How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
John 16:33
I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!’
Words of Grace For Today
It is good to know that Jesus has won the war, because our enemies certainly seem to be winning a lot of battles, even when I refuse to fight any battles.
Now the Psalmist knows exactly what it is like, not just for me, but for so many people through the generations: our enemies seek the destruction of whatever and whomever gets in their way in order that they can pretend to be powerful, powerful enough to make their way without God. Once they start to ‘win’ by destroying others, they seem not to be able to stop.
This is the persecution that followers of Christ have faced in every generation.
Our hope is sure. Christ has conquered the world, and more so, Christ has conquered death!
What is a series of battles lost, when life eternal awaits us? Certainly we can survive …
though today in the middle of these huge losses, it feels more like the world comes to an end, at least for us already today.
Thank God, we are not on our own.
Through all our pain and sorrow, through all our persecution, we know we are not alone.
God is with us.
With God we can hope to survive these trials and persecutions.
With God we can hope with a sure hope that ALL God’s promises will come to pass, including that our enemies will be defeated, not by their defeat. Rather by the Holy Spirit transforming them into followers of Christ.
In the end, since Christ has conquered death and the world, everyone wins. Finally we will win, in God’s way of giving life abundant for all. We win life now and eternally.
For today we pray, and struggle to remain filled with gratitude.
My eye grows dim through sorrow. Every day I call on you, O Lord; I spread out my hands to you. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Selah
John 17:15
I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.
Words of Grace For Today
Water. It is the basis of life, the cleanser, the thirst quencher ….
What can we do when our eyes water with tears of sorrow?
What can we do when we call on God, with upraised hands … and yet there is no answer.
What will come of us when there is no more life in us?
We will no longer be able to call on God, nor will God be able to answer us.
So while we live … yes, while we live we call upon God for all good things, with hearts filled with gratitude, and hopes of high expectations for all that God has promised.
The real challenge of life is not mere logistic chaos to organize, or engineering problems to designed to a resolution, or stories of lives that have gone amok, and not even the real lives that the stories represent. The real challenge in life is to face, with almost no expectation of relief, the deepest depths of the Devil’s work. For we knowing we could only be lost if we are left on our own.
Yet, there is no danger, for Christ is with us, not to take us out of the world to another place. No, Christ has stood with us each hour as the Devil works his terrible wiles, and protected us, and given us the best that life has to offer: Living Water. This is the water that quenches all thirst in life, and gives us life so abundant it carries us beyond all imagination.
Each day, drinking in the living water, we call upon God, knowing that Jesus hears our every word and the Holy Spirit guides us to be all that we can be, as God’s children.
Nor does anyone smell like roses through and through.
Where is your place in the universe,
Where Roses die and rose-hips take their place?
Exodus 20:12
Honour your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
Romans 15:7
Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.
Words of Grace For Today
One hopes always, not just for oneself, but for each child, that the parents are honourable, and worthy of being honoured. Of course no one is really worthy. Being a parent is not a skill set one is born with. It is acquired through trial and error, lots of trials and lots of errors.
As in almost everything, if one is kind as a parent, that goes a long way to making everything else possible to work out or work with.
Yet no matter one’s parents, there is value in honouring your parents. This only starts with treating them with respect, though not always obedience as one becomes an adult oneself. The real gist of honouring one’s parents is to recognize one’s own place in the universe, right down to the family.
As child to parents, even more so as one becomes an adult child, one receives great blessings in learning to value your parents, just as they are. No good comes of painting them either better than they are, nor from painting them worse then they are. The blessing is in taking them just as they are, and honouring them for their trials and errors raising you, or not if they did none of that (which means you were probably better off than with them.)
This is an essential step in maturing as a person. One recognizes one’s parents are fully human. An accompanying step is to recognize that you, too, are fully human, trials and errors included.
Learning how invaluable kindness is, and how it helps one make up for so many other terrible things is also an essential step in maturing.
God gave us this commandment that we might become healthy, mature people, always children of God.
Honouring one’s parents, knowing one’s place in the universe right down to the family, accepting others and oneself as flawed and wonderful humans, and being kind: these are the stepping stones that enable us to welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed us.
Of course so many people say they do this just fine thank you. It’s just ‘those’ people, the strangers, the homeless, the different orientated, the people of a different faith, the people of a different race or face or tongue, ‘those’ people (you know who we mean, they say), those people are not welcome.
When Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead, Jesus will welcome the inhospitable people just as they welcomed ‘those’ people.
