery.
Love is unfathomable.
Love is doing the simple, caring things.
Love is doing and paying the cost for the most expensive thing: forgiveness.
Love covers all offences.
Love is life.
Love is the mysterious sub atomic string/wave/particle that holds the universe together, that gives life, and that gives life meaning.
Now if I have found favour in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favour in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.
2 Thessalonians 2:14
For this purpose he called you through our proclamation of the good news, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
It is easy to have silly hopes … and it is foolish to live one’s life built on those silly hopes.
One can, for example, hope that (contrary to all experience past and reasonable expectation for the future) that one will have a [fill in your desired, unreachable thing, like a ‘private lake’]. It is all silliness, hoping to possess things. It is foolish then to build one’s life so that one can finally buy a boat, and then store it away for the day that you can make it’s maiden voyage on your ‘private lake.’
To have hope that inspires the best of life into one and drives one to live the best and that draws from one better than one can imagine … to have that kind of hope one cannot foolishly build one’s life based on silly hopes. One needs to understand profoundly what is before one in the present, what is behind us in the past, and what lies ahead for us in the future.
Moses, wise as he was, is not always written about as if he were so wise. He asks of God, who has just told him that God favours Moses, that Moses will be able to live knowing God’s ways (in Hebrew this knowing is also to be intricately wound up in, to be active in the doing of God’s ways). And to what end does Moses make this request? To find God’s favour.
Yet, God’s favour is already pronounced by God! Moses is making a circular request.
This is us, all too often. God saves, loves us, favours us, and tells us so. We respond by asking that if God loves us and favours us we may know how to earn God’s love and favour!
We all too often want not to be in God’s debt, but we want to know ourselves, and be seen by others, to have earned all that God has gifted us! So Moses is written about as if Moses did not accept God’s favour, but wanted to earn it. Indeed, Moses wanted others to see without a doubt that God favoured Moses. It was required for his and his people’s survival.
There is so much more going on than a silly wish, to earn God’s favour. We can learn if we see.
The second passage also contains something to see. Paul writes to the Thessalonians that his proclamation of Jesus the Christ to them is to bring them Jesus Christ’ Glory.
Christ’s Glory is not something that many people would seek: it involves betrayal by one’s friend, a false conviction, a torturous cross, and death. Only then does it come to anything like what we might expect as Glory.
But Glory, God’s kind of Glory it is. It is that God brings us to life abundant through our being betrayed, being falsely convicted and our bearing our own crosses, which indeed kill us. Then we can start to understand the sacrifice for others lives that Jesus accepted, that Jesus calls us to accept.
On this cross, on this glory, we can hope that God will show us how to live the abundant life … not so that we can earn God’s favour. Rather we ask that God will show us how to live the abundant life that does not require things at all. Rather we ask that God will show us how to live the abundant life as our response to trusting that God saves us, loves us (unconditionally), and favours us.
Knowing this love, trusting this love, we are able to answer Christ’ call to sacrifice our selves, even our lives, so that others may have life, and have it abundantly.
That’s Glory. That’s Grace. That is us as Jesus’ humble followers.
For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures for ever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
Titus 3:4-5
But when the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.
Words of Grace For Today
We try so hard. In life we try so hard to make life turn out our own way.
God moved with love to save us. God did not wait for us to do what is right. God jumps right into the middle of all our plans and rescues us from our wretched sins, sets us back into good life, and calls us to be the instruments of Grace for others.
Amazing Grace. You know the story most likely of John Newton, ships’ captain who loaded slaves in Africa and delivered them into the New World. God reached out and touched his heart. He gave up slave trading and became a pastor. He penned the hymn, Amazing Grace, as an expression of profound and utter thanks for what God had done for him, saving himself from his life of sin, carrying for profit people carried as cargo with little care for their survival or decency or that they are humans.
There are many ways in every age that we treat other people cruelly, demeaning them, as less than human; all to think that somehow we are better than others. Ahh, the sin in it, which destroys our victims, so many bystanders, and even ourselves.
We may Gaslight, scapegoat, and falsely convict others, not once, but over and over again. Even then God reaches out to us and offers us new life, life renewed, life based on truth, and dependent on God’s goodness, loving-kindness, mercy, steadfast love, and faithfulness – for generation upon generation.
From our wretched existence God rescues us.
God loves us unconditionally, when we deserve nothing, not even the breath we breathe.
If we are fortunate, we will have time in life to learn to share God’s goodness, loving-kindness, mercy, steadfast love, and faithfulness with all people in for our generation.
