Wednesday, October 6, 2021
God rends ice
as our hearts
and assembles us whole.
Joel 2:13
Rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
1 Thessalonians 5:9-10
For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.
Words of Grace For Today
Rending one’s clothing was a way of symbolically taking apart the life that had gone wrong, and allowing God to reassemble life in harmony with God’s will.
Like many of our religious practices we have reduced rending of clothing to a superficial act that really has no impact on our actual lives. So Joel calls people to not just rend their clothing, but to rend their hearts, and thereby to allow God to reassemble life to be in harmony with God’s will.
This simple act changes us at our foundations.
Jesus provides us God’s way forward for us: we rely solely on the Grace of Jesus the Christ, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live … and live with him.
Living by Grace alone we have no place for wrath.
We embody God’s Grace. As God is, so God makes us saints gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing. This is quite the life, in which rending our hearts is a small and yet complete act of love.