Monday 15 August

2 Chronicles 2:1-5:1

He was worth every bang of the hammer.  He was worth every stoke of the flames.  It took 153,600 men working flat out for 7 years - that’s at least 270 million man days - and the Lord was worthy of every single second of labour.  He was worthy of every drop of sweat, every jammed finger and every haggard face.  In fact, he was worth more.  Solomon himself exclaimed - “who is able to build a temple for him, since the heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain him?” And I want to say “exactly Solomon - who could?”  This God of ours is so physically ginormous, so spiritually weighty, so intellectually lofty, so emotionally potent, so sovereignly dynamic that we could never do Him justice.  If he won’t even fit in the stratosphere then how could our brains comprehend him and our mouths be able to describe him or our hands be able to construct something worthy of him.  We wouldn’t even get as close as ants offering their nest to a pod of blue whales.   And I want to remember this every time I come to a period of sung worship.  I want to bellow it out every time the guitar-player starts to strum - “WE’RE NOT WORTHY GOD, WE’RE NOT WORTHY”.  Our songs and our hands raised and our hips swaying gently from side to side when we think no-one else is looking - they could never express anything even close to the greatness of God.  We will never be able to worship properly; we will never be able to give God his worth properly.  And yet the wonderful intimate Spirit of God still beckons us to try.  He still stands alongside of us and stirs up within us a yearning and a longing to say something to do something to try something to acknowledge the greatness of God.  And when we respond to this beckoning?  Well, then it is my belief and it is the testimony of scripture that God is well pleased.  This awesome God is well pleased.

1 Corinthians 9:10-10:13

Assuming you are a Christian - and if you have got this far with bible in a year without being a Christian then I sincerely commend your commitment - but, assuming you have become a Christian at some point in your life then the significant question is surely “What now?”.  There are so many different Christians doing and advocating so many different things that it can be quite baffling as to how we should live.  Paul speaks into this question in two ways.  Firstly he warns of the dangers of complacency.  This terrible disease of complacency has been blighting Israel since the birth of Esau and there are some ominous early symptoms appearing in the church at Corinth.  A tolerance for sin, a gradual neglect of Jesus, a tendency to grumble.  If we find ourselves going that way we need to repent and then be careful, trusting in the faithfulness of God and clinging closely to Him.  Secondly (although Paul actually puts this first) he goes beyond the negative and stresses the positive aspect of life in the kingdom - choosing to live for the gospel - re-organising your life so that you can get alongside people and point them to Jesus.  This is what Christian living is about.  This is what Christians should do; train themselves to get alongside people and speak the words of Jesus to them.  It can be done at work, it can be done with neighbours or friends or acquaintances, it can mean choosing one pub or one coffee shop or one supermarket and making it your ‘local’, it can mean joining a sports club or a book club or an art class.  But it is being strict with 

ourselves, making ourselves a slave to the people around us so that we can serve them up hope.  It’s choosing to live in such a way that we can best offer others undistilled life.

Psalm 97:1-12

He guards our lives.