He satisfies the thirsty, and the hungry he fills with good things.
Philippians 4:19
My God will fully satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
Words of Grace For Today
To be satisfied.
When one has so much, that may seem to be a cart blanche that will fill one’s every wish, a great fulfillment of whatever one can dream of.
When one has not much, and really not enough, to survive even one day at a time, God’s promise that the thirsty will be satisfied and the hungry will be filled, and not just filled but filled with good things and the promise that God will satisfy our every need … well there just is not better news that anyone could give us. No more going hungry. No more enduring thirst with nothing good to drink. (That’s not a reference to finding a good Scotch, or a good wine. It means good, clean, cool water!)
To be satisfied.
For most of the people in the world, it’s great news!
If you really though that ‘satisfying the thirsty’ meant Jesus provides a good wine or scotch, then this probably is not good news for you at all. Someone is going to help God provide the food and drink, and all that satisfies people’s every need. That probably means those that have more than they need.
So today, for those already with all their needs met, is probably going to be another bad day. But for those of us who need to work just to stay alive another day, God’s promises give us a boost.
Food, Drink, and all our needs. Yes, thank you God!
It’s going to be a rainy, thunderstorm kind of day, so sit safe and work when you can. Just because God promises, doesn’t mean that we are not going to be the ones doing the work to make it happen! Rest for bed at night. Joyful, thankfully onward. There’s lots to be done.
You shall worship the Lord your God, and I will bless your bread and your water; and I will take sickness away from among you.
Matthew 6:31-32
Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
Words of Grace For Today
Quite sure sickness is rampant among us. Coming out the back end of the Covid pandemic, and it’s not done with us yet by any means, is anyone ready to say that as we worship God our food and bread is blessed and we have all sickness taken away from among us? Covid is simply so contagious that measures to stop it are useless (well not really but people are no longer willing to pay the small price of wearing masks and keeping physical distance and restricting their social interactions to a small group of people so … well so measures are not kept and therefore governments are giving up on keeping them). The greatest sickness is exemplified by the guy who says Covid was a big hoax. Tell that to the families of all the people who died!
I’m sure that if I do not work hard for wood to heat with in the winter, and persist to find money to buy groceries with and show up at the food bank to supplement the ever smaller amount of groceries I can afford, and, and, and … I am sure if I do not strive heftily, I will meet my physical death.
So these passages are difficult to hear.
The truth of the matter is, when we worry about food and water, rather than actually working to ensure we have them, our worry sucks the life right out of us.
The truth of the matter is, sickness will never be wiped out from among us, not completely, and when we either think that it can be and behave like it has been or we ignore that sickness is part of life, we endanger ourselves and so many people around us.
The truth of the matter is that God created the world and said it was good! Hunger, poverty, drought, thirst, illness and death are part and parcel of our being able to choose to either love God or not.
Today is another day of opportunity: to ruin our days with worry and denials of sicknesses and death OR to enjoy our days with thanks for everything God gives us, and appropriate work to secure our daily needs and have enough to share with those without enough, and to live sensibly and cautiously so as to foster our own health and the health of those around us.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and for evermore.
2 Thessalonians 3:3
But the Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one.
Words of Grace For Today
Yesterday the rains fell, the winds blew, and I slept, fitfully with wild dreams in tune with the ruckus outside.
I woke to see leaves against the back window of the camper. Winter tarps strung on frames quickly assembles as the cold set in, gave out around the camp. Tarps danced with anger in the wind.
I wandered out in rubber boots and my bathrobe to survey the damage. The top rain tarps were whipped back exposing the insulating tarps. The protection for firewood was mostly gone, and I freed the tarps the rest of the way to keep it from ripping itself any more. The tree, well … a tree was blown over onto the back of the camper. Thus the leaves at the window were that tree’s, yesterday a good 6 feet away, today up close and pressing on the glass.
I had hauled in wood the day before yesterday. The ‘ropes’ were still in the truck. I positioned the truck to pull a rope, wrapped around another tree (low for better leverage and less risk of pulling that tree over on to the camper) and on to the tree kissing the camper as high as I could reach (for better leverage on that wayward wood.) With a tug in low 4×4 the tree came upright, and then settled against another tree back towards the ‘pulley’ tree. I reattached the rope straight from truck to fallen tree, and backed up (praying the tree would not find it’s way back on to the camper just 6 feet away). It followed the rope and settled nicely in front of the truck (also a concern that I may not be far enough back and the tree would more than kiss the truck!)
A Kiss, Thankfully, Just a Kiss.
