Be Still And Know

1 Peter 1.6-7 NLT 'Be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold.' Let’s not play games. Hard times are hard. Nobody likes going through difficulties or facing challenges. To have to endure violent persecution, such as Peter’s readers experienced, must have been incredibly difficult. Peter wasn’t glad about the trials they were facing, but about the outcome from going through such times. He knew that the persecution that they were enduring not only proved the reality of their faith, but would have the effect of refining them and making them even stronger in their Christian lives. I find it fascinating that gold has been highly prized for thousands of years. The world has changed out of all recognition over that time, but gold continues to be eagerly sought after and over the past couple of chal

1 Peter 1.5 NLT 'Through your faith, God is protecting you by his power until you receive this salvation, which is ready to be revealed on the last day for all to see.' I wonder how you or I would cope with persecution from the civic authorities. Just imagine what it would be like to live with the knowledge that the police are after you, simply because you are a Christian. This is precisely the experience of thousands of Christians today in many parts of the world, and it was also a reality in many periods of the early Church. Peter wanted to equip the Christians to face up to the fires of persecution with courage and confidence, and so he reminded them that God would protect them. The verb that he used for “protecting” was a military term and the tense made it clear that God was continually protecting them. Whatever happened they could be confident that God would be with them and give them courage to stand for him. Peter encouraged his readers to look forward to the day when they would see the full reality o

1 Peter 1.3-4 NLT 'Now we live with great expectation, and we have a priceless inheritance— an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay.' I wonder if you are waiting for an inheritance. If so, I wish you well but, as you probably know, things don’t always work out in the way that we might hope. Many potential inheritances are eaten up by nursing home fees, or are lost through poor investments or changes in market conditions. In short, inheritances in this life are vulnerable and certainly cannot be relied upon. What a joy that this is completely different from our spiritual inheritance which is absolutely guaranteed. Nothing can ever alter it, because it lies well beyond the reach of change and decay. Most people fail to enjoy today because they are so overwhelmed by problems from the past and fears about the future. The wonder of the Christian faith is that it enables us to live today to the full, knowing that God has set us free from the sins an

1 Peter 1.3 NLT 'All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by his great mercy that we have been born again, because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead.' When Peter wrote these words the storm clouds were gathering, and the church was soon going to be facing very sharp and painful persecution. Many Christians were going to die, and Peter was well aware that he needed to equip them for the challenges to come. I love the fact that he does so not by offering them words of comfort or sympathy, but by an outburst of praise! It’s a good reminder to us that it is always the right time to praise God. That is not a way of dodging the challenges or putting a brave face on things, but because God is always worthy of praise. Even in the harshest and most testing moments of life, God is God and continues to be faithful, gracious and loving. Peter reminds his readers that they have been born again because of God’s mercy. The new life that we have in Christ is never because of anything good that we

1 Peter 1.1 NLT 'I am writing to God’s chosen people who are living as foreigners in the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.' I wonder where home is for you. The older one gets the more interesting the question becomes because there are so many potential candidates. Perhaps it’s the place where you were born. I left my birthplace when I was 18, but I still look back at it as a place of great importance. But, since then, I have lived in many different places. When I lived in India I remember concluding that my home was wherever I happened to have a bed, table, chair, paper and pen! So long as I had those five items, I was content and could feel at home. Every place that I have lived has become very precious to me, but Peter would want to remind me that I am, at the end of the day, a foreigner. This world is not my true home, because I have a permanent home in heaven. In this letter Peter addresses his readers as foreigners and, throughout the letter, he spells out the implications of

Psalm 96.1-3 NLT 'Sing a new song to the Lord! Let the whole earth sing to the Lord! Sing to the Lord; praise his name. Each day proclaim the good news that he saves. Publish his glorious deeds among the nations. Tell everyone about the amazing things he does.' Many people see life as being divided into two categories – the sacred and the secular. The sacred is, for example, what we do when we go to church and worship God, and the secular is our normal daily routine of family life, going to work and relaxing. This way of looking at life is strongly Greek in origin and is very different from the Hebrew thinking which we see reflected in this psalm. The psalmist had no thought of confining his worship to his visits to the Temple! He was eager to proclaim the good news of God’s salvation every day. Whatever he was doing he wanted to declare the greatness of God and encourage other people to do the same. The idea of living in two separate compartments was completely unknown to him. When we see God at work in ever

Psalm 95.6-7 NLT 'Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God. We are the people he watches over, the flock under his care. If only you would listen to his voice today!' These words of invitation are often used at the beginning of church services to remind us of how wonderful God is, and how much he deserves our worship. But although God is perfect and is worthy of our complete devotion, he will never impose himself on us. It is up to us to respond, and listening is a crucial part of that response. The sad reality is that we often do not listen and the psalmist reflects on a time when the people of Israel refused to listen. They were at the start of their wilderness wanderings and there was no water to drink. I don’t want to minimise the acute difficulty of such a dilemma, but the people’s response was to complain and not to listen to God. Although he had miraculously delivered them from slavery in Egypt, and provided regular food for them through the provi

