You say, ‘I am innocent; surely his anger has turned from me.’ Now I am bringing you to judgment for saying, ‘I have not sinned.’
1 Peter 1:13
Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed.
Words of Grace For Today
It is one thing to sin terribly. It is another degree of a thing to then claim that one has not sinned. That leaves one unable to redeem oneself.
Even then the only thing that saves us, that can save us, is what God has demonstrated through Jesus. Jesus’ story is clear and simple: God always has loved us, been ready to forgive us, and given us everything we need to know how God is always gracious towards us.
So our hope is set on Jesus Christ’ grace.
We are thus prepared for the action that the Holy Spirit calls us to do, namely living out grace for all other people.
It’s quite a life God has for us, and quite a life we have to offer others.
Let us lift up our hearts as well as our hands to God in heaven.
Ephesians 6:18
Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.
Words of Grace For Today
Lift up our hearts … as well as our hands … to God in heaven.
This will then enable us to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to choose, with each thing we do, to work like mad for all people in God’s good creation.
Otherwise we will inevitably work, heartlessly, and without pause, consuming all we can on our way, destroying everything in our wake.
Locusts come in hoards and work their little hearts out.
When they leave, they leave because there is nothing more to consume.
When they leave there is nothing left behind for anyone else.
When they leave the goodness of creation must be re-established by God’s healing work built in to nature … if it can.
This we do not want to be as a species, because when we try to move on there is really no place for us to move to
on God’s good creation of earth, our host planet.
Instead,
we pray with endless supplications
that we would work with our hands
as honey bees do.
They work at least as hard as locusts.
They work with the plants like the locusts do.
They work differently, instead of consuming and destroying and moving on …
They work for the benefit of all creation, helping plants to flower and produce food, for us all.
In their hives they create enough honey to sustain their hive’s next generations and
they create enough honey to provide for many others to feed from the sweet products of their tireless labours.
Locusts destroy and move on to destroy more.
Honey bees work in the eco-sytem and they stay in that eco-system (if we allow them to) to help it continue to provide for this generation and many to come.
So we pray endlessly with supplication and thanksgiving that God has provided our ability to work hard, and to work as honey bees, providing for this generation and for many generations of saints to come.
No Matter the Weeds Or Ice In Our Way, Christ’s Light Guides Us.
No Matter What Our Enemies Do
Or Take From Us,
No Matter the Wilderness They Abandon Us To
God Walks With Us
Lamentations 3:24
‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’
1 Peter 1:8-9
Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
Words of Grace For Today
So many things challenge us each day, sometime making our day’s progress the usual grind, sometimes throwing up road blocks that could put us in reverse to find a way around them, and sometimes they stop us in our tracks, dead halt.
Whether it’s our enemies trying to undo us, or someone using us as a stepping stone to get ahead, or questions about our own worth brought on by lies about us or our own real limitations or others’ unreal expectations, or it is our health that fails us … no matter what it is that challenges us we all experience them every day.
The only way to live life abundantly is to be able to know that the Lord is our portion and only in God we can hope.
When we fear and love God, when we believe and trust God’s promises to carry us, when we know that glorious joy from knowing God walks with us … then we can know as well that God is at work in us, having given us faith and sent us out to share all God’s gifts with all God’s people.
God is at work in us showing us that our portion is the Lord, and that we can trust and hope in God alone.
Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name.
John 14:6
Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’
Words of Grace For Today
No matter who we are, what history we have, how many sins we have piled up, and no matter how many times God has forgiven us and the Holy Spirit has inspired us to live as God’s saints spreading God’s unconditional and steadfast love to all people …
No matter what challenges we face in our past and in our present and in our future …
No matter anything, God’s Grace pours over us in abundance …
and we still know we need Jesus’ way, truth and life more and more for our hearts are divided between serving Christ and serving our own selfish needs, and so are our decisions each minute.
Decisions.
We make decisions every day, every minute.
We make decisions by engaging in various steps:
1. we asses what the situation is
2. we consider what choices we have
3. we discern what choice best serves our self interest
4. we make the decision by acting on it.
Recent modern thought is that step three is the most important. Thus the common assumption behind modern society brings us to serve our own, greedy, selfish interests, thinking that is the most important thing to do.
Philosophers and thinking people of all generations have long since realized that step one is actually the most important.
