So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being. Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the Lord your God, including the earth with all that is in it, yet the Lord set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples, as it is today.
Revelation 14:7
He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.’
Words of Grace For Today
What God has done for us!
What God has done for us is beyond comprehension!
What God has done for us is wondrous!
God has chosen us!
The hubristic human take is always God has chosen us instead of others, or chosen to favour us more than others.
God has chosen us, all of us!
God has chosen us, setting God’s heart in love on all of us!
What can we do in response to the love that makes life possible, and sustains it for us no matter what comes our way?!
We can return God’s love with our love for God, and for God’s peoples!
That love starts with the fear, love and trust of God.
From there it is rather simple to know what God wants of us and profoundly difficult to do it day after day.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Colossians 2:2-3
I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Words of Grace For Today
Here we find God’s truth. God is all powerful and to be feared more than anyone or anything else!
Without that fear there is no path to find knowledge, wisdom, truth. Without fear of God all our efforts will be bent, perverted, and misguided. Without fear of God our paths begin on a foundation that will shift and disappear out from underneath us.
Fear will not do it alone. The pseudo Paul who wrote Colossians (a disciple of Paul most likely) got this right. We need our hearts and minds encouraged and built up, united in love. With fear of God but without the love of God (bringing us to love God, all people, and all creation) we walk a dismal path where understanding is only partial, and that part is treacherous. Love brings us to understand life as God intends us to live it. Love enables us to move beyond understanding to contributing to God’s work in this world among us here and now.
The fear and love of God brings us to trust God with everything we are and have and can do. We begin to get glimpses of God’s mystery revealed in Jesus, the Christ.
We begin to live a life guided by true wisdom, a gift of the Holy Spirit for us at our baptisms.
That life is not a life of comfort. It is not a life of ease. It is not a life of capitulation to evil, or evil forces, or evil in others directed at us, or even to evil in ourselves.
This life is a difficult, seemingly chaotic (though by the Spirit very ordered), seemingly risky path that winds hither and yon. This is a life that gets us in to trouble, good trouble, trouble for Christ, trouble for the children, for the outcasts, for the poor, and for the condemned.
This is life, wisely lived life, life abundant, life blessed, and the life that God intends for us.
What are you waiting for?
The Son of God to come and give you directions, to die for you, and to be risen back to life thus conquering death and all evil for us?
He subdues the ancient gods, shatters the forces of old; he drove out the enemy before you, and said, ‘Destroy!’
Luke 1:50
His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
Words of Grace For Today
Lord have mercy on us!
The people, led by Joshua, move across the Jordan into the Promised Land. They are going to take it, occupy it, and claim it as their God given right. They have something of a claim to some of the land, for this is where Abraham and Sarah raised first Ishmael and then Isaac, and their grandchildren, Jacob and Esau, and after them the great grandchildren including Joseph. The 2nd generation of those who ran from Pharaoh’s slavery to be delivered into the Wilderness are all there is left, for those that were delivered from Pharaoh’s chariots and army through the Red Sea, turned against God at Sinai, made a godlet, an idol of their own gold in the form of a calf, and worshipped it.
Now, the story is told that God has subdued the ancient gods, shattered the forces of old, driven out the enemy before them and called on them to ‘Destroy.’
For the Love of God, how can we mess up God’s story for us so badly.
And then Luke continues in the same vein, for it is not a seldom embraced idea that somehow ‘we’ are good or at least ‘chosen’ and ‘blessed by God’ and they (or all others) are bad and not chosen and not blessed, and here as it reads are destroyed.
First off we ought to notice with open minds that the ancient gods are not subdued. They and their supports in force have risen up in the form of ‘new age’ religions.
Second off we ought to notice that God has not driven off the enemy before us. The enemy is still here, doing great damage to so many people. Further, the greatest enemy is not those that work against us; it is ourselves working against God who give power to evil from others and from within ourselves. We end up worshipping that ‘golden calf’ of our own making from our own ‘gold’. We turn from God as fast and thoroughly as any of God’s people ever have!
Third off we ought to notice that humans have used God as an excuse to ‘destroy’ since the beginning of time. The story of Jesus, the old, old story of Jesus and God’s love does not include destroying our enemies. It teaches us that we, like God does for us and all people, are called to love, forgive, and hope that God can save our enemies, as God has saved us.
Lastly we ought to notice that God’s mercy, in so much of Jesus’ story this is made blatantly obvious, extends not to just a chosen few, not to just those who fear and trust God, but to all people, even our worst enemies! God’s mercy extends to all people, from generation to generation.
Those who God has saved, as we are, received abundant life. That is not a life of comfort and abundance. It is life lived, no matter our circumstances, blessed with God’s truth, with God’s Promise, and with the call to extend Grace and life abundant to as many people as we possibly can in our ‘3 score, ten’ that we breathe.
Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.
Luke 17:21
Nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.
Words of Grace For Today
As the slings and arrows fly at us, we are desperate for God to save us, not only from the things piercing the air so near us, some not passing us by. We need to be saved from ourselves. One only needs to recognize how we have dealt with the beauty of creation around, in and among us to know that we really do screw things up good. Or bad as it were.
So we require God’s salvation, and we cry ‘Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love,’for it is not on our own merit that we can possibly hope God will redeem us. We need God’s grace provided to us; we are solely dependent on God’s steadfast love as the reason God would save us.
So God provides all we need.