Gracious God gives us time now for the amendment of life, to mature enough to recognize Jesus in the face of ‘those people’ before it’s too late and we now longer have the opportunity to share God’s Grace as God has so freely given it to us.
who has lost theirs and become another homeless person
struggling to survive the winter?
Job 9:4
He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength – who has resisted him, and succeeded?
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 original sin is to claim to be what one is not. The story of Adam and Eve, the first of original sin, recounts how they sought to be wiser than they were, accepting the serpent’s ‘wise words’ as better than God’s Word of Promise and Guidance.
In the face of a tiny virus, the world has shutdown or suffered a fast and deadly spread of illness and death. The rapid spread sometimes still came despite measures to shutdown, since not everyone complied or there were too many loopholes. Bodies piled up … and still do.
We ought to be quite humbled by the last six months.
Instead people are defiant, claiming openly that they are done with the pandemic, that it were a hoax, or that there were easy remedies to stop it … and … and … and on go the complaints about other people’s good work to slow it. Stopping it would have required such drastic measures that no one would anticipate enough people would comply as to make them even as effective as the half measures we do have. And on go the shear stupidity in words and actions that people engage in.
Of course stupid people throw caution to the wind and behave as if there were nothing that one ought to do different to protect oneself and others. These stupid people are rarely the people who get deadly sick. It’s always the innocent bystander (to whom the stupid ones have come too close to, touched, or breathed on) who gets rip roaring sick, is permanently maimed, or dies.
Which are you, the overly cautious (no caution is too much really) or are you one who helps keep the virus spreading and killing, maybe not you, but others?
Who are we?
We are very small specks in the scope of God’s universe, and yet God knows us intimately and walks with us always.
Now, from prison people have run and escaped; not all but some. Across closed borders some people have run and escaped to freedom of a sorts; not all but some. Like the Berlin Wall, those who made it alive were few and far between. Most were shot or electrocuted in dem Grenzgebiet. Or the Mediterranean Sea, where boatloads of people have drowned in the crossing to ‘freedom’ and others upon arrival are detained within camps of squalor no person should ever know of, yet alone have to live in, or they are returned home to a certain death. But a few have made it into Europe and it’s ‘freedom’ and ‘life’.
Doch, no one can escape from God, who walks with us. No one. Not one. Resistance is futile! There is no way to escape from God’s creation and God’s walking with us. It is not death that comes with our failing to escape. It is the promise of life, and life abundant.
What are we to do, instead of trying to cut out on our own? As if we could be more than we are by escaping or denying God! The Holy Spirit calls and guides us to imitate Jesus and obey his commands to love one another as ourselves, especially our enemies.
The company we keep is important. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, the low life of his time. Can you hear the words of Jesus? Can you see the people Jesus calls us to love? They are the invisible ones, the lowly ones, the homeless and forgotten.
With this Covid 19 shutdown, relaxed as it is, and almost certainly coming back in a second wave, there are going to be a lot more people out on the streets, homeless. Good people, poor people, sick people, healthy people, people of integrity, people of hope; all people who could not manage to keep a roof over their heads with the challenges of Covid 19’s shutdown.
For I the Lord love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.
1 Thessalonians 4:6
No one wrongs or exploits a brother or sister in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, just as we have already told you beforehand and solemnly warned you.
Words of Grace For Today
Forgiveness is our manner of living with everyone.
For Jesus, the primary command for us and others is to love one another, even our enemies, to forgive 7 times 77.
Yet not all that Jesus is about is forgiveness, as we read today, Jesus is also the avenger of robbers and wrongdoers, and for those who wrong and exploit a brother or sister.
This is quite the thing, another side of Jesus’ Word for us.
Where are we supposed to go with this?
Are we supposed to love and forgive? Or are we suppose to let the sin and Evil of every day and person rot in our hearts as we wait for God to avenge the wrongs done to us?
What is this?
If one cannot walk on water, or trust God’s other miracles, there is no way we know what to do with these passages, God’s Word.
It is rather simple in the end.
Our life is all about loving one another and forgiving each other, and even our enemies.
Any avenging is left up to God.
We live forgiveness. We trust God.
Evil that comes our way is easier to forgive when we know that God will deal with what cannot be forgiven.
That’s how we celebrate all that God has done and continues to do for us.
For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, ‘Do not fear, I will help you.’
Matthew 14:30-31
But when [Peter] noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’
Words of Grace For Today
There are great challenges, enough to scare any sensible person out of their skin. God walks with us, holding our right hand, reassuring us that we are not alone. We need not fear anything, not nature, nor humans, nor monsters, nor evil itself … and not even a teensie weensie virus that can kill us.