Psalm 94.18-19 NLT I cried out, “I am slipping!” but your unfailing love, O Lord, supported me. When doubts filled my mind, your comfort gave me renewed hope and cheer. Sharing honestly and openly what God has done in our lives is incredibly powerful. The most wonderful thing about testimony is that nobody can deny it. Other people might choose to interpret our experiences differently from us, but the moment we declare our personal accounts of how we have seen God at work in our lives they are bound to take note of what we have said. I draw the conclusion from this that we need to give one another generous opportunities to share what God has done. Sharing our testimonies is good at every level. In a large congregation they can inspire faith and stimulate worship. However, it is particularly good when we share our experiences in small groups where we can be totally honest with one another and where one person’s testimony can trigger other people to share what they have been through. But probably the mo

Psalm 93.4 NLT 'Mightier than the violent raging of the seas, mightier than the breakers on the shore— the Lord above is mightier than these!' I was brought up by the sea and have always enjoyed the sight of waves breaking on the shore. I love the rhythm of the waves and the drama as they crash onto the beach in their own unique way. There is a timelessness about waves, and it is easy to understand why the psalmists often refer to them. But, however powerful and violent the sea might be, the psalmists insist that God is even more powerful. They often remind us that God is incomparably great. However powerful anything or anyone might be, God is always greater and stronger. Whatever threat you are facing, God is more than able to cope. I wonder what challenges you are facing at the moment. They may be connected with your family, work, church, neighbours, community or something else. Life in our broken world inevitably produces a stream of challenges for all of us. And when we think beyond our immediate lives, w

Psalm 92.1-3 NLT 'It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to the Most High. It is good to proclaim your unfailing love in the morning, your faithfulness in the evening, accompanied by a ten-stringed instrument, a harp, and the melody of a lyre.' Throughout the Psalms, we are continually reminded of how good it is to worship God. In Psalm 84.10 the psalmist says that he would rather spend a single day in the presence of God than a thousand anywhere else! Our verses today remind us of the importance of worshipping God throughout the day. Worship needs to be woven into the fabric of our lives. It isn’t something that we can do occasionally or half-heartedly. It needs to claim the best of our energies and attention. Worship is of such huge importance because absolutely every aspect of life is affected by it. The thought of worship being confined to a couple of hours in church once a week is completely foreign to the Bible. When we worship, we declare the greatness of God and seek to bring our lives

Psalm 91.2 NLT 'This I declare about the Lord: He alone is my refuge, my place of safety; he is my God, and I trust him.' I will never forget where I was when I heard the news of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. I was buying carpet with my wife in a large store in Exeter and was standing at the till. A woman was describing to the shop assistant the awful events in such a way that I assumed that she was talking about a film that she had recently seen. Such things don’t happen in real life. Or so I thought! But as I listened to the conversation it suddenly became clear that she was talking about a real event, and the horror of it started to sink in. Thousands of people were snatched away in an instant. All of them had gone to work that day with the not unreasonable expectation that they would return home safe and well. But they didn’t. Such events are exceptional, thank God, but we all live in a precarious world where none of us enjoys complete safety and security. In such a world it is import

Psalm 90.10 and 12 NLT 'Seventy years are given to us! Some even live to eighty. But even the best years are filled with pain and trouble; soon they disappear, and we fly away. Teach us to realise the brevity of life, so that we may grow in wisdom.' It’s wonderful that so many people are living to the age of 100. In the UK there are more than 15,000 centenarians and that figure is about double the number twenty years ago. But such long lives are as nothing when placed on the timeline of history or when we think of our God, for whom a thousand years are like a day. So it is important for us all to listen hard to the psalmist. He observes that seventy years is a typical life span, and that some even reach eighty. In the light of this, he asks God to teach us to realise that life is brief. That could sound sad and morbid but that would be to forget that every single day of life is a gift that we couldn’t possibly deserve. Facing up to our mortality is actually a very positive thing to do. When we accept that our

Psalm 89.8 NLT 'O Lord God of Heaven’s Armies! Where is there anyone as mighty as you, O Lord? You are entirely faithful.' Faithfulness is a wonderful word. To find someone who is absolutely trustworthy and dependable is an incredible blessing and the psalmist is convinced that God is exactly that. He looks into the heavens and reflects on the awesomeness of creation and concludes that God is entirely faithful, unlike anyone else. This is the time of the year when I seem to have a string of insurance renewals. I like the security that insurance gives and am more than happy to pay up. But we only need insurance because we live in a world where there is so much uncertainty. Things break and people let us down and we need to have the cushion of insurance to keep life going. But when we look to God we need to take out no insurance against the possibility that he might let us down. We can lean with all our weight on him, knowing that he will never fail us. I love Deuteronomy 33.26-27 where Moses, like the psal