Who we are and what we think, how we view the world, is the most important step. Therein we determine what the ‘problem’ is, and that determines everything about what choices we come up with, choose and act on.
When we know that first and foremost when facing decisions our only hope to do something good for us and for other people is to consider everything from the perspetive that God gives us: that God created, we all are free to love (and therefore sin, that is to turn from who God created us to be), that God forgives us our sin and calls us back to ‘see the world’ (and our ‘problems’) as God’s gift to us including our own lives, and then …
then we have some hope of choosing what is in our best self interest, which is always then in the best interest of all people.
It all depends on us knowing God’s creation as God created it to be, and us in that creation as God saves us and inspires us to be: God’s saints.
So we pray: Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name! knowing that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.
Whether Buried by Snow or Standing in the Chilly Air.
So Also God Knows Every Last Minutia of Us,
And …
Psalm 63:7
You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.
1 Corinthians 13:12
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
Words of Grace For Today
It is a terrible thing to not be seen at all, to have others look right past you and never notice that you exist. It is a terrible thing to be reduced to a thing that can be manipulated and used, everything extracted from and then tossed out with the garbage (as has been done to me). It is a terrible thing to go asking for help from those certified and paid to help, and to be ignored, as if it were okay that one be left to die unnoticed (as the doctors, nurses, and staff have done to me with lies about what I supposedly did to justify their lies and abuse.) It is more horrendous to be the ones who abdicate their privilege and responsibility to provide help, to see and to work to heal. For by choosing to refuse help and care to those in need, they become instead of privileged, they become cursed by their own lies and hard hearts. While there is a cure for many diseases and ailments, and while God promises to heal us of every disease of our hearts, minds and strength; there is no cure for these kinds of lies and hard hearts, not without God intervening … but they refuse to hear God’s promises and they refuse to acknowledge their lies and hard hearts, and in so doing they refuse the only help that could save them, God’s Grace.
To be seen, to be helped, to help others, and to heal one another in body, mind and heart; this is what God created us for. This is a marvellous way to live; being saved and forgiven and healed by God so that we can be that same Grace for others.
It is a terrible thing to be silenced (as I have been), told you are someone you are not (as I have been) and told you have done things you did not do (as I have been). It is to be gaslit, and then silenced, to have your reality and voice stolen from you (as was done to me – by so many people including the courts – and most of the people who did this to me did not do it by accident or negligence or by error – they did it with eyes wide open intention). While it is horrendous for the person silenced, it is long term more devastating for the people who gaslight and silence others, for their reality is based on lies, a whole pack of lies, and they will never escape the horrors they create for themselves until they seek, find, and admit the truth of what they have done … and that is so unlikely to happen. Instead they create more and more lies, creating a bubble of completely falsehoods from the bottom, to the top, to all sides around them. They separate themselves from reality and reality is not for them, but against them in every way.
Those who are silenced know well what the Psalmist writes of ‘You have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy’ for God comes to help us, save us, and give us new life.
Those who gaslight and silence others cannot know God’s saving hand, can they! God reaches out to them, promises them forgiveness (as God does for all people), yet they refuse to acknowledge their lies and in refusing to recognize what they do they refuse God’s promises, help, forgiveness, and renewed life. What a waste of life!
To be heard: that is a precious thing. To be able to speak the truth and have people listen and respond: this is what God gave us eats, minds, and tongues for.
To be un-seen, and un-heard are terrible things.
To be seen and heard is precious and needed for life.
To be known … that is yet another infinite degree of precious, for it is beyond most people’s ability to know others well and even less so to know themselves. Paul describes this inability we share as ‘seeing dimly through a mirror’ and a very imperfect, misty mirror at that. But for another to know us, down to the last detail … and to love us in spite of it all … well that is something that only God can do.
And knowing that God promises to know us, all our past, present and future, the good, bad and the ugly about us, … and for God to promise to still forgive us, heal and renew us, and to send us out into the world to be that same forgiveness, healing, and renewing for others … well there is nothing so spectacular in all the universe and …
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.
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.
Will any teach God knowledge, seeing that he judges those that are on high?
Romans 12:16
Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Words of Grace For Today
The beginning of wisdom is the fear and love of the Lord.
The critical piece in fearing and loving God is that one has then identified one’s place in creation, in the universe, and among God’s people.