So it was: my morning. A day with plans to endure the rains. I’ve survived a flood, watching waters rise to within a metre of destroying a house that I build with my own hands, crossing up over the river valley to the plain away from town. Then travelling (instead of 3 km to town) back and around and over the dam up river (the only road still in tact over the river) 17 km to get to town, and hearing the rain each night, each day, and the reports that the dam was softened and shifting.
Real dread fills my bones still when heavy rains persist day after day.
This tree, this rain, did little damage that cannot be repaired. The tarps and their supports needed to be better designed and built before another winter. Now it will be done a bit sooner in the summer. A good thing at that.
So it is that I can heartily echo these readings:
The Lord will keep our going out and our coming in from this time on and for evermore and the Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one.
It’s just another normal spring day (normal given climate change.) What will I do with it? What will you do with it?
God certainly does not collect, cut, stack and stoke the firewood.
God does provide trees that die to become firewood.
Psalm 127:1
Unless the Lord builds the house those who build it labour in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.
Philippians 1:6
I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.
Words of Grace For Today
I decided one day that I would let God do everything.
I stayed in bed and waited for the fire to be stoked, breakfast to be served, and my writing to be done.
My back got sore, I got real cold after the fire went out, I got hungry for no breakfast showed up, and when I looked later I was hours behind on my writing schedule.
God, I decided, does not do everything. It wasn’t personal or anything. God did not just ignore me. God was speaking real loudly at me. I was not listening.
Paul writes to the , the Philippians, who had embraced him early in his ministry, funded him well, and always continued to support him in every way possible as he got into more and more trouble – because he kept preaching a radical Good News, Jesus loves you! When he does, we get to listen in on some of the most profound truths about the Gospel. Paul is less guarded, less polemic, writing to people less inclined to mis-hear or mis-take his words.
Jesus started a good work in the Philippians, in Lydia and her household. Paul assures them that Christ will bring this work to completion. Not they themselves. Christ.
The Psalmist writes what many have come to know is true: we can work all we like and as hard as we like, but if God is not working in us, for us, and through us, our labours are all in vain.
So God does lots.
God does everything.
That does not preclude our having to work hard. It means that as we work hard we need to give God thanks and remember that only God working in us makes it possible for us to do the work we do.
This morning, I got up and made a fire, a blessed fire that boiled water for coffee and washing.
This morning, I gathered more wood for the fire, and will stack most of it in preparation for the winter cold when I will burn lots of wood to stay alive and a bit more to be comfortable.
This morning, I came in and got breakfast ready, which is really not much work at all. It’s just pulling things out of the drying rack, out of cupboard and out of the fridge, and pouring boiling water on the coffee in the french press.
(I’m not french in anyway. It’s made by Ikea probably not in Sweden. And I use it to make coffee. So it’s a coffee press to me. The French can keep the guillotine and lots of other things, too. It’s just this is a coffee press every morning. It makes coffee from somewhere in the world and mixed and roasted and ground and canned. Not french at all. Of course we could say it’s a God press, because everything is from God. But then nothing would have any distinction. So everything is from God, breakfast, coffee, fire, boiling water. But it’s a coffee press to me.)
I’m working at my writing, bit by bit, though I’m still behind schedule, or maybe I gave up on the schedule.
Still, God is at work in all this or this means nothing, to me or to anyone else.
This day God made full of surprises and work and delights and daily bread and forgiveness and … lots more, and I’m still waiting for Christ to complete the work begun in me at baptism, though I’m doing everything I can to get on with that work, and get out of the way of God working hard through me.
One hopes one would be thought of as kindly as Paul did of the Philippians, and not the Corinthians, though I gotta say, sometimes I’m probably more cantankerous than even that lot. God has lots of work left to get done in me.
As for today, the tasks at hand are more than enough to fill the day. It is a small delight to get a few of them accomplished, even if the bigger tasks never quite seem to come to completion. That’s life. I guess when the work is done, it’ll only be so for me because I’m dead. Then the incomplete tasks will be someone else’s.
As for today, it’s time to take delight in God’s gifts, starting with time, breath, and energy to work.
You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing; when you bear witness in a lawsuit, you shall not side with the majority so as to pervert justice.
Ephesians 4:15
But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,
Words of Grace For Today
It is self explanatory that we would only speak the truth.
Life is not that way for so many people.
I cannot say I understand that, for I’ve stood for the truth often against a crowd who all together speak lies and commit crimes, theft, and fraud, and worse in court where all the other witnesses perjured themselves including RCMP members, and worse, the judges themselves lied about what was given in testimony, one even deleting a section in order to make a false conviction.
These things I do not understand. Speaking the truth always seems to me to be a basic, like eating healthy food.
You may get away with lies temporarily but they still hurt you, and eventually they will be exposed to be lies … and then there is nothing left of the liars. So little gained, and eventually everything lost.