In the course of many ordinary days, Jesus calls us to be courageous, faithful, and trusting, as we venture where others fear to go … in order that we can give life abundant to others, even our enemies. Walking on water is rather simple as the miracles go that Jesus calls us to trust the Holy Spirit enacts for us. Come visit in the winter and I can show you how easy walking on water can be.
Forgiving, especially one’s enemies, is no small thing. At times it is so difficult it is beyond us. There are real monsters in human form that walk among us. It is hard to forgive the evil that incarnates itself in people, bent on destroying that person and all people around them.
Today a visitor came up to the window, and stopped just a few feet away as I pounded on the window to scare her off. It’s not that I do not like visitors. I just prefer not to be a juicy meal for a visitor, or a punching bag, or a bloody pile of bones to be batted about.
I should have grabbed the camera sitting right there near the window instead of pounding, but I was afraid. It bears considering the power in the paws, instead of the possibility of recording one’s last moments. Thankfully she ran. The question is who taught this yearling to explore near human habitat for food or fun? Dangerous.
Fear not, for God walks with us, even when big dangerous show up, or when small dangerous float about. This is God’s creation, and we are God’s people, the people God walks with through life.
So the little bear finally ran off, or rather lopped off and then carefully stepped over a few logs in it’s path.
One day, that bear will end up on someone’s table.
Honour the Lord with your substance and with the first fruits of all your produce.
Luke 6:35
Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
Words of Grace For Today
The leaves have begun to turn, not colours wondrous, but brown spotted. This is not healthy I would think.
As the harvest is gathered, though I have no produce to gather in, we hear the call to honour God and God’s people by sharing, not the left overs, the trickle downs, but the first fruits of our produce and our substance!
Many people the world over have no produce to gather in. Food is grown in massive quantities by massive farm operations, processed and distributed in stores for sale for those who are so fortunate to live where and how food can be purchased.
So what first fruits do we share?
The brown spotted, diseased leaves of the trees struggling to stay alive against some unseen disease or environmental shift too swift for them to adapt to?
We may not have produce or even healthy plant life around us, but we do have substance. Each and every one of us has substance.
At harvest time, and at every time, God calls us to use our substance, our heritage and present being, our contribution to our lineage as God’s people, in order that:
We will love our enemies!
We will do good!
We will lend expecting not to be repaid!
We will imitate Jesus, being kind to both the wonderful people of God and to the ungrateful and wicked people, infested with Evil.
For by being kind and gracious, we imitate Jesus and share what he has given us, our lives. And more: we may indeed in our time bring others to hear, experience and trust what Jesus has done for us all. And even if not in this generation, we live the story that will be told for generations, of how Jesus calls us to give grace upon grace, so that in future generations others may hear, experience and trust what Jesus has done for us all.
The Harvest goes on to the end of time, and our contribution is only a tiny spot in a long line of hope driven love that will give life as a gift that keeps on giving … long after the leaves are all gone.
We give what we have received without merit: life abundant.
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
Galatians 3:7
You see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham.
Words of Grace For Today
Ancestor stories are one’s identity. Who are we in this time and place starts with who are we descended from. It hardly stops there, though one’s ancestry often reveals more than the obvious, like what hereditary diseases are you susceptible to and what precautions can you take or preparations if precautions are of little help. Like what values have you been surrounded with as you grow/grew up. Like why are you fascinated with a particular way of looking at the world (which may influence your profession or avocations.)
Is your hair orange, your eyes green? Is your hair black, your face oval? Are you short and stocky, tall and lean? Are you near sighted or far sighted? Do you have a ‘liver spot’ on your left hand between your wrist and your thumb? These are interesting though not too significant.
Most significant is your identity in relationship to the Creator of the universe. What heritage do you have, can you claim, do you trust and rely on? What faith have your ancestors handed on to you? Was it life giving for them? Is it life giving for you? Does it offer the best of life to those around you, or is it a selfish faith that destroys others around you or different than you?
Abram and Sarai are characters in our ancestors stories of our relationship with God. It is clear enough that while Abram and Sarai were historical people, real people, the stories that are told and the characters developed in those stories are most certainly a collection of stories that belong to a number of historical people. They are then a collection of our ancestors’ stories attributed to two individuals. That’s a marvellous way to collect stories about one’s ancestors, and it is done for us.
