Walking the Way: A daily devotional

  Micah 3:7 So the seers shall be ashamed, And the diviners abashed; Indeed they shall all cover their lips; For there is no answer from God.”   Thought for the day – The deafening silence In today’s chapter Micah is speaking out against the false prophets that are crying peace when actually they should have been calling for repentance. But there is something about that verse today that speaks to me of those times when God is silent, and God doesn't answer, and just how frustrating it must be not to be heard.  The creator of the 24-7 prayer movement, Pete Grieg has a book called ‘God on mute’. And in the book he asks the question why God doesn't answer our prayers. It's not an easy read. It's full of personal anecdotes about his wife and when she got poorly. About evil in times of the Holocaust. It's a harrowing read. But as I read it, actually  I listened to it as an audio book, I was struck by the frustration expressed when God doesn’t answer prayers...

Micah 2:10 “Arise and depart, For this is not your rest; Because it is defiled, it shall destroy, Yes, with utter destruction. Thought for the day – Where is your rest? There’s a classic stereotype that comes up again and again in action movies. The hero or heroine thinks they can go no further and then a voice, or a memory or a vision tells them they have the strength to go on. It is not their time ,their job is not finished, yadda, yadda, yadda. And on a superficial level we can read that as how we continue as pilgrims living in a world that is not our home. But there is a darker and more meaningful meaning in our verse today. In Old Testament understanding the rest of the people of Israel was the Promised Land. By God telling them that it was no longer their rest God is effectively evicting them.  And it got me wondering what we have done to remove ourselves from God’s rest for us? So recently I was talking to someone and the conversation came up about personal bound...

  Micah 1:9 For her wounds are incurable. For it has come to Judah; It has come to the gate of My people— To Jerusalem. Thought for the day – The hope in Ebola I was struck by our verse today from Micah about Judah's wounds being uncurable, and it got me thinking about uncurable diseases. One of the reasons I was thinking about uncurable diseases is because recently there's been an outbreak of Ebola in Africa, cantered on the Democratic Republic of Congo with over 5000 deaths. As someone who has worked in healthcare in Africa, Ebola has always scared the pants off me. The symptoms start innocuously enough a bit like the flu but quickly progress to vomiting diarrhoea, rash liver and kidney failure and internal and external bleeding. On average 50% of people who get Ebola will die from it. There is a vaccine against one of the three forms of Ebola but no treatment.  If the outbreak continues as it is it is on track to become the biggest outbreak of Ebola since in discovery and t...

  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...

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...

  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...

  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...

  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 ...

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...

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...

  Amos 7:14 Amos responded, “I’m not a prophet, and I’m not a disciple of the prophets. I am a rancher and a grower of figs. Thought for the day – Not a Prophet, Just a Farmer Today’s chapter is an interesting one. God changes his mind because Amos asks him to. That in itself is remarkable because we sometimes think that God does not or will not change his mind. But look who God is listening to. A farmer. Amos was a shepherd who also grew figs. In his own words he wasn’t a prophet or even a disciple of a prophet. He was a farmer. And yet God listened to him and changed his mind. And it got me thinking abut the times we may have had the opportunity to speak to God and change something and we didn’t because we didn’t feel we could. Sometimes we feel that we can’t speak for God because we are…insert reason here… But the reality is we are God’s Holy people, his Royal Priesthood. We don’t need to be clergy, or prophets, or whatever we think we are that’s stopping us. We just n...

Amos 6:1 How horrible it will be for those who are at ease in Zion, for those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, and for the heads of the leading nations, to whom the nation of Israel comes. Thought for the day – Comfortable, not callous Jesus tells a challenging account of a poor man called Lazarus. He lives outside the gates of a wealthy man in abject poverty. He dies and goes to heaven, the rich man dies and ends up in hell being tormented. Jesus is making a point about money and what it reveals about people’s hearts. A point bought home in 2018 when a homeless person in Liverpool, woke up to find someone who had been out partying, standing over him urinating on him. An echo of an incident in New York in the 1970s, when a millionaire was photographed urinating on another homeless man. What both of these demonstrate is a callousness to the plight of those considerably worse off. I don’t think God doesn’t want us to be comfortable. And I do think we as a church ...

Amos 5:24 But let justice flow like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Thought for the day – A River, Not a Tap In 1834, six farm labourers from Tolpuddle in Dorset are sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia after swearing an oath to organise against falling wages. Their leader, George Loveless, was a Methodist local preacher. The public outcry was so fierce that they were pardoned and brought home. It was worship lived outside of the walls of the church that got them sent to Australia. In Amos 5, God says some of the most uncomfortable words in the Bible to those who would class ourselves as being religious or followers of Jesus. ‘I hate your festivals. I won’t listen to the music of your harps. I can’t imagine me saying that from the pulpit on a Sunday! Why would God say it? The answer is that worship that never leaves the building is just noise. But our verse today is the heart of Amos’ message to the people. Justice is a river. Righteousness is a...