So how is it then, that speaking the truth in love we grow up into Christ?
However that is, today is another day, of paying the costs for others lies, and receiving blessing up on blessing from God.
These blessing pour down on us as rain showers coming and going through our days, sometimes overwhelming us, but always sufficient (for we are not in a drought here, nor in a flood, thank God!)
Today, another day of living blessed and grateful for everything, and praying that God will keep people that so easily lie far from us.
The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts.
James 2:1
My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?
Words of Grace For Today
While the rich continue to exert a ghastly disproportionate carbon footprint on the environment that everyone needs to sustain life …
While nepotism is exercised openly and in secret the world around usually as a means to ‘buy’ other people’s support and favour …
While last year’s extreme weather events become more normal this year (for every year of the previous decade it seems, and cumulatively so that this year’s normal is really extreme!) resulting in drought, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, drechos, wildfires, ice storms, heat domes, and all kinds of rare weather events that challenge our way of living …
While so many people seek to be exalted in so many different ways, always at the cost of someone else’s basic living …
While today is a gift of 24 hours …
How do we choose to live?
We can jump right out there and compete with everyone in our way while we struggle to get all we want out of life (whatever that may be, and often we have no clue about what we are striving so hard for … even when we name it with words like money, honour, stability, security …).
Or
We can disengage and justify ourselves as living outside the way the world works, self-righteously declaring that we are and/or have it better than everyone else.
OR
We can listen to the Holy Spirit guiding us towards the Truth about us, life, and all creation. Often we say that people cannot bear all the Truth all at once, so we receive glimpses of it through our lives. That may be. Yet Truth is not that hard to come by and not that hard to grasp, if one is willing to face the implications. The implications are drastic to us who have ‘made our way up in the world.’ The Truth reveals that what we think we have accomplished is actually useless and futile. The Truth has less drastic implications for those who subsist. For them it offers what they have never had possible through their own efforts, life abundant. None of us can achieve it through our efforts, it’s that the poor have less opportunity to delude themselves into thinking they have or can achieve it.
The Truth is God created us, filled us with free will to choose to love, and when we choose to not love all of creation, God comes to forgive us, redeem us, renew us, and restore our freedom to choose to love … or to not love. God gives us a free gift, again and again, abundant life, filled with all the love and all the security that is possible on this good earth.
So how do we want to proceed through these next 24 hours?
Life abundant, or futile scrambling and struggling?
Samuel said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil, yet do not turn aside from following the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart; and do not turn aside after useless things that cannot profit or save.’
John 12:26
Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.
Words of Grace For Today
You have done all this evil!
That is usually preceded by a long list of horrendous things we have done, some are well known and many we have hidden so others would not find out about them, but then someone did. Everything eventually sees the light of day!
You have done all this evil!
That is usually followed by a stiff condemnation and a listing of the ways we will be punished, which hardly ever is exactly proportional to the horrendous things we have done. We would like to say that crime and evil do not pay, but they do. We would like to believe that innocent people are not punished for things they did not do, but there is more evil done punishing innocent people than the evil that innocent people are punished for. It’s just how we ‘get it out of our system’. We humans are always up for a good scapegoating to relieve the pent up pressure on our own guilty consciences. Girard had that right!
You have done all this evil!
Then Samuel plays out for the people God’s grace. There is no punishment list.
There is in the prior verses much more: Samuel, old in age, has come before ‘all of Israel’ and asked them to judge him if he is guilty of any offence, and they have declared that he is not guilty of anything.
Samuel goes on to recount their history, from their cries in Egypt that God answers by sending Moses and Aaron to bring them to the Promised Land, to their wayward worship of and serving other gods, Baal and Astartes, God’s punishments as foreign powers conquered them, and then their request for a king to lead them against their enemies. This is counted by all as a sin, one terrible sin on top of all the others.
Still Samuel tells them that all can be well: if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the Lord your God, it will be well.
It’s not a simple day of reckoning for Samuel. The people are still called to account, so Samuel demonstrates God’s power: Is it not the wheat harvest today? I will call upon the Lord, that he may send thunder and rain; and you shall know and see that the wickedness that you have done in the sight of the Lord is great in demanding a king for yourselves.’ So Samuel called upon the Lord, and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day; and all the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel.
The people, rightly notice God’s power and wrath against them and pray for their lives, not to God, but they ask Samuel to pray for them: All the people said to Samuel, ‘Pray to the Lord your God for your servants, so that we may not die; for we have added to all our sins the evil of demanding a king for ourselves.’
