In those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. He prayed to the Lord, and he answered him and gave him a sign. But Hezekiah did not respond according to the benefit done to him, for his heart was proud. Therefore wrath came upon him and upon Judah and Jerusalem.
1 Peter 5:5
In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders. And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. ’
Words of Grace For Today
There is a fast way to orchestrate one’s own demise: pride.
There is a wonderful, enriching way to live blessed and shared those blessings with others: humility.
Today we pray, may we be humble this day, and in every day to come.
O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.
Luke 2:29-31
Simeon said: Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples….
Words of Grace For Today
Living to the fullest may mean hard partying, drinking, drugs, and sex for some. Or working hard to make so much money one cannot spend it all and playing even harder trying to spend it. Or just about everything under the sun in the extreme to the extreme.
All that as if one’s actions, accomplishments and record were worth something at all, when measure by the one measure that counts at all, God’s measure, our human actions, accomplishments and record are worth next nothing, especially compared to what God does, accomplishes and establishes through us and without us.
The fullest life we can live is to continually, humbly, give God thanks and praise.
Living life to it’s fullest in this way we can be ready to greet our death as Simeon did, with thanks and praise for all God’s gifts, especially the gift of God’s Son living as one of us, God’s communication to us that is so clear we can tell the story over and over again and marvel at God’s Grace and Love for us all.
The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’
Hebrews 12:12-13
Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.
Words of Grace For Today
As the years accumulate and take their toll on my body, more and more joints complain, some very loudly and persistently.
Whether it’s arthritis or decayed bones or broken tendons, muscles, and blood vessels, the complaining is voracious when it comes to consuming my time and abilities.
Ah, such is life past it’s best by date.
It’s not that the journey is over. There’s lots of time travelling (forward one day at a time) left. And I hear more than just angels telling me to get up and eat to strengthen my body, mind, and spirit for the day’s travels.
The 1.3 km path through the woods into the meadow is already providing challenges. With the snow already at the beginning of January as deep as it was at the end of winter last year, the coming and going is tricky to say the least. So much of my time and resources are spent (despite complaining joints) to make the path smooth, or at least smooth enough that I can continue to drag the route in with a piece of roofing tin supported by an odd assortment of screwed together wood. That beats the snow into a hard packed mess that makes it a bit easier coming and going, a bit, but not enough.
Now I would love to have the joints healed, and the road bed (the dirt, grass, and rock surfaces) make level so that snow clearing were so much simpler and coming and going when it all melts and turns to soft mud would be predictably possible. I haven’t seen that yet.
So I love this passage’s promise, but I just don’t see it happening.
Rather time travel steals more and more usefulness from my joints, and that’s just life, or at least life past one’s best by date.
Another day of challenges, meeting them as best as possible, trusting that God walks with me always. Do God’s joints complain when God walks with me? Kind of think they must, or at least something similarly, so that God has compassion and mercy and at least heals my spirit, one day at a time.
Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he the child I delight in? As often as I speak against him, I still remember him. Therefore I am deeply moved for him; I will surely have mercy on him, Says the Lord.
Ephesians 2:4-5
But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
Words of Grace For Today
New Year’s Resolutions are already being broken around the world. Old sins have accumulated and weighed people down to the point they see no other way ahead than to sin more and more as if digging themselves out of it all, when they actually are digging themselves deeper and deeper into the excrement of sins from generations upon generations.
And how does God deal with this, yet again?
God points out our sins!
And
God is merciful and gracious: God forgives us and frees us from the burdens of broken resolutions and accumulations of sins and sins’ excrementations.
And
God delights in us, as we move forward, not free from sin, but able to be saints in this chaos of life on this precious planet.
And
God adopts us as God’s own children, blesses us beyond our wildest imaginations, and sends us out
to share this mercy and grace with all other people.
Another day beginning another year, come what may, God is ready to walk with us through it all.
From Making Power for Our Insatiable Striving to Control Our World
is Ours
Numbers 23:19
God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind. Has he promised, and will he not do it? Has he spoken, and will he not fulfil it?
2 Corinthians 1:19
For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not ‘Yes and No’; but in him it is always ‘Yes.’
Words of Grace For Today
God is not human, vacillating with first this Word and then later a contrary Word, always indecision reflected as the inability to know and control what is to come. Rather God is Omniscient and All Powerful so that God’s Words and Promises are sure, to be trusted, and thus
we are to live accordingly.
Or else!
Right?
Not really. Not really at all, at all.
For God did become human, in Jesus, and in him Paul says all things are always Yes – not vacillating between Yes and No. Paul asserts this when he was caught out by having told the Corinthians of his plans to return to Corinth and then his actually not returning by choice or due to things beyond his control. Paul wants to reestablish his trustworthiness to the Corinthians by pointing out that Paul is, like Jesus, always trustworthy, though not in this case! And, if we are honest, it is never the case for any human.
