Tuesday 24 May

1 Samuel 14:24-15:35

His body may have been decaying but his mind was as sharp as a flint’s edge.  “What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears?”  he said.  Isn’t that just one of the most outstanding put-downs of all time?  It’s like he picked up a slightly rotting kipper and slapped it gently but very intentionally around both cheeks of king Saul.  He may have sounded harsh but Samuel was calling out what needed to be declared.  Israel’s king was bankrupt.  He did not know what he was doing.  The key verse that sums up the confusing but ultimately tragic state of Saul is 15:30 - “I have sinned.  But please honour me before the elders of my people and before Israel; come back with me, so that I may worship the Lord your God”.  Saul admitted he had not done what Yahweh wanted but he still saw Yahweh as being Samuel’s god and not his own.  He didn’t have that personal connection to the one who had called him and was overseeing him.  That is what Samuel got all huffy about.  If that is where you get to - seeing God as someone else’s thing but not your own - then it is high time to put down your staff and pick up your journals.  It’s time to stop for a bit and remind yourself of who God is and what he has done for you.  This whole thing is entirely contingent upon us knowing God.  If anything is getting in the way of that - worship practices or kingdom advances or leadership responsibilities - then things need to change.  God is calling us to know him and, more than that, to remain in him.  Why would we choose to be anywhere else?

John 14:1-31

Sometimes you wonder whether Jesus was trying to be as confusing as possible.  All this talk of “if this, then that” and “the Father this” and “the Counsellor that” makes my head spin.  Essentially, trying to distill it down, I believe that this is Jesus trying to explain the Trinity to us in a way that we might be able to understand.  And, for the 2000 years since Jesus said this, we humans have stood with confused looks on our faces, scratching our heads and saying “sorry, can you just go back over that again?”.  The fault with this is entirely at our end, not remotely at Jesus’s.  The truth is that there is something about God that is exotically mysterious and beyond us.  Something that we could never possibly understand.  But, as Jesus is stressing here, there is also something about God that is slap bang in our faces, touchable, visible, teaching us and caring for us.  There is the Father, seen in the Son, known in the Holy Spirit.  God is not distant and remote - he is here, calming our hearts, showing us the Father, giving us peace.  You know, it is interesting that I’ve never heard anyone refer to the Holy Spirit as the Counsellor.  I’ve never heard anyone pray “Come, O Counsellor”.  And yet, in some ways it is a more descriptive title than Holy Spirit, or at least it emphasises the relational aspect of God more than the usual term does.  It’s not that I want a change, I just want us to all receive all that God has for us.  To know him close and to feel him soothing us and calming us.  That would be a fine thing.  That would be a great way of us knowing that even though our God is too mysterious for us, we are in Him and He is in us.

Proverbs 12:28-13:9

“The desires of the diligent are fully satisfied”.  Oh crud.  What about the slapdash?  Can't we get what we want as well??