Tag: CofE

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March 2016

March 3rd 2016: Hebrews 7:1-10

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

A King of Peace and a King of Righteousness. Sound familiar? Melchizedek is a ‘type’, or a forerunner of Jesus, just as earlier in Hebrews (6:20) we are told that Jesus is our forerunner, entering in on our behalf. The writer of Hebrews is at pains to show us that Jesus follows after Melchizedek, is the only one to surpass his righteousness, and is therefore worthy of all the glory, honour and praise that is and should be given to him.

As we are in Christ, it is possible that we, too, can be people of peace and righteousness. Melchizedek was a ‘type’ for Jesus, In turn Jesus accomplished all that he did for us and showed us the way, the pattern for the life of faith. So we are to seek to honour God, love one another in the way that we love ourselves and take seriously our roles as forerunners pointing the way to Jesus and his life and love.

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March 2016

March 2nd 2016: Hebrews 6:13-20

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

‘…a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul’.

Time and time again with these pieces, I find myself drawn to the unchangeable truths of the promises of God found in scripture as opposed to the entirely changeable nature of my feelings and emotional responses to them. Again we find ourselves here today. The truth of the good news of Jesus Christ is that his victory enables him to be ‘a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul’. If I am find in and with him, I am surely and steadfastly in the place I need to be, and I can live from there. If I do not accept that Jesus is a sure and steadfast anchor, because of things that happen, how I feel about them, mistakes I make, thoughts I have which are more refined and evolved than those expressed in scripture, then I am not stepping beyond God. Instead, I am making my life, and the life of faith, more complicated than it actually is, was meant to be, or ever should be. We all need something, or someone to hold on to. Jesus is that something and that someone. It is simple. It is not complicated. He is sure and steadfast. I have never found anything else that is. And I’ve looked. Hard.

My anchor will hold in the storms of life, because my anchor is not me, it is Jesus. He can be yours too. Just ask him. Do it. Today

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March 2016

March 1st 2016: Hebrews 5:11-6:12

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

Writing about Hebrews these last few days has been something of a challenge. The language is so direct, so stark. The warnings are dire. And yet it is shot through with such grace and hope. As Christians, we should focus on the hope of a passage such as yesterday’s, without ever losing sight of the battle that we are engaged in, that is being waged around us, over us and within us. Even as Jesus has won the greatest victory, evil is all around us, trying to devour us, divert us from the path of following the way of the King.

We are hidden with Christ in God. This has become a powerful truth for me this year. On the (many) days when I have doubted myself, my calling, my abilities, whether my body or my mind are able to sustain what is required of me to be this person and do these things, I’ve returned again and again to this. All around, battles rage. In society, between nations, war is waged on the poor and needy, the elderly, the infirm, the widow and the orphan. At all these, and the many other wars that are seen and unseen, it appears that it is the hope of the enemy to distract, divert and devour, but we can stand firm on the truth of the love of God, the truth of the good news of Jesus Christ. But we shouldn’t just stand firm, prim and proper in splendid isolation. Everyone needs this. It’s not just for us who are aware that God loves us, it’s for everyone.

So don’t fall away. Don’t leave the path. Even if you’re stumbling, crawling along today, keep going. Let someone else carry you for a few steps if need be, but keep going, and keep your eyes, your heart, your mind, the core of what makes you you, focused on God. Being alive, right now, following Jesus, that’s what this is all about.

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February 2016

February 29th 2016: Hebrews 4:14-5:10

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

It doesn’t matter how many times we read the words in today’s reading, I pray they never become comfortable to us, or the kind of words that we read quickly, pass over and move on. These are words of such immense power, such grace, such a magnitude of force that we cannot afford to treat them with anything less than awe.

Because of who Jesus is, the life he lived, what he did on the Cross, that he was able to do because of how he lived, we can approach the ‘throne of grace’, we can approach God, with confidence. Confidence! If Jesus had been someone else, or lived a different kind of life, we would only be able to approach God with trepidation. But instead, we can go to God confidently.

Do you go to God confidently? I can’t say I do that often. I approach with timidity, fear often. I remember the things I’ve done which have fallen way short of God’s glory and way for my life. I panic when I enter into prayer. Thoughts rush by as I remember all the reasons I don’t deserve to be here, in this moment, doing this thing, conversing with God. But that’s the point. I am forgiven and free. Because of Jesus. So are you. That’s it. That’s everything. End of. We’ve been invited to approach God with confidence and then to go, to go with him wherever he may send us. So let’s approach, approach boldly.

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February 2016

February 27th 2016: Hebrews 4:1-13

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

I’ve often wondered about what kind of mood the writer of Hebrews was in when this letter was written. There’s just a sense to it of negativity and worry that I don’t perceive in a lot of the rest of the New Testament. Everything is cautious, tempered, careful. And so I wonder, how does how we are feeling about things change how we talk about God? ‘Salvation’  looks very different when things are going well, I suggest, compared to  what it looks like when everything we are is threatened, even though ‘being saved’ and what that entails actually remains the same. We have an unchanging God, but our perspectives, our language, our experiences, these must change. For them to stay the same is, potentially at least, to deny that the ‘living and active’ element of his word, and his Word, Jesus. We can’t be made new, transformed by each encounter with the Spirit, and yet simultaneously remain the same. This is not feasible. Similarly, it seems to me that one of the main points of a life of faith is to be open to the Spirit’s prodding to the broadening of horizons and thoughts, so that we able to see and acknowledge more of God, his glory, and share it with those around us.

