Every Day with Jesus

‘That the devil has already been defeated and his kingdom laid waste – in the past tense for the New Testament authors – exposes him as little more than a raging beast, one with decidedly more bark than bite.’

War is devastating, as that between Russia and Ukraine has brought home to us all this year. Bertrand Russell, a lifetime pacifist, wrote, ‘Either Man will abolish war, or war will abolish Man.’* It can prove controversial to adopt the language of warfare in reference to our walk with God, yet Scripture makes it plain that we are in the battle of our lives.

Absalom’s rebellion begins, but Ittai, a Philistine, chooses to follow David. When questioned why, Ittai responds that he’ll follow the king regardless of the cost, even if it means death. When the Holy Spirit examines our choices and actions, what will they reveal about our Christian faith? Will we be found to be following a false king like Absalom?

One constant challenge for Christians is when life takes a turn for the worse, no matter what we plan or do (2 Sam. 12:11). Within us there’s a deeply rooted survival instinct. Despite our internet age someone has remarked, ‘You can take the person out of the Stone Age, but you can’t take the Stone Age out of the person.’

The challenge we have with sin is that once we react inappropriately, as Cain did here in his anger with God in accepting Abel’s and not his offering (v5), we open a door to a sin sequence with the potential for horrendous consequences.

Adam and Eve leave Eden in disobedience yet clothed in God’s promise. The Garden wasn’t evil, but they wilfully chose to violate God’s instruction. Paul reflects their struggle, one common to us all. We must learn that we too live subject to the subtle temptations of God’s enemy, Satan.

On discovering their nakedness, Adam and Eve immediately attempted to cover a shame they’d never known. Knowledge of good can only exist with a knowledge of its counterpart, evil. They fashioned fig leaves into clothing, a sign of lost innocence.

Having eaten from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes are opened and they see their nakedness, a vulnerability of which they’d been unconscious in their former state of innocence. Always seeing what was around them, now they had sight of their inner makeup, conscious of wrong and right.

Hope is our greatest imagined good, the source for our optimism. Pandemics, wars, and life’s many challenges quickly dampen such optimism. However, hope is something that can help keep us focussed on the good we visualise.

Self-determination poses the question of just how independent we are. We can’t make a decision to break the law without facing consequences, the price of policing in a social contract we support with its promise of peace, prosperity, and privacy.

Self-determination is critical to psychological wellbeing and personal growth.* Human development requires that we must feel in control of our behaviour, free will. Eve takes control of her environment and approves the fruit which she takes and eats, taking direct action for herself.

In learning how to live the Christian life we’re given two examples – Adam and Jesus, the first and the last Adam. Whilst the first introduced death and decay into humanity, the second illustrated the possibility of heaven on earth.

We’ve observed that God places decision taking squarely in our hands. This free will precedes the Fall, demonstrating God has no interest in micro-managing His creation. In his state of innocence, Adam heard God’s advice with nothing to compare it to or contradict it. He was comfortable taking God at His word, yet trouble loomed.

Making sense of life presents a challenge for us all, one that stretches well beyond our years of anticipated adolescent struggles with meaning and identity. Whilst we seek to manage our life and keep it within the safety of the banks between which it flows, sudden storms can cause a flood and the river is replaced by a borderless lake that drowns everything beneath its waters.

A refuge is a place we run back to. As an injured child turns to a parent for comfort, so we, confused by an unresolved mystery, can run back to God, who offers reassurance and comfort, though the source of our pain remains unresolved. We need to find some comfort when our reaction to such pain is an outburst of emotion.

Afriend once said to me, ‘God’s clock keeps perfect time’, referring to how we often need to wait for God to act. Our temptation is to step in when God appears slow in showing up. Joshua and the Israelites have now safely crossed the Jordan and, like their earlier Red Sea crossing, witnessed a miracle.

Today we’re inundated with valuable resources online, in print, and at conferences. There’s almost too much information and a danger we may try to live a life that is not our own. Consider David, trained as a shepherd to protect sheep from wild animals, then dressed in Saul’s armour which severely restricted his movement and compromised his skills

Friendship with Jesus provokes us into building credible lives of service reflecting His character. All four Gospel accounts present a picture of how Jesus lived, yet we quickly discover we lack the power to live His way without the power of the Holy Spirit, deposited within us by God’s grace when we say yes to Him (Rom. 8:9).

When exploring any educational or training programme we always make a cost-benefit analysis. Is the investment of time, finance, and energy worth the return? We quantify this across a spectrum ranging from practical outcomes to personal achievement. I went back to university part time as a necessary distraction from the intensity of caring for my wife.

How do we evaluate, or find a value for, our learning and subsequent service? Effective measures are hard to find for something not calculated against external criteria. Only God knows the state of our heart and can compute our integrity. Jesus tells us to keep quiet about the apparent good we do so that we don’t congratulate ourselves or allow pride to provoke us into judging others.

Examples offer help in illustrating what’s being said. They assist us in how to practise our learning. Paul confidently invited the Corinthians to follow his example, as he followed Jesus’ example. Jesus is the only visual aid we have for the characteristic behaviour expected of disciples. We often believe the bar is set too high, aimed at ‘super-saints’, and not the average mortal.

The early disciples were of one mind, or ‘together’ (v44). The word is found in Acts 1:14, again in Acts 4:32 and many other instances and it means ‘of one passion’. Together they shared a common interest in following Jesus. Yet, the Gospel stories reveal that, whilst the twelve disciples were together in following Jesus, they were of different temperaments.

Apriority is a value we give to something; another word might be ‘treasure’. Life demands that we make decisions and choose what we prioritise. A favourite group icebreaker is to ask people that if their house was consumed in flames, what treasured item would they grab before running from the building? Answers offer a glimpse into our priorities.

Assessing where we are in our discipleship, we may identify a gap between where we are and where we want to be. No worries – Paul felt the same. A Christian hero, he knew that he was in a marathon, not a sprint, and was invited to keep going till called home by God. Only those who cross the finish line can claim to have completed the race. Whilst competing we’re cheered on by a great cloud of witn...

Realisation means to exhibit the actual existence of something. In our case it is to exhibit the reality of God in a world of competing ideas, all seeking to lay claim to the meaning of life. In this multiplicity of meanings, we are consistently subject to becoming first captivated and finally captured by ‘hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritua...