Jeremiah 29:24-31:14
He has plans for us. Are you afraid? Don’t be! Are you dismayed? Take heart! He is with us and he will save us. He will restore us to health and will heal our wounds. Our broken hearts and our wounded souls will be nurtured and restored by Him. He will have compassion on our houses and he will rebuild our communities. He will cause us to shout in joy and celebrate our abundance. He will draw us close to him and we will gaze upon his everlasting love. He has placed us on the winning side, he will lead us into the land of bounty, into his well-watered garden, and we will congregate there surrounded by the hubbub and clamour of a great and diverse throng. This is not an individual hope reserved for those times we sit alone looking morosely into the gathering dusk, no this is a community’s hope, this is a nation’s hope, this is seething mass of people’s hope that clings to us like lycra throughout every moment of the day. We are part of something massive. We are in a dynamic movement of all kinds of people from all kinds of centuries who are called by God and are being walked by God towards his loving-kindness and ‘the heights of Zion’. It’s time to dance with joy. It’s time to take up your tambourine.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-17
Streuth, there are a lot of words in this passage that I’ve only ever seen before on wackoapocalypse.com (I don’t think that website exists but you get what I mean?). All this talk about rebellion, the man of lawlessness setting himself up over everything and counterfeit miracles just sounds so far from my daily experience of faith. But the incredible thing is that Paul had only spent about 4 weeks with the Thessalonians and this was the sort of stuff that he told them about (2:5). This stuff about the End Times was basic routine fayre for the early church - how have we let it slip to the lunatic fringes today? We need to claim this stuff back. We need to start talking about ‘the splendour of his coming’. We need to start grinding this stuff about ‘The Day of the Lord’ into our daily walk. We can’t just leave it up to likes of The Left Behind series to inform people’s judgements about this (peace to Tim LaHaye). This is the stuff that helps us stand firm in the faith, this detail about the mechanics of our future salvation is what we are called into by the gospel. So we need to turn to Jesus and God our Father who love us and who are seeking to encourage us and give us hope - they are the ones who can strengthen us in all our understanding of this, and in every good deed as well.
Psalm 119:33-40
“Teach me, O Lord, to follow your decrees”. Opening the word and kneeling in prayer need to go hand in hand.
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