Some have said (and said rightly) that the original sin (the one that leads to all others, the first sin, the one portrayed in Eve and Adam eating the fruit of the forbidden tree and getting kicked out of the garden of paradise) is pride or arrogance, that is hubris. It is to place oneself incorrectly in creation and among God’s creatures. It is to place oneself above what one is not above. It is to claim one is wiser, purer, better, more powerful, etc., etc. than one actually is. It is to forget that one is God’s creature, and a miserable sinful one at that.
This misplacement of oneself is often borne of and supported by luxuries that one enjoys (that others cannot) leading one to think one has ‘earned them’ when they are only gifts given by God, and then abused as trophies reflecting one’s supposed station high above others. In fact one, with this false pretense of status, has actually placed oneself on the lowest rung of sinners, those that delude themselves with falsehoods about their own worth.
So we see that money corrupts, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The danger in being one to speak about these corrupting self-image sins is that one participates more fully in them; the only difference is that the ‘luxury’ that one touts as a marker of one’s ‘better status’ in creation is a supposed wisdom, one about other people’s sins. Wisdom about other’s sin and a blindness to one’s own sins is a powerful tool of the devil to win hearts and souls. With the goodness of God (wisdom in this case) claimed as one’s own, one has misplaced oneself in creation, supposedly better than all those miserable rich, powerful, famous sinners. In fact one actually marks oneself therewith as right in the pack of miserable sinners who think they are above others in God’s creation.
Ahh, what is one to do? Should one pretend to know nothing? Should one abandon one’s calling and consecration to bring God’s Word to all people? No, one simply need return to remembering that all people sin, oneself as well. That everyday is a sinners path for every person, oneself included. That only by Grace is one able to be a saint, a God-made saint. One humbly prays for forgiveness, trusts that it is given even before one asks, and proceed humbly through the day, as one of God’s lowly creatures, called to speak truth, even though one is at ‘the bottom of the cesspool of sinners’ on earth.
One will then have no trouble associating with the lowly, providing comfort to the lonely and distressed, aiding the helpless and hapless alike, freeing the prisoners, and acting for justice for all people … all in Jesus’ name. One lives filled with gratitude, giving God credit for anything good one is able to do, proclaiming from ‘the bottom of the cesspool of sinners’ on earth how great God is to bless such a miserable sinner as oneself, a sign that God does bless any and all who will receive the blessing even as they fear and love God from ‘the bottom of the cesspool of sinners’ on earth.
Who then will offer willingly, consecrating themselves today to the Lord?
2 Corinthians 9:7
Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
Words of Grace For Today
Arnold began life in poverty in a dictator run country, occupied by the Soviet Union, the son of a pastor, who served a number of small community parishes. That position came with a parsonage and large parcel of land. It was the pastor responsibility to provide care for all the people in the parish and to care for the land and the parsonage … and all the churches he served.
That meant that the ‘poverty’ that Arnold grew up with was relatively luxurious. He enjoyed running water and a toilet that flushed. Apartment complexes had toilets at one end of the building, the excrement falling in a large pipe from each floor to the bottom. There was no running water, just a high trafficked ‘outhouse’. Coal provided heat though it meant gathering it, carrying up the stairs, starting and stoking the fire for cooking, warmth and hot water. The smell of coal smoke was everywhere. Out in the country in the parsonage with it’s land the smell was barely noticed. Where many had not place to run and play, the parsonage land provided all sorts of places to play and find solitude with birds and animals the only noise to be heard.
In the world of adults, though, the secret service police recruited so many informants that one never knew who was watching and who would inform on you, even if it was not the truth. Arnold learned well from the secret police how to observe others and to make the best of their weaknesses for one’s own good.
Arnold lived his whole life vowing never to be one of the people others took advantage of. He would be the one to enjoy the best luxuries of life, whatever that cost other people around him.
Arnold was a ‘taker’ and a destroyer, an accomplished fabricator of lies to cover his own weaknesses and to destroy others who threatened him, most of all those who knew his weaknesses. Being a destroyer and a taker has it’s high cost … of guilt or psychotic oblivion to others or dread of being discovered. Arnold suffered terror jags every day, as most destroyers do knowing well that ‘what goes around eventually will come around.’ Hiding the truth costs more and more lies, until one cannot tell what is true anymore, not at all. The terror becomes inexplicable and inescapable.
