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Karens

  Jonah 4:4 Then the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Thought for the day – Karens According to that great encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Karen is a pejorative slang term typically used to refer to a middle class woman who is perceived as entitled or excessively demanding. According to Professor Heather Woods, a Karen's defining characteristics are a sense of entitlement, a willingness and desire to complain, and a self-centred approach to interacting with others. And while Karen refers to women, the term Davids or Terrys is the male equivalent. Loud, opinionated, and obnoxious. They are generally angry as some sort of offence against them. Sort of like Jonah. Jonah may, for all intents and purposes, be the first recorded Karen. And his complaint? God heard the cried of the people of Ninevah and spared them. And Jonah is mightily upset. So God asks the question: ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ In other words, ‘What right do you have to be angry and tell me who I c...
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Irony and obediance

Jonah 3:4 And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day’s walk. Then he cried out and said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Thought for the day – God’s will I wonder sometimes, how much energy we would save if we just did what we were told. I say that because I was watching my children the other day and I'd asked my son to put down one of his devices and he had an absolute paddy. And I remember saying to him, how much easier would your life be if you just did what you were told?  And as I was thinking about today and today's reading of Jonah in the city of Nineveh, I couldn't help but smile at the thought of me telling my son to do what he was told, and that his life would be easier, when we as adults regularly don't do what we're told. And in our chapter today we have Jonah doing what he was told, even though his life was made particularly difficult by him refusing to.  And the things is when Jonah preached the word of God. The peo...
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Final call

  Jonah 2:7 When my life was fainting away,     I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you,      into your holy temple. Thought for the day – Final call So, Jonah was having a bad day. He'd been thrown off the ship, been swallowed by a giant fish, and now three days later he's praying. And he's praying these words that we have in our verse today. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. And I wonder how many of us have found ourselves in a situation where it's only when we hit rock bottom that we've prayed.   Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying praying when things are really bad is a bad thing. In fact, most of us will want to pray when things are getting really bad, but I can't help but wonder why it is that we leave things to the very end. The other day I was at a Bible study and we were talking about how the disciples had called upon Jesus in the storm and ho...
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Sleepers in a storm

  Jonah 1:6 So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.” Thought for the day – Sleeping through the storm Have you ever been woken up at the worst possible moment? The captain in Jonah finds Jonah fast asleep in the hold while the ship is breaking apart. “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your God!” It’s a rebuke from a pagan sailor to a man of God.   Jonah is sleeping because he’s exhausted from running from God. He’s gone down into the ship, down into the hold, down into sleep. It’s the sleep of someone who has closed their heart to God and is worn down by his rebellion. Compare that to Mark 4. There’s another storm, another boat, and another sleeper. But Jesus isn’t sleeping because he’s running. He sleeps because he’s resting in the Father’s hands. The disciples wake him with a very Jonah-shaped question: “Teacher, do you no...
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The other side of the Street

  Obadiah 1:11 11  On the day that you stood aloof,     on the day that strangers carried off his wealth and foreigners entered his gates     and cast lots for Jerusalem,     you were like one of them. Thought for the day – Standing on the Other Side of the Street Here’s a question for you: ‘what’s the difference between doing harm and watching harm happen?’ Obadiah says, not much. Edom didn’t march on Jerusalem. Verse 11 says they “stood aloof” while strangers carried off the city’s wealth. And then comes the line: “you were just like one of them.” Edom wasn’t a stranger either. The Hebrew word for brother, ach , runs right through this passage, and it’s the same word Moses used in Numbers 20:14: “This is what your brother Israel says.” These two nations were family. That’s what makes it so raw. The betrayal was like a knife in the back.   Then notice the rhythm to verses 12-14: “You should ...
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The challenge of prophecy

Amos 9:15 I will plant them on their land,     and they shall never again be uprooted     out of the land that I have given them,” says the Lord your God. Thought for the day – The challenge of prophecy One of the challenges of reading scripture some two and a half thousand years after it's been written is history. And by that I mean the fact that so much has happened between when the prophecy was uttered and us reading it today. So an example of it is our verse today. Amos says that God would plant the people of Israel on their land and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that God has given them. And yet we know that the Northern Kingdom was completely destroyed and that even the tribes of Judah and Benjamin were sent into exile. Though Benjamin and Judah did come back to Jerusalem, even then however, Jerusalem was completely destroyed and the Jews completely dispersed in 70 AD, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem. So, the questio...
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Amos 8:11 The days are going to come, declares the Almighty Lord, when I will send a famine throughout the land. It won’t be an ordinary famine or drought. Instead, there will be a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. Thought for the day – A Famine of Hearing One of the joys of being in a new part of the world is learning the different stories. I recently heard a story about a young lady named Mary Jones. She was 15 years old at the time and lived in North Wales around the 1800s. Mary saved for six years to buy a Bible. The story goes that she walked some 25 miles from her home to a place called Bala to find Thomas Charles. When she got there, she discovered that his copies had all been sold out. Charles was so moved that he found one for her. And her journey is said to have helped inspire the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society a few years later. You might be thinking, what's that got to do with today's reading? Well, in Amos 8 the chapter opens with a b...
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