Every Day with Jesus

Mother Teresa once observed: ‘We are not called to do extraordinary things; we are called to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.’ This is the way of the heart. In the midst of a culture that prioritises intellect over friendship, independence over community, and success over love, the suggestion that our calling is to small things can seem odd. Yet when we think about it, we often encounte...

Sometimes I feel that I just can’t go on. I feel alone, lost, empty, abandoned. It’s painful.’ I wasn’t sure how to reply to Jane when she said this. I had to think: where do you find hope when everything seems to be hopeless? There is no easy answer to such a question. Nevertheless, the apostle Paul does give us a vital starting point. Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Living with dementia is not easy. It is a mixture of happiness and joy, sadness and grief, impossibility and new possibilities. As one person with dementia put it: ‘It’s more of a journey than a clear path.

The story of the prodigal son illustrates the foolishness of the son who thinks he knows best, and the grace of the father who waits patiently for him to return. I imagine many of us can identify with this story. We have all been in that distant country. We have all thought we knew better than God only to discover that God knows what God is talking about!

In the book of Genesis, we are given a wonderful vision of God creating everything that we know. He makes the moon, the mountains, the seas, the animals, the birds, the fish. God imagines a world of diversity and beauty and creates it out of love and for love. The highpoint of creation is the formation of Adam and Eve, the first two people whom God loved. 

The pressure of concealment is a heavy burden to carry. Our decision making is private unless we choose to reveal it. Adam hid from God and discovered nowhere lies outside God’s gaze. Past mistakes, deceptions, and untruths depend upon our carefully managed efforts to keep them hidden. 

There are two critical ways we are instructed in our Christian faith. Both are aspects of the spiritual house that God is building. Every house is separated into different rooms. Jesus teaches His disciples that when we pray, we are to go into our room, shut the door (Matt. 6:6). 

God invites us to join in collaborating with grace. Many are taught that grace means, ‘God’s riches at Christ’s expense’. The treasury of heaven opened to us through Jesus’ Passion. Christ becomes our foundational principle upon which we build our life, always engaging in collaboration where we discover the best and worst of ourselves. 

Watching demands paying attention to what’s happening around us, together with the influences at play within. The first are visible to others with many varied interpretations (as Job endured his friends’ unsought advice). 

It is only when God is present that anything of significance can take place. We may declare God is everywhere present, but the question remains, is God present with us in the here and now? Life’s a perpetual distraction from our personal encounter with God. 

The virtue of humility is seldom the objective of anyone’s character development programme today. In our age of celebrity culture, most prefer the lens of life to promote their personal worthiness, and humanity’s contemporary mantra is, ‘I’m noticed, therefore I am’. Whilst we might enjoy a modicum of success, we can take ourselves too seriously, failing to appreciate our true standing in God’s wo...

It’s difficult to own the fact that our personal contribution to world affairs is minimal. We collaborate with God under His direction, but our influence, whilst important, is negligible. Many seek to quantify the importance of their mortal life in its significance, but for disciples its importance lies in our attentiveness to God. 

One consistent challenge in the Christian life is the impossibility of proving God through empirical method, something based on verifiable evidence drawn from observation rather than theory. Christian confidence is established through faith, which Scripture describes as, ‘confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see’ (Heb. 11:1). 

Today the world will observe King Charles III’s coronation in Westminster Abbey in a thousand-year-old ceremony. Charles will be anointed and acclaimed King by the gathered assembly with the words, ‘God save the King!’ 

It’s difficult being honest about our heart desires. King David gazed at Bathsheba bathing and lust awoke in his heart and forcefully drove his decision taking (2 Sam. 11:2–5). The lesson’s clear! We are never best placed to evaluate the desires inflaming our hearts. This provides a foundational principle as we live every day with Jesus. 

We read Bible stories with the benefit of hindsight and life’s uncertainties appear easier when bravely experienced by some historic hero. Job, facing the loss of all he loved most followed by a brutal illness, pioneered a path of living hope through suffering that helps us with our pain today. 

Keeping hope alive when hard pressed is difficult for everyone. Here Peter encourages Christians to do so, even in the face of real hostility. There is no consensus on what constitutes life as a ‘living hope’. It is a process rather than a state. We see this as we change physically and psychologically with age. 

Peter, former fisherman and Christian disciple, encourages the Christian Church suffering their first violent persecution under Roman emperor Nero. This was brutal, a source of great fear amongst the early Christian communities. Scattered throughout what is today Turkey, these disciples found themselves the unwitting scapegoats for Nero’s personal plans for grandeur. 

Pressure makes its impact on all of us. A great metaphor is a car tyre. Four rubber rings filled with air keep us from disaster over various terrains at differing speeds. A tyre has inflated air pressure pushing outward to maintain its shape. It also experiences the external pressure exerted by the road surface pushing back and impacting that shape and the tyre’s performance. 

In this well-known story, Jonah receives instructions from God to deliver a warning message to the city of Nineveh. God has seen their ‘wickedness’ (v1). However, instead of obeying, Jonah runs away. The ship he’s on gets into trouble, he is found to be the reason, the sailors throw him overboard, and Jonah is swallowed whole by a large fish (v17). 

This psalm is a beautiful promise of ‘shelter’ and ‘rest’ in God. It is a psalm we often quote when we feel we are being attacked or oppressed in some way. Verse 2 tells us that God is a ‘refuge’ and a ‘fortress’, and later verses speak of salvation and covering. Whatever the terrors, seen or unseen, ‘no harm will overtake [us]’ (v10). 

Reading this passage in Ephesians encourages us to grasp the depth of the love of God, in Christ Jesus. Once we do, says the apostle Paul, we can be ‘filled to the measure of all the fullness of God’ (v19)! What would it be like for us to be filled with God’s fullness? In this passage is also found the astonishing promise that He is ‘able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, accordi...

The apostle Peter is telling his readers about the inheritance that is kept for believers in heaven, that ‘can never perish, spoil or fade’ (v4). Here, Peter encourages his readers that although we may suffer all kinds of trials and grief in this world, these troubles will prove the ‘genuineness of [our] faith’ (v7). 

This chapter is full of excitement and promise. We are spiritually blessed by God! It is through His ‘pleasure and will’ (v5) that we are adopted into His family. We have ‘redemption through his blood’ (v7) and all this is ‘lavished on us’ (v8) by our generous and loving heavenly Father. This is all for the glory of God; we have the security of being ‘marked… with a seal’ which is the Spirit (v13)...

Zacchaeus is determined to see Jesus! He is small, so he climbs up a tree to get a better view of the Lord passing through Jericho; he couldn’t get a proper view any other way. His tenacity is rewarded as Jesus tells him that He is going to spend time with Zacchaeus at his house!