Further we need not look. We need not seek somewhere else. For the kingdom of God is here among us!
Great that it is, a life dependent on God’s Grace, on God’s steadfast love only.
…
until we collectively and individually screw it up so royally again and the slings and arrows of others’ misplaced anger start piercing the air around and toward us.
So we cry to God to save us
…
again and again we repeat this, and God, for the sake only of God’s steadfast love, continues to save us.
Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.
1 John 5:15
If we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have obtained the requests made of him.
Words of Grace For Today
There are so many choices we must make each day or make by trying to not make the choices; they catch us no matter.
The wiser we get, hopefully before we get too old, the more we notice how little we know of everything we need to know. We see how desperately we need help.
So we learn to plead to God for help: lead us in your truth, and teach us.
Where else are we to ask for what we need?
Where else in this world of corruption from top to bottom are we to find truth, about us, about others, and about God?
We know when we ask God, God will provide what we need.
This is God’s promise, which we can trust.
There is no more we need from life than what God provides, for it give us everything worth waiting for; God’s truth that is irrefutable.
Trusting God’s truth gives us life in the face of so many lies about ourselves, about others, about what God is and is not.
Trusting God’s truth gives us life, life abundant.
The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.
Luke 12:22-24
Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!’
Words of Grace For Today
I am not sure about this:
You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.
We humans have a way of ‘desiring’ so much more no matter how much we have.
Further the birds, bees, and beasts, and not to forget the fish, struggle under the effects of our ‘possessing the land’, ‘dominating it’, and destroying ecosystems that have taken millions of years to establish!
So?
The truth is God created the world quite capable of sustaining all the life created on it, satisfying the desire of every living thing. God promises to provide for the needs those desires are given to life of all kinds, in order that all life can continue on God’s good earth.
That includes our desires that God gave us so that we could continue to live among all the life on this planet.
How did we screw it up so badly!?!
Well, God loved us, wanted us to be able to love, which means we need to be able to choose to love or not, and …
Well so much of the time we humans have chosen, do choose, and forever will choose to do other than love! Youch, what a price!
We are destroying what provides us the ability to live on earth! It’ll take us maybe 100 or so, maybe only 25 or 5 years, to unmake the earth capable of sustaining life, something God created in 6 days, or millions of years measured in our time.
What power we have … to destroy!
And what power we have, as well, to love, when we so choose. Choosing to love is possible, for any one, for every one, of us … though only as God makes us able.
The beginning of God making us able is to promise that God values us greatly. Knowing that we can choose to act responsibly and responsively to that unconditional, life-giving and life-renewing love!
God willing and ‘the creek not rising’ (maybe it ought to be ‘the oceans not rising’) we may still live on planet earth in 1000 years and more!
God’s Word started this all. God’s Word sustains us all. Certainly God’s Word is able to bring us to that miracle of miracles.
So what are we going to do today, with God’s love?
It is I who by my great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the people and animals that are on the earth, and I give it to whomsoever I please.
Matthew 5:5
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Words of Grace For Today
We work so hard to survive.
And when that is accomplished or given to us by our station at birth or by sheer insane luck, stupidity, or corruption we humans always look to have more from life. We measure it in what is ours! not theirs.
Yet God created this earth not for us to divide it up among ourselves. God created it good, sufficient for all, held together by love, renewed by Grace, and sanctified to be wondrous – including us!
The bold seem to win the most at this inane game of possessing what cannot be possessed, love, land, security, hope and the future.
Jeremiah and Jesus puts it clearly that God is the creator and the one who gives the earth to stewards, and those stewards are not the bold and victorious in our inane human games we have reduced life to.
The meek will inherit the earth.
After we are done ruining it, the victorious will not want it. They will move on to other planets, other challenges, other inane games that they can use to ‘prove’ they are significant.
Only God determines who is significant and for what we are significant.
Have you any clear idea for what we are significant?
Or who is significant to God?
What does the old, old story of Jesus and his love teach us about for what we are significant and who is included in this ‘we’?
…
Right, all are included (even the deluded ‘victorious’) for we are significant at all to God, solely because …
They came upon me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my stay. He brought me out into a broad place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.
Matthew 9:9
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.
Words of Grace For Today
The life I live is limited by many restrictions. While so many others feel the restrictions to protect us all from Covid 19 (or sort of at least), years before Covid 19 the reality of abject poverty, a ruined reputation, and injustice profound kept my horizons down to surviving one day, one week, one month, one season interrupted by desperate, life threatening needs.
As at no other time in my life, though some have come nearly as close, I have known that God walks with me,
and
that I am blessed with a life abundant.
I, with so many other humans through history, know well these words as my/our own:
They came upon me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my stay. He brought me out into a broad place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.
Perhaps you do, too?
This I have known as well, that God has called me, perhaps not like Jesus calling Matthew away from a life as a hated tax collector, but to be one who shares God’s Grace with as many people as I am able.
As I have followed Jesus, knowing that God delights in me, I have given my all each day as I was able. I have delighted in God’s claim on me, and the promise that God will walk with me no matter what, and that there is nothing that can separate me from the Love of God. For God has claimed me, a sinner of my own making, and made me a saint of God’s own making. In that everyone has hope. If God can save me, attacked as I am by foes yet each day, surely God can save anyone.
God created this earth, and us in it … and when it was done God said, “It is Good!”
So we can be good this day, too. Why not! If not now, when?!
