Yesterday we were thinking about how our personal sense of spiritual poverty could be a blessing, in that it was the spiritual equivalent of hunger pangs, causing us to go to the Lord for sustenance. Psalm 36, from which we quoted yesterday, could also be the Old Testament answer to another of the beatitudes, ‘Blessed […]

I’ve always assumed that when Jesus said  ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven’ Matthew 5:3, that He was talking about an awareness of spiritual poverty that leads a person to salvation. I am thinking today that it is more than that, and that in fact Jesus meant it, […]

One of the things that seems to have come out of our meditations on thanksgiving over the last seven months is that thanksgiving and thankfulness is a living dynamic thing rather than a formula, or document, or procedure or even a rule that we must follow. Indeed when you think about it, it is something […]

In the bible, both Old and New Testaments, we see impossibilities become possible as people follow the leading of their God. We see babies born to women who are barren, a fully armed giant slain by a boy with no armour on, walls around a city fall when there are no battering rams, Joshua 6:20, […]

I was reading Jesus response to the two brothers, James and John, when they asked Him if they could sit ‘one on your right and the other at your left in your glory’. They clearly wanted to be the most favoured and the most important in His Kingdom. Jesus doesn’t tell them off but simply […]

Yesterday we were talking about the fact that there is always sufficient grace for every eventuality, and it occurred to me that sufficient is often the way God is with us. One step at a time, grace for the moment. It’s everflowing but it’s never all stored up. Why? Because it’s about ‘walking’ with the […]

I wonder how you woke up this morning? Fresh as the proverbial daisy? Feeling overwhelmed by what today holds? Feeling tired from a night of tossing and turning? Or excited by all the possibilities today brings? Probably for most of us there is a bit of a kaleidoscope going on with all of those things […]

When we find ourselves in a difficult situation or concerned about someone we love, I guess it’s an automatic reaction to ‘pray’, to talk to God. Now whether it’s a short sharp ‘HELP’ kind of prayer, a long deep intercessory prayer, or anything in between, we are often motivated by the circumstances that we see […]

In that amazing prophecy in Isaiah 61:1-6, which Jesus quoted in the synagogue in Nazareth, thereby confirming that it was indeed a Messianic mission statement, it tells us that the Spirit of the Lord would be on the Messiah, anointing Him to ‘preach good news to the poor, bind up the broken hearted, proclaim freedom […]

After I had my cataracts removed last year, I could undoubtedly see things very much more clearly and in  richer colour than I had become use to but, mysteriously, I still found that if I looked for example at the moon I would see two moons, a bright moon and a shadow. A recent visit […]