Though some people intentionally lie and are very predictable in that they will do you harm if it is to their advantage, there is not a person ever who can know the future and control it, try as many may.
So we are left vacillating between our yes’s and our no’s and seem to be untrustworthy and out of control. That chaos evil people take advantage of, manipulating others’ destruction and their advantage.
And that is just how it is,
Right?
Not at all, not at all.
For God’s Word is sure, and while we must not comply with God’s Word, and in fact are woefully incapable of doing so consistently,
By God’s grace and by God’s grace alone, we get to live according to God’s Word, not that it ‘works to our advantage’
but in order that we are examples of how God works with woeful sinners like us, like you, like us all.
And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.
James 5:7
Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.
Words of Grace For Today
This is the time outside of time,
as it were.
Between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, a week of extra-ordinary time.
Time to contemplate the wonder of Christmas, Jesus born as one of us, giving us a clear story of God with us.
Time to remember who we are, and whose we are, and what wondrous, loving, and gracious things God has done for us great sinners to make us saints.
Time to remember the stories that make us live as we do, humble, generous, loving, and bringing wondrous news to all people: that God is for us!
God, the judge of all able to destroy all evil, relents and graciously moves us to plant and build today for a future for all people.
God provides this time for us to wait, again, for a new beginning, just as we sleep at night each night, waiting and trusting that God will forgive us that day’s sins and create in us clean hearts for the start of each new day, and each new year.
Time between,
Time between us being irrational people caught by emotions that confuse and mislead us, between that and rational minds that have no room for wonder and grace, and between all that (and more that we humans are in our feeble ways) and
the miracle that is God knowing us completely, choosing us, forgiving us, renewing us, calling and sending us out to share God’s Good News, the story of Jesus for us, and then God walking with us come what may.
Time
Time between
Time between the mundane and the mystery,
Time to be miracles of God’s making, living with emotions and using rational thought, and surrendering both to the mystery that is life, and God for us in this life.
And Others Make the Pollution For God to Deal With!
…
…
But If We Look Up Close and Are Honest
We Are Also So Broken,
and Only By Grace Do We Live,
But Oh How We Live
Blessed By God’s Grace.
First Kings 8:66
On the eighth day he sent the people away; and they blessed the king, and went to their tents, joyful and in good spirits because of all the goodness that the Lord had shown to his servant David and to his people Israel.
Luke 2:16-17
So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child;
Words of Grace For Today
God Speaks,
Things Happen,
Unexpected, Inexplicable, Wondrous Things.
God Acts,
which is the same as God speaking!
And we are astounded (if we care to notice at all) how God works in and among and for the poor, the outcasts, the lowest of the lowest, and the least remarkable people on earth to carry a message of Grace, Love, and Peace,
from God to us all.
Like shepherds, we get to go
to go out
to go out and tell the world
what great goodness, mercy, and blessings God has shown us
He said, ‘Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.’
John 1:18
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
Words of Grace For Today
Lots of ways to orient one’s life,
only one is a living God, born among us to poor parents, from a most unabashedly scandalous pregnancy, and heralded by the lowest of the lowest of society.
Thus it is we are thought to be fools, and yet we continue as servants to the poor, the sick, the needy, the imprisoned. We continue to humbly begin our ways in the world remembering not our own greatness, but God’s in dealing with our great sins. We continue to live in a peace from out of time and place while conflicts storm around us. We continue to effect change, not through power, might, and force, but through humility, compassion, love, and forgiveness.
We continue.
We continue to live life to it’s fullest, sharing that fullness with all we encounter.
The snow may be fresh, but our orientation in life is as old as the universe: it is God-given from the beginning
He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem; and the battle-bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.
Luke 2:14
Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!
Words of Grace For Today
As the nations wage war, as conflicts consume lives from billions to one single person by another, and as the Devil plays in God’s good creation:
God comes and commands that there be peace among all nations and for all people, for God favours us all.
The sun rises shining bright, lightening hearts and minds in these short days and lately these cloudy days.
The temperature rises to above -20⁰.
And small successes provide music worth listening to this season, blessed music that is not Xmas musak.
Christ is born this evening (we celebrate again the event of more than 2000 years ago.)
And there is cause to celebrate life in all it’s chaotic complications, time to pray for those close and far, and even for those who are bent on destroying me to cover their lies and injustice, and time to rest in God’s peace that permeates all.
What else would one do on Christmas Eve
.
.
.
if one is not caught in the manufactured celebrations and all the pain that go with them?
