Tag: Mercy

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2020 Bible Reflections

April 14th 2020: Psalm 136

1 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.
His love endures forever.
2 Give thanks to the God of gods.
His love endures forever.
3 Give thanks to the Lord of lords:
His love endures forever.

4 to him who alone does great wonders,
His love endures forever.
5 who by his understanding made the heavens,
His love endures forever.
6 who spread out the earth upon the waters,
His love endures forever.
7 who made the great lights—
His love endures forever.
8 the sun to govern the day,
His love endures forever.
9 the moon and stars to govern the night;
His love endures forever.

10 to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt
His love endures forever.
11 and brought Israel out from among them
His love endures forever.
12 with a mighty hand and outstretched arm;
His love endures forever.

13 to him who divided the Red Sea[a] asunder
His love endures forever.
14 and brought Israel through the midst of it,
His love endures forever.
15 but swept Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea;
His love endures forever.

16 to him who led his people through the wilderness;
His love endures forever.

17 to him who struck down great kings,
His love endures forever.
18 and killed mighty kings—
His love endures forever.
19 Sihon king of the Amorites
His love endures forever.
20 and Og king of Bashan—
His love endures forever.
21 and gave their land as an inheritance,
His love endures forever.
22 an inheritance to his servant Israel.
His love endures forever.

23 He remembered us in our low estate
His love endures forever.
24 and freed us from our enemies.
His love endures forever.
25 He gives food to every creature.
His love endures forever.

26 Give thanks to the God of heaven.
His love endures forever.

You can listen to today’s Psalm here: Psalm 136 audio
How often do you wish you could be sure that the goodness of God was a reality? How often do you find yourself hearing about this God from other people, perhaps people who seem a little off, or a little odd, but who also have a kind of contentment and confidence that the God they talk about loves them? And not just them either, but that the love he has for them could extend to anyone around who asked for it. People who don’t ‘get’ Christians (and there are lots of reasons not to ‘get’ Christians) often find it off-putting, infuriating even, that when things are tough and all the visible evidence points to God having long ago left the building, the faith of the one who truly trusts God remains strong. It makes no sense at all. Why would a person, or people, who appear to have been cut off, a people who have been let down, disappointed, hurt even, by the God who they put their trust in, keep on going back to him with love and trust and with thankful hearts.
It’s all in the psalm above what I’m writing here. The love of God has endured throughout everything that Israel has faced.
And so it endures today, through everything we face, whether individually or as a society. What will be remembered about us who claimed to have faith in God as we lived through the time of Covid-19 a hundred, two hundred, even a thousand years from now? Will it be that we remained thankful and praised God for his goodness? I hope so.
As we think back to the love Jesus showed and lived out through all he did at the first Easter, remember that whatever it seems like now, death is defeated, fear has no power anymore, unless we decide to allow it to have power in our lives. I’m bad at being fearful. It happens to me a lot, but the perfect love of God, love that endures forever, triumphs over fear. If we ask God into our lives, in he comes. And we need never be the same after that.
Something To Do
Write a list of all that you’re thankful for today. Give it time so that you don’t just write down the things that first come to mind. Then
Something To Pray
Thank God for each one in turn.
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April 2016

April 4th 2016: Romans 5:12-21

With apologies to those who have been waiting, and probably given up, for these posts to return after a two-week break. I decided to pare down what I worked on in the week before Easter, and have then been on holiday this past week. Normal service will now, I hope, be resumed.

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

 ‘Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.’

Do we believe what Paul says about the saving work of Jesus Christ (his death and resurrection) here? People have spent whole lifetimes trying to work out the salvific value of the cross, to whom it applies and what must be done in order to benefit from its consequence (or, to be crude, to be saved). Who’s in? Who’s out? What do we do to get ‘in’?

There are things that Christians are expected to do. We are to love others at least as much, if not more, than we love ourselves. We are to love the poor. We are to partner with God in building his new way of life here, because has given us that privilege. We are, primarily, to love God with everything we have, worshipping him, but not just with Rend Collective songs, or Charles Wesley hymns, with who we are and how we live. We’re to prioritise service, with everything we have, including our money. We’re to pray for those in authority, speaking the truth in love to power.

But none of that, in and of itself, gives life to anyone. Jesus Christ gives life and justification, purpose and all that goes with it, to everyone. Not just some people, his one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all, Paul says. All. Not just some. There’s no contraction or contingency here based on us behaving rightly in order to receive the undeserved consequences of the act of righteousness. We don’t even have to say a special prayer at a particularly emotive moment in our lives. Jesus has brought justification and life to all.

If this is true, and I can see already the sharpening of keyboards everywhere quoting various scriptures that might argue against it, doesn’t this have a monumental impact on everything? Perhaps Paul misunderstood salvation. Well, wouldn’t that be interesting. Some of us would struggle with that even being possible. Perhaps he’s journeying with his thinking on the issue. Perhaps what he really meant isn’t what has been communicated to us by the translation here. I wonder what Jesus would have to say about what he is asserting here.

But what about this: what if the greatest lie the devil uses in this age to confuse and concern people, aside from the one about not existing at all, is that Jesus did not know what he meant when he said ‘it is finished’ on the Cross? Wouldn’t that be a neat and powerful trick? See, I believe Jesus did know what he meant. Exactly what he meant. He meant that we have life and justification. Not so that we could build edifices, power structures, empires, whole industries, around his name and following him. We have life and justification so we can share it with everyone, those who know the life Jesus has won for them and those who do not.

A time is coming when evil’s complete annihilation and the total, final victory of love will become plain to all. This is the promise of the Cross and the wonder of the grace and mercy of God. So, lots of fine and fancy words, but what difference will they make to how we live today?

 

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March 2016

March 9th 2016: Hebrews 10:1-18

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

‘I will remember their sins and lawless deeds no more’

Today’s is one of the most amazing passages in the whole of Scripture (in my opinion). Jesus gave a single offering for all sin, which was sufficient to satisfy the demands of justice. The law of love wins! All the offering and sacrificing we can do will not ever lead us to freedom, Jesus’s gift to us is the only thing that can do that.

And not only that, as the quote at the top of this post says, God promises that he will put sins and lawless deeds out of his mind. He will not remember them. This seems entirely contrary. I keep a record of my own wrongs, even though I shouldn’t. More than this, I am bad at keeping a record of the wrongs of others. Am I loving them? When we find ourselves living in times when injustice is meted out to the poor on an institutional scale and every reading of a news article’s ‘under the line’ comments section indicates a national hardening of heart towards those who are in need, there is a rising within me of a desire for justice (which I think is good) as well as a desire for the restoration for balance (still good, I think) and finally a desire for some kind of redress (this is where it gets bad, I think). We are to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God. If, at any point I find myself claiming that I am less in need of the grace and mercy of God than those who vote for or implement unjust laws, those whose opinions I disagree with, however strongly, claiming that those things are more sinful and in need of mercy than I am, then I deceive myself.

We live in times when it is all too easy to be fearful. Just look at the political leadership situations in most of the most powerful nations of the world. But God is my light and my salvation, whom then shall I fear? We have a God who could remember our sins and lawless deeds, who could count them against us, who could do anything he likes at any moment. He chooses grace and mercy. Let’s do the same today.

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March 2016

March 4th 2016: Hebrews 7:11-28

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

‘…accordingly Jesus has also become the guarantee of a better covenant’.

The Christian life can be so hard, a series of tests and challenges, one after another. We can, if we’re not careful, spend a very large portion of our faith-lives seeking to ensure that the deposit God made in us with the gift of the Holy Spirit comes to fruition. If we just do this, do that, say this, say that, all will be well.

