Friday 2 December

Daniel 8:15-9:19

“I was appalled by the vision; it was beyond understanding” (8:27) Daniel, my brother, I know what you mean.  But even in his confusion Daniel was a heck of a pray-er.  What a cracking way to start a bit of petitioning - changing into your sackcloth and dabbing your face with some cinders.  I just don’t think we see enough sack-cloth these days.  I’d like to see Primark come out with a sack-cloth onesie - I’d definitely order one for Christmas!  But it wasn’t just Daniel’s outfit that I’m in huge admiration of - it was how he  started his prayer.   He started by recognising that the Lord is the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands.  And Daniel recognised from the outset that his need to petition God sprung from him and his people’s failure.  Only because they had sinned were they so in need of God to move.  Prayer that moves mountains I think will always contain two strands of humility - humility before the great and awesome and good God of all, and humility about our wretchedness and our inferiority and our powerlessness in life.  I think God tends to respond to humble prayer like that.  I think God tends to give revelation to people who pray in that way.

1 John 2:28-3:10

Ooooh.  When it comes to sin John seems to set the bar very high.  Too high, I fear, for me.  How can he say “No-one who is born of God will continue to sin... anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God”?  Is he suggesting that real, proper christians reach perfection the instant they pray the prayer?  I really don’t want to duck away from the challenge of this verse but at the same time I don’t want to rip it out of the  context of the letter.  You see earlier John says “if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves” (1:8) and “if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defence - Jesus Christ, the Righteous One”.  So I just can’t accept that John believed proper Christians lived in utter perfection.  He explicitly says that believers may sin without it being the end of the deal.  But that bar is still pretty high; John does not want any believer to sin.  He pushes others towards holiness harder than I would ever dare.  And I think that is because he appreciated the depth of privilege it is to be a child of God.  John experienced so much of the reality of the love of the Father that he fully expected that reality to be displayed in his life.  And he expected both the love and the reality of that love to be experienced in my life too.  His letter is both a push to dig deeper into the Father and to raise the bar for holiness.  It may sound impossible, but nothing is impossible with God.  If he has already made us his children and lavished his love on us, how much more will he continue this great work in us.

Proverbs 29:10-18

“The rod of correction imparts wisdom, but a child left to himself disgraces his mother.”  I find that really helpful while I struggle with how to be a good parent!