Walking the Way: A daily devotional

  Ezekiel 37:3 He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”   Thought for the day – Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones Recently I heard some really sad and distressing news about the Methodist Church in the UK. It is reckoned that at the current rate of decline there will be no more than 20000 members of the MC in 10 years’ time. And as I look across traditional mainline congregations, I see the same thing happening.   A mathematician by the name of Dr John Hayward applied the principle of contagion to church. How contagious are our churches? He applied the ‘R’ rate, or the rate of reproduction to the life of the church. The Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England have ‘R’ rates of 0.9.   Anything below 1 indicates that there is no contagion or reproduction, meaning numbers of church-goers will only reduce as no new people are encouraged to become part of the church. The Methodist Church has an ‘R’ rate of .85 and here in Wales, the Church ...

  Ezekiel 37:9 For I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown.   Thought for the day – The gardening God One of my abiding memories as a child is going to visit my great aunt Nellie on their smallholding in Zimbabwe. Nellie was an amazing gardener. There wasn’t much she couldn’t grow and her garden was always full of snapdragons, foxgloves, flame lilies and roses. And she would spend hours cultivating the flowers and preparing the ground for the next season’s planting. And that love of gardening stayed with her all the way till her final few years. And today’s verse from Ezekiel took me to her garden and the time I spent there as a kid and watching my aunt intentionally do things in her garden to make it the paradise I remember. And that’s the things about God. God is intentional about everything. Even when he is preparing Israel for coming home. He is preparing them for their return, and he is being very intentional about it. Hear the wor...

  Ezekiel 35:13 Thus with your mouth you have boasted against Me and have multiplied your words against Me. I have heard them.   Thought for the day – God is still God I wonder sometimes how much people must hate God. I’m treading on some very thin ice here, but I wonder if one of the reasons, atheists spend so much time railing against faith and religion is because inwardly and probably subconsciously they have a deep hatred for God. People such as Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. They will no doubt claim that rationality and science drive their convictions, but so often their attacks on faith and God are so vitriolic that it borders on hatred.   I get really cross when people slag God off. And I get really cross when people build their careers on slagging God off. But then I’m reminded that God is still God even if those who hate him denounce him. And God is well aware of the things that are said about him. But here’s the thing. Wh...

Ezekiel 34:31 “You are My flock, the human flock of My pasture, and I am your God.” This is the declaration of the Lord God.   Thought for the day – Baa-aa-aa Ministry takes you to some strange places. On Wednesday I went to a cemetery in the hills to do a risk assessment. The cemetery had closed and the decision had been made to allow it to return to the wild. We still need to check it every so often, which was why we were there. And in the middle of the cemetery lay a dead sheep (Insert comments about appropriate places to die etc…). As if that wasn’t enough, there was another sheep nearby, possibly it’s lamb, bleating constantly. It turns out that whenever sheep are separated from the flock, however small the flock is, they bleat. And this is how shepherds find the lost sheep. In our case, eventually the other sheep wandered off. It hadn’t come back when we left. And it was all a bit sad really.   We as people are very much like sheep. That’s why the Bible uses ...

  Ezekiel 33:4 Then, if anyone hears the sound of the trumpet but ignores the warning, and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood will be on his own head. Thought for the day – Heed the warning. On the morning of 14 October 1913, a methane explosion tore through the Universal Colliery at Senghenydd. Four hundred and thirty-nine men and boys never came home. It remains the worst mining disaster in British history. Here's the part that still stings. The warnings were already on file. That pit had blown once before, in 1901. The safety regulations were clear. The colliery had been prosecuted for failing to meet them, and the fine came to £34 in total — The Merthyr Pioneer newspaper worked it out at roughly a shilling a life about the equivalent of £6 a life in 2025. The trumpet had sounded. Nobody listened. Ezekiel gives us the picture of a watchman on the wall. He sees the dust cloud on the horizon. He lifts the ram's horn and blows. And then the responsibility shifts. The...

  Ezekiel 32:2 “Son of man, lament for Pharaoh king of Egypt and say to him: You compare yourself to a lion of the nations, but you are like a monster in the seas. You thrash about in your rivers, churn up the waters with your feet, and muddy the rivers.”   Thought for the day – Do What? One of the things I am most proud of as someone who grew up in South Africa is the truth and reconciliation commission that was set up after the 1994 elections. It was an opportunity to confront the past and potentially rebuild South Africa for the future. Nationalist Party Leader FW De Klerk and ANC Leader Nelson Mandela worked together to drive through significant changes.   As Christians we were encouraged to pray for the country’s leaders, no matter who they were.   God’s wanted Ezekiel to lament for Pharoah. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. But Ezekiel did. In much the same way people in South Africa were asked to pray for leaders they may not ha...