But then we fail and fall, we think the wrong things, say the wrong things, do the wrong things. Again, and again, and again and blasted again, and we know that the deposit is being wasted. Or worse, we essay along in blissful ignorance of what we’re doing, its consequences and the impact we are having on ourselves and others. We’ve all been there at times, I would wager.

Jesus, because of his obedience to God and the call that was placed on his life, has GUARANTEED a better covenant, a better relational contract, between God and his people. It isn’t a might or a maybe. It is a done deal. It is God’s promise, as our eternal pursuer that this new relational status, won for us by Jesus, will be honoured. We can live forgiven and free, spending our whole lives working out what that actually means, every time we come to a conclusion realising there is more forgiveness and more freedom to be had, all because of Jesus. I can’t do it alone, earn it alone, or satisfy the right demands of it all alone. Jesus has done it all. All glory to him.

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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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A Song A Month

A Song A Month For February 2016: Light Has Come

I’m really pleased today to release the video blog for February’s A Song A Month, ‘Light Has Come’.

Most of you reading this will know that I’m a disabled person. I try not to bang on about it all the time, but being disabled is part of me, it’s not something I can easily avoid, and so instead I try and embrace it, without making a fuss.

Years ago now, I did a Disability Studies Masters by Distance Learning from the University of Leeds. One of the key people on the course, Colin Barnes, challenged me to write songs about my experience of disability. ‘We need more protest songs’, he said. I always fought shy of writing about disability, mostly because I didn’t feel I had the language to write about it well in a song. I haven’t wanted to be a protest songwriter. I’m no Martyn Joseph.

Over the last few years though, perhaps as I get older and some of the idealism of youth wears off, I’ve found myself finding the UK a harder and harder place to live as a disabled person. I personally am a very fortunate man. I have a family, a wife who I love and who loves me. I have a faith which sustains me, and I feel like I’m able to make a contribution to my community, and to society, in a variety of ways. The fact remains though that I am in physical pain of one sort or another all of every day (like a lot of people, a lot of whom have it worse than me) and more than this, mentally and emotionally, I face challenges and hurdles to overcome many times daily, because I use a wheelchair and am disabled. It’s hard to explain or quantify. It’s simply how it is. I hate being disabled. Much as I’m supposed to be well-adjusted to it all, I wish I wasn’t.

But I know full well that my life isn’t as hard as it is for a great many other people, whether they are disabled people, or whether they experience other things in life which marginalise them and make them part of minority groups they never asked to be in. I truly believe that, as people of social conscience, Christian or not, we are called to be prophetic, whether we’re off faith or not. I believe we’re called to stand and hold one another to account for how we treat each other, whether we are ‘successful’, functionally well, impaired, old, young, or anything else. It saddens me to sense a corporate, societal, hardening of heart towards people with disabilities. Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps I’m entirely mistaken, but that’s my sense.

February’s A Song A Month is a humble offering, inviting us to see that there is a better way to live, a better way to treat one another, to treat ourselves. A Light Has Come.

Thanks once again to Pete Thorn for playing on this song, and his help with the video.

Download the lyrics to Light Has Come by clicking here

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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 19th 2016: Galatians 5:16-26

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

‘If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.’

I’ve known for a long time what the fruit (singular) of the Spirit is, as contained in today’s passage. It’s another of those elements of Scripture that gets drummed in to you as you grow up in Church and are encouraged towards maturity in faith. It can be used as a measure of ‘how you’re doing’,or something used to hold you accountable. These can be great, loving, generous, kind and so on, or can be used as instruments of judgement, either by others against us, or for us against ourselves. If we’re not showing enough patience, kindness, gentleness and so on, we can make ourselves think that we don’t have enough of the Spirit, that God is disappointed with us, or even that the Spirit has given up on us and left. We can be convinced that this is entirely justified. It is highly possible to enter in to a cycle of transactional faith and failure where we welocme God in to our lives, then fail and fall, let him down, lose him and then the whole thing starts again. Some of our pastoral care structures can actually exacerbate this. I’m convinced that, actually, some of us prefer this highly emotive way of doing faith. It gives us something to focus on (our failings) and makes it more about us than it is about God.

