Friday 23 December

Ezra 10:1-44

Choosing to lead is like choosing to be ugly.  To lead can be humbling.  To lead can be harrowing.  To lead can be lonely.  But if you lead well then you will lead people into joy.  I constantly want to flinch from the grubby aspects of leadership.  I don’t want to go around confronting people with their sin.  But I don’t suppose Ezra did either.  I don’t want to confess and weep and throw myself down in full view of any passer-by.  But I don’t suppose Ezra did either.  I guess all of us who aspire to lead others come to a point where we have to decide what we want most.  Do we want to honour God and lead the people into the promised land or do we want to take a tourist trip through the desert?  I don’t think we can do both.  Every week we have to choose one or the other.  Leading people towards Jesus can be pretty tough.  But it can also be the most amazing experience in the world.  It is like choosing to be ugly.  But it is also like choosing to be rich.

Revelation 14:14-15:8

It has shocked me how much worship has gone on in Revelation.  I knew the big passages like Revelation 4 and Revelation 19 were soaked in the worshipful crown-casting of the elders but I hadn’t realised the praise-liquid had soaked into every corner of this book.  And most shocking perhaps is the fact that worship seems to lap right up and over all the most awkward bits about bowls of wrath and sharp-sickle-swinging angels.  To me it feels a little hard to read about trampling the winepress until blood flowed out and then to say ‘Great and marvellous are your deeds Lord God Almighty”.  But then again, I’m not yet on the right side of this view.  I don’t yet have the perspective of one who has been victorious over the beast.  I have not yet been given a harp by my God.  And so I must humble myself before this Word of God.  If this is what the Holy Spirit has disclosed to John and through John to me then I need to accept it.  I need to change my patterns of thought so that they fit in with the priorities of the word rather than just try to move on unchanged and unredeemed.  For God alone is holy and I most decidedly am not.  And I’m not going to become so unless I accept his word over mine.

Psalm 146:1-10

“Do not put your trust in princes”