Sunday 2 October

Jeremiah 4:10-5:31

I writhe in pain.  O the agony of my heart.  I really mean it, I’m not just quoting the verses.  How bitter it is that people can be so vain and conceited and ignorant of their own place in the world.  We are so often like a smug prom-queen adorning ourselves with jewels, convinced we will wow everyone at the up-coming ball.  We think we are so impressive and such an impressive little number.  And yet our date has no intention of collecting us and we won’t be mentioned at the ball at all.  We have so little humility before the Everlasting God who brought order to the marauding darkness.  We have so little humility before the Director of Nations who can whistle for any random king and have him do his bidding.  We have such little humility before the Protector of the Weak who sees every abuse of the poor and who will make the first last.  I just wish we’d all be more humble.   I just wish we’d all be more respectful.  I’m in anguish of my lack of humility before this God who is so flipping mighty.  I wail that I’m so disrespectful to the Lord our God whose made me his child.

Philippians 3:1-4:1

It’s like a huge athletic gym racked up with the state-of-the-art equipment and every imaginable contraption for helping you reach your peak.  Philippians 3 is a spiritual mega-gym.  It is stacked up with line upon line of muscle-enhancing concepts.  If you want to be spiritually mature then Philippians 3 is a room you should live in.  That’s right.  Spiritual maturity doesn’t come through having been a Christian a long time.  Spiritual maturity doesn’t come through having prophetic words for people or doing a lot of worship.  Spiritual maturity doesn’t even come from just reading a lot of the bible.  Spiritual maturity comes from reading the word and then living it.  It comes from taking the bible’s view on life.  It comes from wanting to know Christ, from working hard to know Christ, from choosing to see everything else as crud except the joy of knowing Christ.  Spiritual maturity comes through giving our own achievements - or lack of them - or heritage - or lack of it - no regard.  It comes from forgetting all that stuff and instead choosing to strain towards what God has in store for us.  Spiritual maturity is seeing the huge abundance of provision and purity and power that God has stored up for us in the heavenly realms and making it our goal to have as much of it as we can here and now and to claim all of it when we are resurrected from the dead.  Goodness me, I can’t do this passage justice.  I need to live in here far, far longer.

Psalm 116:1-11

Our God is full of compassion.