This is where the verse above fits. Samuel begins by telling them not to be afraid. He just struck the fear of God into their hearts and now he tells them not to be afraid. They should serve their God alone, and all will be well, if they and their king serve God alone. Samuel tells them God has an interest in them, so God will not too quickly kill off the sinful people for all their sins, the last being asking for a king to lead them against their enemies.
For the Lord will not cast away his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself.
To their request that Samuel pray for them, Samuel puts it simply:
Moreover as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you; and I will instruct you in the good and the right way.
And what is that instruction, as if the passages have not been spilling it out in abundance: Only fear the Lord, and serve him faithfully with all your heart; for consider what great things he has done for you.
And it they do not, well then there will be, as they feared, the punishment that they already deserve: But if you still do wickedly, you shall be swept away, both you and your king.
So is God merciful?
Is Samuel right to strike the fear of God into their hearts with rain and thunder on their wheat crops?
…
The whole scenario plays out that we can avoid God’s wrath by serving God alone. Yet like the Israelis we turn from God in so many ways each day.
God does honour those who serve him.
Thankfully God is merciful to all people who ever lived and will ever live, for we have all at some time in some way turned from serving God alone. Scapegoating innocent people to relieve the conflict in our lives we have created is just one of the ongoing, horrendous sins that is our turning from our God, who has sent us the Spirit of truth, to guide us in all truth.
Ah, but we choose to hide our evil deeds, and our hearts from the truth, for we think we cannot bear the punishment that will follow.
Thankfully God is merciful to all.
Now for today: how can we choose to serve God alone! Well then … on with it!
My son Solomon, know the God of your father, and serve him with single mind and willing heart; for the Lord searches every mind, and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will abandon you for ever.
1 John 4:13
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
Words of Grace For Today
Were we to measure our lives by any means dependent upon our own abilities, actions, thoughts, beliefs, intentions, or anything that is of us, we would come up with a fools result.
It’s like using a tape measure to figure out how much sewer the whole city of 2 million produces in a day. The tool is not up to the task of the things measured.
One thing we know is our own records are not far off from the sewer contents when it comes to being something we can boast of before God.
To measure our ‘success’ in life (as God might measure us) we simply need to admit we cannot. The only things we know about God and God’s measure of us is what the Holy Spirit gives us as gift. We cannot measure those gifts either. So we come up empty handed trying to measure our success before God.
We can only trust God (trust made possible by the gift given to us by the Spirit) that God does not forsake us, abandon us, or leave us to stand on our own, now in this life, or ever in eternity. God stands by us, walks with us, suffers with us, and does everything to convince us that all is well, all is well, and all manner of things are well, because (and only because) God is gracious with us.
Of course we would prefer to know that we can serve God with a single mind and a willing heart, and that we can seek and find God. That way we are in control of what happens to us and to the world around us. But that’s not how God created us to live. God designed us to live guided by love, grace, faith and hope; and none of that gives us the ability to judge our own ‘success’ in serving God with a single mind and a single heart. It certainly does not give us the ability to accurately judge others.
We try to judge ourselves and we love to judge others. It gives us a sense of control over our lives, control that is not ours to have.
We are only by grace able to live fully when we are guided by God’s love, faith, and hope. That will fill up any day we wish to give over to them, and then some.
Ready or not: Hang on to your hat, it’s another of God’s days for us.
Remember me, O Lord, when you show favour to your people; help me when you deliver them.
Ephesians 4:7
Each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
Words of Grace For Today
Our hope is always that today, yes finally today, we will be saved, at least me and mine. God teaches us patience through life as we suffer, pray for deliverance, and the suffering continues and increases, until in old age we are more than ready to give up the mortal frame and the suffering that goes with it, to go home where there is no more crying, weeping, death, and suffering.
Until we reach that point we learn to endure.
We learn to pray, if Lord you do not save me today, at least Remember me, O Lord, when you show favour to your people; help me when you deliver them.
We learn to trust that we are given what we need to make it through this day. The suffering may go on, and there is nothing we can do about it. We can learn to live the days we have, grateful for all God gives us. The measure we receive is not exactly what we want (thank God, or it would sink us from all consideration that we might need God, yet alone need to be thankful for life and all that is in it!) The measure we receive is given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
That measure is simple: what does God need to give us so that we will share all we have and are with those who are truly poor and needy.
Ah, that measure.
The measure of self-sacrificial love, not just for the people we think are good, but for the people that are truly evil.
Yes, that measure.
Simple. And so difficult to embrace. Impossible to embrace if we do not first know to be grateful in all things for everything God gives us.
So we pray, teach us, God, to be thankful, and prodigiously generous and gracious with all people.
That’s a full day for any of us.
For that God gives us the full measure, 24 hours, until our last day. For now, we give thanks, and move into the day.