Tina grew up a missionary kid in Africa, then in Minnesota. Her parents were medical missionaries, ones who brought caring and curing as the reality of Jesus’ old, old story in this world. Their actions spoke God’s love. They gave up lucrative careers in Minnesota to serve in Africa. When a tropical disease almost killed and fully disabled her mother, they returned to Minnesota to serve as medical ‘missionaries’ even there, giving all they had to provide care for many children and patients and people in the community.
Tina learned early that no matter what happened, the measure of life was certainly not money nor luxuries nor privileges enjoyed. The measure of a good life was in giving what one had. In all she did, she worked hard, listened to people, provided good words, assisted people further in their own lives, and never developed any idea that she had to acquire or possess or earn property, things, wealth, position, status or power. Serving was it’s own reward. Life would take care of itself, or rather God would provide what was needed in life.
Tina was a giver, a self-denier in order to provide for others. Tina enjoyed what she did, even when Arnold took her to the cleaners, ran her through the courts and into prison for crimes she had not committed, and left her destitute, so far in debt she would never be out of debt in this lifetime, barring a miracle of money. Even destitute Tina gave and gave and gave, even when all she had was a funny word, an encouraging word, or just a smile. Long ago Tina offered herself, being ordained as a pastor, dedicating her life to sharing the old, old story of Jesus and his love, not merely with words but also with actions of caring for all people and all creation.
These passages have long been used to encourage people to give generously to their congregation’s coffers to cover the costs of churches equal or greater in majesty than the wealthiest in their communities. Sometimes, well rarely, the pastor was compensated well. More likely the parish saw it as their duty to keep the pastor in poverty so that she or he would not sin with the evil’s of money, which really was the parishioners’ sins of greed and coveting the education of the pastor (well what used to be the good education of the pastors. Now that education of pastors is watered down to only the basics of learning how to do whatever will keep parishes alive, serving whatever passes for faith – which is more likely corrupt power. Forget any integrity in caring God’s Word or the traditions and heritage of the church alive in the parishes. So dishonest pastors flourish, corrupt parishes thrive, and the rest suffer. Nothing new for the Devil has always worked best in churches.)
These passages speak to a much more profound part of life. It is not the offering plate or the volunteering in the parish that is so crucial. These are of minor importance in God’s Kingdom. These passages address our attitude of being grateful for everything we are and have at our disposal – our gratitude for God providing all that is needed and more, our gratitude that when we were and are still wretched sinners, God chose and chooses to love and forgive and give renewed life and walk with us.
Giving to God flows freely and cannot be forced, or it corrupts those who force and those who give. It also corrupts those who try to force others and those who do not give, but take everything they can get from life.
The crucial matter is how we make up our minds to give what we give. Do we decide to give so that it makes up for the ‘taking’ we do in the rest of our lives? Are we like Arnold, takers and destroyers, giving only to cover up our greed, hatred of others, and our scrapping to have everything we can get? Or do we decide to give because God has given us everything? Are we like Tina, givers and bearers of Jesus’ love that brings life to others? Do we share, knowing that what we share never was ours anyway? It is all on loan from God for the purpose of sharing it with all other people, in Jesus’ name and as signs of God’s love for all people?
Choose we do, each time we make a decision: do we serve God or do we serve own ‘interests’?
Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
Whether we see others as ‘weeds’ in our lawn of life
God sees us each as precious and
God shines Light on each of us,
the light of love and life.
Isaiah 56:7
These I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Colossians 3:11
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!
Words of Grace For Today
We humans keep building walls, us and them.
God keeps telling us and showing us that God is for all people, without any us or them.
Christ is all and in all … and for all peoples!
…
Christ is even for me, and for you, sinners though we be, God has claimed us a God’s children and made us saints, able to share God’s light with all people …
without any ‘us’ or ‘them’
or
walls
or
judgments
or
condemnations,
…
…
just
Grace for all.
It’s a wonderful dance of love, this life is (at least as God intends for us, and makes possible for us to live it.)
Ready or not here it comes, one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time … one decision at a time.
Set a place for Elijah, keep an eye for the poor at your gate, invite in the homeless …
This is God’s day, and out day to give everything back to God, one decision in one minute at a time.