Matthew 28.8-9 NLT 'The women ran quickly from the tomb. They were very frightened but also filled with great joy, and they rushed to give the disciples the angel’s message. And as they went, Jesus met them and greeted them. And they ran to him, grasped his feet, and worshiped him.' The women who found the empty tomb on the first Easter Sunday morning clearly experienced a riot of emotions. They had got up early to anoint the body of Jesus because this was the first opportunity to do so after the sabbath. Their astonishment that the stone of the tomb had been rolled away was then compounded by meeting an angel whose face shone like lightning and whose clothing was as white as snow. The angel informed them that Jesus had risen from the dead, just as he had promised, and told them to go and tell the disciples. As they ran off, Matthew records that they were very frightened but also filled with great joy. This sounds like a considerable understatement! And amidst this tumult of emotions they then met Jesus h

Matthew 27.57-60 NLT 'As evening approached, Joseph, a rich man from Arimathea who had become a follower of Jesus, went to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. And Pilate issued an order to release it to him. Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a long sheet of clean linen cloth. He placed it in his own new tomb, which had been carved out of the rock. Then he rolled a great stone across the entrance and left.' We know very little about Joseph of Arimathea. The Gospel of Mark tells us that he was an honoured member of the high council of the Jews, and that he was waiting for the kingdom of God to come. The Gospel of Luke comments that he was a good and righteous man and the Gospel of John informs us that he was a secret disciple of Jesus because he feared the Jewish leaders. But that’s all we know. However, this brief account of him going to Pilate and asking for the body of Jesus reveals that he was a man of exceptional courage. Such an initiative could easily have exposed him to enormous risk both from the Ro

Matthew 27.54 NLT The Roman officer and the other soldiers at the crucifixion were terrified by the earthquake and all that had happened. They said, “This man truly was the Son of God!” When Jesus died on the cross at three o’clock in the afternoon, the curtain in the sanctuary of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom and there was a great earthquake. It’s no wonder that the soldiers, tough as they were, were terrified by what saw and heard. We need to be very grateful to the Gospel writers for recording so much of what took place, but there is so much more that we would love to know. If it had happened today one can imagine news agencies interviewing everyone in sight and getting film footage of every part of the day. I find it fascinating that the Gospel writers tell us nothing of the response of the religious people. We know that some of the Jewish leaders were very sympathetic to Jesus. I wonder what Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea thought? We are told nothing. And what about the disciples? W

Matthew 26.26 NLT As they were eating, Jesus took some bread and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take this and eat it, for this is my body.” The Old Testament prophets frequently communicated their message by actions. They are often called acted parables. Through their actions they powerfully proclaimed their message in a way that was both clear and unforgettable. In the Gospels, we see Jesus doing exactly the same thing. On Palm Sunday his entry into Jerusalem on a donkey powerfully declared that he was both a king and a man of peace. He came in humility and gentleness. Now, on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus shares the Passover meal with his disciples and declares, in the breaking of bread, that this represents his broken body. The Passover meal is an annual opportunity for Jews to revisit the Israelite’s miraculous liberation from Egypt. That historic event proved for all time that God is a God of salvation. He is able to do things which are humanly

Matthew 26.7 NLT 'While Jesus was eating, a woman came in with a beautiful alabaster jar of expensive perfume and poured it over his head.' Things were hotting up. Jesus had launched a tirade against the religious leaders and they, in turn, were now absolutely committed to seeing him put to death. We learn that they had a secret meeting at the home of the High Priest, Caiaphas, in order to plan how they might bring this about. Amidst all of this ferment we go to a home in the village of Bethany and meet a woman performing the most amazing act of devotion to Jesus. At the time it was quite usual for a Jewish woman to carry a little alabaster jar of precious perfume around her neck. This perfume could be incredibly valuable and in the Gospels of Mark and John we are told that it was worth 300 denarii. That would be about the same as someone would earn in a year! Just imagine! To say that her gift was generous would be a major understatement. It was a phenomenal act of devotion, and we needn’t be surprised t

Matthew 22.37-40 NLT Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” The battle of words between Jesus and the Jewish leaders had got to fever pitch. They had challenged him about his authority and the Sadducees had just come up with a really awkward question about the resurrection. Now the Pharisees got together to push Jesus to the limit. They asked him a question that they often discussed amongst themselves, namely, “what is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” If Jesus tripped up on this question, then they could label him as a blasphemer. But Jesus gave them the classic Jewish answer. Loving God with everything you’ve got is the first commandment and the second is loving your neighbour as yourself. One imagines that Jesus’ questioners we

Matthew 21.12-13 NLT Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out all the people buying and selling animals for sacrifice. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves. He said to them, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a house of prayer,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves!” The joyful celebration of Palm Sunday is followed by something completely different. Jesus walked into Jerusalem and was angered by the sight of the temple precinct crowded with traders. This was nothing new. In order for worshippers to make their sacrifices, there was a rule that they had to purchase their birds or animals in the coinage of Tyre. They therefore needed the money changers to convert their Roman and Greek coins into that currency. This elaborate system was carefully developed over many years but Jesus’ concern was that it totally obscured the real purpose of the temple. Instead of it being a house of prayer it had been turned into a noisy shopping mall