Thursday 4 August

1 Chronicles 16:37-18:17

God is completely amazing.  More than 800 years before the birth of Jesus, God is outlining his plan for him coming.  He is the son who will have his kingdom established.  He is the one who will build a house for God and whose throne will be established for ever.  He is the Son who’s throne will be established for ever.  If you think about it, there is no real point in God speaking these words of prophecy to Nathan - it’s not as if he or David are able to do anything about it.  But it is a sign of God’s love for his people, his desire to share his secrets with them and to inform them of his intentions.  God loves to have relationship with his people.  And, for us, it is interesting that the two defining features of Jesus reign will be his intimacy with his Father and the fact that it will go on for ever.  We have see one of these come to pass - any of us who have spent any time in the gospels will be well aware of the tightness of the relationship between Father and Son.  But are we so alert to the eternal nature of Jesus’ reign - that he is reigning now and will be until the end of this earth?  I know we could probably write it down in a doctrine test but I wonder how much I really believe that Jesus is ruling over and shepherding his people right now.  Do I really live in submissive reverence to him, trusting that he is the boss, that he has a plan, that he knows what should be done and that all I need to do is to look at him and do what he says?  

1 Corinthians 1:1-17

Sanctification.  There’s a word that rolls off the tongue.  Sanctification.  Ooh, I like the sound of that.  I can’t remember many books I’ve read on it though.  I don’t think we’ve done much on it in house-group.  Not in the positive, almost triumphalist way that Paul talks about it here.  But sanctification is nothing less that we have received from Jesus.  And it is nothing less than we are called to by our God.  In church today, really pushing ourselves to be holy is often associated with legalism or with ‘being a pharisee’.  But I think that betrays a lack of understanding of what pharisees were and what the gospel is about.  We are called to be holy.  We are empowered to be blameless on the last day.  Just the thought of that is extraordinary.  And so Paul starts his letter to the Corinthian church by expounding this extraordinary, radical thought - do not tolerate sin.  Do not shrug your shoulders and turn a blind eye to the practice of sin among you.  Do not feel slightly smug that you are part of a church that is so ‘with it’ that it is filled with issues.  Rather, fix your eyes on where Jesus wants to take you.  Work hard to agree with one another.  Work hard to remove any sense of faction and try to become united in mind and thought.  Not because that is what saves us.  Not because that will look good to others.  But because that is what the cross of Christ was about.  Jesus died to present a holy and blameless people to his Father.  Sanctification is a critical part of our faith.

Proverbs 19:3-12

“It is to a man’s glory to overlook an offence.”