While we may or may not be from the actual blood lines of Abraham and Sarah, by faith we are ‘adopted’ by God into the family of their children, and made children of God. DNA testing is not relevant. Here if one views ancestry as both nature and nurture, we are included by virtue of nurture. That’s a marvellous thing as well. It’s like being made honorary member of an indigenous family by virtue of one’s participation in and contribution to the life of that family. Yet God makes us members of Abraham and Sarah’s family, and children of God, not by virtue of anything we do or are. It is all gift. Undeserved gift.
That is something most marvellous.
God includes us, though we are strangers, and though we are not worthy, nor have we inherited from anywhere something that makes us worthy. Pure gift.
So into what kind of family are we adopted?
Abram and Sarai’s story begins: at his ripe old age of 75 God calls Sarai and Abram to uproot themselves from everything that is home, and to venture out into God’s world, to a land unknown and foreign and a family that is not yet and will be long in starting.
No matter our age, God calls us to uproot ourselves from all that would hinder us from following Jesus’ Way. That Way is simple to describe: we follow Jesus’ example of sacrificial, unconditional love, giving everything, even our very lives, so that others may live and live abundantly. (That’s got next to nothing to do with material abundance, it’s life abundance!)
Covid 19 or not, Christians have always been the people who volunteered to stay and care for the sick and dying as others moved away from diseased areas and inexplicable widespread death.
Our ancestry is marvellous, and it challenges us to go places we have not imagined, to do things we hardly envisioned possible, and to share that astounding attitude of God towards us with everyone: that God loves us, unconditionally.
Do not fear, you worm Jacob,you insect Israel!I will help you, says the Lord;your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel. 15 Now, I will make of you a threshing-sledge,sharp, new, and having teeth;you shall thresh the mountains and crush them,and you shall make the hills likechaff. You shall winnow them and the wind shall carry them away, and the tempest shall scatter them. Then you shall rejoice in the Lord; in the Holy One of Israel you shall glory.
Romans 5:11
More than that [i.e. having been reconciled, we will be saved by Christ’s life] we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Words of Grace For Today
Worm Jacob and Insect Israel, judging the mountains!
Jesus reconciling wretched sinners, so that we can boast of the mighty sacrificial love of God.
When we know our place, there is no joy in threshing, crushing, and scattering the mountains and our enemies.
There is only boasting in what God has done for us through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Who can give us life?
There is no life in judging others, especially not for what you have done yourself in order to make yourself appear better than you are. Worms and insects abound and do not make good judges.
Doch, to receive reconciliation, that is to receive as a gift that everything between us and God is made right, not by our own feeble and futile efforts, but by God’s own miraculous work through Jesus’ death and resurrection. Now that is a gift that keeps on giving every minute right into eternity.
Now every day, the simplest visions of light, colour and hope spread God’s glory before us to be seen, acknowledged and celebrated.
We may be mere worms and insects, doch through God’s own will and work we are made to be saints, bearers of God’s blessings of light and grace for all the world.
Shine Jesus shine, in us and through us.
Let Jesus wonders be scattered throughout the universe.
Let us remember the marvellous light of Christ, even on cloudy days when it rains, even when Covid 19 still runs rampant, aided by fools and deniers and ‘I’m done’rs’.
Because God has made everything right between us and God, the our lives are made right in every way. Challenges become opportunities to share God’s grace, in our mundane tasks and among our enemies that work to kill us.
Ah Lord God! It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you.
Matthew 28:18-20
And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’
Words of Grace For Today
God is with us.
For some those words are the most comforting, promise-filled, powerful words that can be spoken, written or read. They name God’s choice to accompany one through all that life presents to us, both good and bad, marvellous and destructive, and hope-giving and despair oppressing.
For others these words can be the greatest cause of fear, dread, and angst. For they have chosen again and again to act selfishly, relentlessly destroying others for their own advantage, and trying to hide the truth from all. God still knows what they have done. To know that God not only knows, but God also accompanies one through life and the hell one creates for others, is to hear that God is not just aware of what one has done and still does, but God is profoundly affected by it as well. God’s wrath will rise up against one, in the end if not before.
God’s wrath is to be dreaded greatly!
For God has created the universe with God’s own power, with a word and an outstretched hand. Nothing is too hard for God. Destroying a person who has given themselves over to evil every day of their lives and only tries to hide this from others and themselves, and even from God … this kind of destruction is child’s play for God.
God is also so powerful as to send us to share God’s Grace with others, and to be ready to baptize them into the Way of Jesus, the Redeemer of the world. We know that Jesus has commanded us what is profoundly easy to repeat, and on our own impossible to obey: to love the Lord with all our heart, mind and strength; to love our neighbours as ourselves, and to love even our enemies.
This is only possible since God is with us always, that we can love unconditionally as God first loves us.