But, the fruit of the Spirit is the Spirit’s fruit. It is the Spirit’s to give, to nurture and to see to fruition. We live in partnership with God because he invites us in to that place, but the Spirit can give its fruit to whosoever it wishes, at whatever time it wishes. All of us, if we’re honest and self-aware, should have no trouble coming up with reasons why God should not bless us, but that’s the point of the gospel. According to our standards, no-one should be loved by God, but by his, everyone is. So don’t let the disappointments of life distract you. God is continuing to plan seeds in your life that will grow in to full bloom.

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February 2016

February 12th 2016: Galatians 3:1-14

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

Did you get it yesterday?

One of Paul’s favourite writing traits is to repeat himself. If a point’s worth making, why not make it over, and over, and over, and over again? As one of the first great evangelistic Christian preachers, Paul wanted to leave his hearers, those who had his letters read to them, in absolutely no doubt whatsoever: the law of the Old Testament does not save anyone. It does not provide a path to salvation. It only brings the possibility of fallure, of death, ultimately. Jesus, the Way, the Truth, the Life is, in his very nature, the answer to this problem. He is where life is. He is its source, it flows from him, into the lives of all who will receive it. I’m challenged again and again in recent times, is my faith in my relationship with God, a relationship which was made possible by Jesus Christ, or is it in an idea, a set of morals, a way of living? There’s nothing wrong with living well, seeking to honour God, love others and love ourselves, but if loving Jesus and making him known is not at the heart of it, we’re the ones who are missing out. Fight against any instinct or temptation to be ensnared in law or legalism. Embrace love, embrace Jesus as he opens his arms of love to you today.

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February 2016

February 11th 2016: Galatians 2:11-21

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

If you’re a Christian, and you have been for any length of time, you’ll probably know this passage. It’s one of Paul’s most famous ‘explanations’ of the insufficiency of the Old Testament Law for salvation. I use inverted commas because his explanation is closely-argued and takes some teasing out. It’s a rich banquet of hope which reveals more and more tender morsels of delight with each fresh reading. This is definitely not a passage to skim read once and move on!

As I reflect on it today, the challenge it presents to me is this: I’ve been freed from the demands of the Old Testament law, because they were fulfilled by Jesus. I’ve been freed, made new, made alive, by the Spirit of God, which dwells within me. All things are possible with God. All things are permissible, even as many things are not helpful for me, for all people.

So, I need to stop living as if there is any other law but love. I do not benefit from exchanging one crippling law code, the one of the Old Testament, for another, the weight of expectation I place on myself and allow others to place on me. In fact I suffer. Grievously. So, more to the point, do those around me. Even more to the point, this was never, as far as I can see, God’s intention. Freedom is freedom. Freedom with caveats or constraints is no kind of freedom at all, it is the exchange of one set of barriers for another. That’s the point of the good news Jesus came to tell and to live out for us. Every barrier between God and man is now broken down. We might try and build them up again to make ourselves more comfortable – after all, most of us like to, actually, give control to others, most of us are used to and prefer to carry an element of caution in the way we live, which quickly morphs into fear and anxiety if given the chance. Freedom is freedom is freedom is freedom, is….freedom. Jesus did not die and rise that we might seek to enslave ourselves again.If our approaches to faith, the way our Churches or faith communities function, force us into a way of being and existing which stipulates the possibility of condemnation, we have missed the point. Where the spirit of the Lord, there is freedom.

Of course, we are to live responsibly in the way we love God, others and ourselves. We’re to make good use of the gifts we are given in seeking to serve others, build others up, building the kingdom of God. By no means do we have carte blanche to live just as we please to the detriment of anyone else. We are freed for lives of joyful obedience. Obedience to the law of love, to live the way of the master, the way of the cross, the way that leads to life, the way that glorifies God.