Tuesday 4 October

Jeremiah 7:30-9:16

Is there no balm in Gilead?  Church is for healing people.  God would have his church bind up the broken-hearted and repair the crushed.  And this is where the tragedy of sin strikes hardest.  Sin robs the church of its healing power.  Ignoring God smashes the wine-skins and all the balm runs onto dry ground.  Church is meant to be somewhere that people come with a whole range of maladies - they are lonely, they are depressed, they have a limp, they are separated from their God - and they find their healing.  Horror grips God when his church doesn’t offer this.  He wants to go and hide in a lodge in the desert when his people turn away from this and turn away from him.  This is one of the great lost truths about the church - it is the healing for the world, it is the hope for the world.  In the church and through the church runs the balm of God, the healing for the nations.  In the church and through the church lies the promise of wholeness and restoration and unhindered standing before God.  We need to press ourselves and our church continually into offering this balm to our neighbours and this love to our enemies.    We need to pray that wounds would be healed.

Colossians 1:1-23

Jesus wants to have supremacy in everything.  Is he a mega big-head?  Is he just the most competitive person who has ever lived, constantly trying to out-do everybody and prove he is the best?  Not really.  Think of it like you are trying to build a tower and you have a few playing cards and then a ruddy big concrete block.  If you try to build in any way that doesn’t put the concrete on the bottom then a lot of things are going to break. You have to put the concrete at the bottom.  You have to give the concrete supremacy.  We are like wafer-thin cards and Jesus is like the ruddy big concrete block.  Except he is a pretty clever concrete block.  He was before everything and everything was made by him.  He holds everything together and he broke through death, carving a route for us all to live after we have died.  And that is even before we get onto the fulness of God being in him and him reconciling us to our Father.  I still have this huge nagging worry that my vision of Jesus is woefully tiny.  I still feel like I am massively missing the boat on how gigantic and awesome and powerful he really is.  But one thing I know already.  He is far greater than me.  I need to be his servant.

Psalm 116:12-19

How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?