We have been considering how ‘giving thanks’ keeps us walking in step with the Lord. It keeps us connected in faith with Him, through busy times, overstretched times, and it keeps us in good relationship with Him through those challenging times of deciding what is the right way for us, in the face of some […]

Yesterday we reflected on how thanksgiving helps me to say ‘No’ to things that are too much or do not seem to be what God wants me to do. This opens up a fresh vista – that is that thanksgiving is a means of protection, a defense. We have considered over the last few months […]

Yesterday we were looking at how pausing to give thanks to the Lord regularly throughout our day can help us to keep in step with the Lord and to accomplish all that the day holds at His pace. Nevertheless I am sure that we are all aware how easy it is to overload the system, […]

Do you ever look at the diary and think ‘I’m not sure how I’m going to manage all the demands or find the time needed for everything this week!’  Sometimes when we look ahead at a busy week, we can rush into things trying to ‘get ahead’ or at least ‘stay on top’ of things. […]

In the family of God we are encouraged to ‘give no offence either to Jews or Greeks or to the church of God’. 1 Corinthians 10:32. Paul is of course referring here particularly to whether it was ok to eat certain foods. The antidote he said was to take part in a meal with ‘thankfulness’. […]

Faith is a great mystery. I don’t mean ‘saving faith’ but the faith that moves mountains or that sees healings and miracles. We know that it is God’s power that heals, but even when Jesus had felt that power leave Him for healing He said to the woman who touched Him, “Daughter, your faith has […]

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, […]