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February 26th 2016: Hebrews 3:7-19

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

‘Today if you hear his voice, Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.’

I wonder, are you someone who hears God speak audibly to you? Some people say it happens to them all the time. To my knowledge, it’s happened to me only once in my life, but that once was a life-altering experience I may write about here another time. God speaks in a variety of ways: audibly, through scripture, through other people, quite often, it seems to me, through people who make no claim at all to follow his way, but speak through them he definitely does anyway.

So, we could hear God’s voice often, if we are ready for it. Are we ready for it? Are we expecting him to speak? What if it’s in a way that we’ve not experienced before? Will we be open to hearing, listening and responding? It can feel so unlikely, at points in our lives, that God might speak, that when he does, we’ve already decided the way we want to go. For whatever reason, sometimes seemingly for very good reasons, our hearts have hardened. We’ve stopped recognising that we need God. We’ve stopped acknowledging him. He’s been relegated to a part of our lives we go to when it suits us, and instead we exist in our own kind of regal splendour, making our own decisions, living just as we want to. Sometimes we might do good. Sometimes we might do right, but things are decidedly out of order.

God is speaking to us. Are we listening?

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February 2016

February 25th 2016: Hebrews 3:1-6

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

‘the builder of a house has more honour than the house itself’

It’s good when things are doing ‘right’ in Church isn’t it? You know what I mean. We’ve all been here. We’ve all been the people saying these things. Traditions upheld, prayers prayed in the right way, in the right order, with the right language, tone, sense of decorum. It’s always been done this way. Let’s keep the show on the road shall we?

Or perhaps you have been like me in thinking along these lines: the house [Church] will fall apart if it, its teachings, its heritage, are not maintained, honoured, cherished. How quickly, even in thinking that by holding on to heritage, teachings, history handed down through generations that we honour God, do we enter the realm of risk of elevating our Churches, our callings, our thoughts (I say this to myself) over God himself. God builds the house. Unless he builds it, the labourers, us, labour in vain. All the things we hold to as of crucial importance may well be crucially important, but God is the one who’s name is the name we are to honour and praise. He is the one who is worthy of it. The Church is the body. We are to love it, help it to grow ever more into the likeness of Christ, always seeking to honour God most highly of all.

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February 2016

February 24th 2016: Hebrews 2:10-18

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

‘Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.’

This follows what we were talking about yesterday. One of the many glories of Jesus is that he experienced life as we do, as every other human has done. He suffered like we suffer. In the deepest possible sense, he empathises with us as we experience pain, fear, disappointment, anger, loss, grief. In one sense, it would be of very little use to us if, when approaching God in prayer about a particularly painful issue, we had no confidence that he had any idea what that was like. But that is not the case God suffered for us, he suffers with us. He knows what it feels like. He is with us through whatever life throws at us and helps us to persist, to persevere, that we might finally be able to reach the point where we are so content and confident in our lives of faith that the things that used to distract us from walking with Jesus lose their power. Jesus experienced the full weight of everything evil could throw at him. He could, at any point, have decided to step aside from the path that God was asking him to walk down and make life more comfortable or easier for himself, but he did not. He persevered, all the way to the cross and the first glorious Easter Day so that we could have lives of hope, joy and freedom with God. One day, the sufferings of this life will be over. They will. Until then we are not alone, let’s walk this road less travelled together.

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February 2016

February 23rd 2016: Hebrews 2:1-9

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

Jesus was crowned with glory because of the suffering of death. Suffering of death which he chose to undertake so that people would be pointed to God and that the world might be saved through him. It’s easy to sanitise Christianity, to make it about doing good works, being kind, generous, putting others before ourselves, but it is important to remember that the heart of the Christian faith is worshipping one who suffered death, defeated it, rose again and calls us daily to carry a figurative (in most cases) cross, just like he did. Suffering of one sort or another is part of all of our lives. It will be part of the experience of being a Christian. There’s no way of avoiding it. We’re not called to suffer unnecessarily, or to seek out harder ways of living and doing things for the sake of it. When we do suffer, we can do it in the knowledge that the God who is in us, the hope of glory, has walked the path of suffering before us.

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February 2016

February 22nd 2016: Hebrews 1

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

‘Your throne, oh God, is forever and ever.’

It does us good to remember this sometimes. In the midst of the busyness of the ups and downs of life, whilst we spend untold hours and days trying to ‘understand’ God and work out what it means to follow Jesus, a verse like this can be very important. We live for God. We love and work on his behalf, perhaps. Sometimes this can take the form of it seeming as if God has delegated making sure everything goes well to us. We have the Spirit, but actually it’s about what we think, say, how we act, that’s what brings about the Kingdom of God. It’s by our efforts, rather than by our love that people will know we are Christians.

But the point is this: the one who saved us, the one who came to be one of us, who makes us new, lives within us and gives us light to shine into all the world; the throne is his, he has earned it, it belongs to him. We can worry if we like. It will do us no good whatsoever. God’s throne is his. All will, actually, definitely and once and for all, be well. Trusting God can seem like the hardest thing in the world to do. We’re always being challenged and questioned, perhaps even scoffed at, for doing so. But it is the single thing we can do which glorifies God, and empowers us, the most.