Category: Smoke

Required Perfection

Thursday 12 January 2023

Oil Fuels Our Circumstances, and Destroys Creation.

Love Fuels Our Hearts and Heals Creation.

Deuteronomy 10:12

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,

1 John 2:5

but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. By this we may be sure that we are in him:

Words of Grace For Today

The formula for life is simple, so people say: just do everything just and righteous, obeying God’s commands, and you will live perfectly, well, and blessed.

The formula for a terrible life is simple: do that and you are for sure going to suffer, suffer, suffer.

Even after Jesus’ story is there for us to learn and treasure, even after the light of the star of the Magi has come and gone and we can learn of it and treasure it, even after so many have ‘discovered’ the key to life and faith is God’s Grace and written, preached, and lived so that we can read their words and treasure them, we humans trundle back to our old and failing ways: we live as if it is all up to us and what we do is the key.

Doing, striving, and learning to do better, and even ‘discovering’ all we can about God’s love for us and all creation are certainly crucial parts of life. It’s just that when we place them at the top of our priorities and the top of the causation chain for how life should develop for us, then we are in for lots of miserable living. Oh, we may acquire riches, power, and fame, but our hearts will be miserable.

Our hearts determine more about our lives than our external circumstances. Our hearts guide us to strive for more and more for our greedy, selfish, perverted selves OR

our hearts can guide us to the key to living a blessed life: love.

First we realize and acknowledge anew that God loves us first and most powerfully, overwhelmingly so. Then we can acknowledge and confess again and again that we are greedy, selfish, and destructive people, greatly in need of forgiveness and a new start in life so that we can live free of our woeful sins (as they all are) and live to love others with God’s love, which is to love ourselves as well. Then we realize that even before we sin so terribly, God loves us, and graciously forgives us our past sins and our present sins and even our future sins, all so that we can live free of them, free to love God and God’s creation with all our hearts, minds, and strength.

Then we get to work, strive, learn and delve into making the circumstances of others’ lives better, as a demonstration of how God forgives us, and how God is ready to forgive them.

That’s the blessing of life, and the required ‘perfection’ of life: to rely not on our own sinful selves, but to rely on God’s forgiveness, and then to get working at making life right for others.

When we are unsure of our place with God, then we realize again and again, it is not up to us to fix it, for God has already done that. That is the security of life, the only security in life, the only thing that is sure. God has done it for us, done love extraordinaire though we deserve nothing of it at all, at all.

Vacillations

Thursday 29 December 2022

Whether By Night

Or By Day,

The Beauty Is God’s,

The Pollution

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.

God Works Not With Perfect

but with us.

Monday 26 December 2022

We’d Like to Think We Are Perfect

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

simple

poor

outcast

broken and sinful

folk.

Rain With A Chance of Lava

Wednesday 7 December 2022

The Outsider.com Provides This Sighting

Isaiah 5:22-23

Ah, you who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!

Philippians 4:8

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Words of Grace For Today

We get used to somethings in life that keep repeating themselves everyday.

Like there being many who are ‘heroes in drinking wine’ and many who ‘acquit the guilty for a bribe’ and ‘deprive the innocent of their rights’ for these are the ways of those lost to addiction and care little for their responsibilities to provide justice for all people. These ‘heroes’ proceed easily through each day, corrupting justice without batting an eye, because it is done routinely, regularly, expectedly so. Expectedly so except by the innocent who are condemned to suffer the injustice of being called criminals they are not. Expectedly so except for the victims of crimes who see the guilty parties walk free. Expectedly so even by the children of God, for we are not blind to evil, and we do not support it, so instead the injustice is turned against us, easily so.

In Hawaii the usual forecast is for temperatures around 21⁰, sunny with a little wind. Occasionally the forecast shifts to rain for a few hours, a warm rain before it shifts back to sunny and pleasant.

So these days when the forecast is for: Cloudy with a chance of Lava, it catches people’s attention.

The big one, Mauna Loa volcano, is erupting spewing out smoke and gases and liquid, freeky-hot-melt-everything-it-touches lava. The eruptions go on and on and are a spectacular site. Tourists flock to catch a glimpse of the upheaval.

But it’s dangerous. The lava, of course, is a deadly thing. The reach of the ‘smoke’ and ash is far greater, and unpredictable … and deadly. The ash is caustic. The ‘smoke’ is made up of a number of gases that are toxic to life. Breathe enough in and that’s the last one worries about breathing … or anything else.

We know that the forecast of ‘clouds and a risk of lava’ may seem humorous but that is the forecast God provides for those who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of their rights!

We might well cheer and flock to see the event, like ‘lava chasers.’ The greatest risk is that we, too, will be caught in such exterminations of evil doers, for none of us are without sin.

So we pray, Lord save us and all your people from forecasts of ‘clouds and a chance of lava’, also this day.

May our lives be predictably in your hands, blessed for us and for those around us.