Be Still And Know

READ: Psalm 38:4-9 NLT 'My guilt overwhelms me—it is a burden too heavy to bear. My wounds fester and stink because of my foolish sins. I am bent over and racked with pain. All day long I walk around filled with grief. A raging fever burns within me, and my health is broken. I am exhausted and completely crushed. My groans come from an anguished heart. You know what I long for, Lord; you hear my every sigh.' It’s an incredible privilege when someone is completely honest with you. David tells us exactly how things are in his life, and it’s not going well! He feels guilty, he’s in pain and he is emotionally crushed. You can hardly imagine anything worse. But the crucial fact is that, amidst it all, he knows that God hears him. I love the expression that David uses when he writes “you hear my every sigh”. God doesn’t merely know when we are going through a hard time, but he picks up every detail of our distress. He is our Creator and knows us better than we know ourselves, so when we pray he is well ahead of us

READ: 1 Corinthians 1:10-11 NLT 'We can say with confidence and a clear conscience that we have lived with a God-given holiness and sincerity in all our dealings. We have depended on God’s grace, not on our own human wisdom. That is how we have conducted ourselves before the world, and especially toward you.' It’s hard to be criticised. No one likes it. If there is some truth in the criticism that’s one thing, but when you are sure that the criticism is totally unfounded that’s something else. That’s Paul’s situation here. He is being ferociously attacked by people in the church in Corinth. It would be a disappointing experience in any setting, but when it comes from the people of God it is particularly discouraging. Paul’s response is to look inside and to examine his conscience. As he does so the pressure lifts because he has a clear conscience. He believes that he has lived before God with integrity and has depended on God’s grace and wisdom. That didn’t make the critics go away but it did give him streng

READ: 2 Corinthians 1:8-9 NLT 'We think you ought to know, dear brothers and sisters, about the trouble we went through in the province of Asia. We were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who raises the dead.' We all experience hard times. They are an unavoidable part of life. It may be a sudden illness, a road accident, a broken relationship or a hard time at work. No-one is immune. Paul certainly didn’t manage to avoid hard times and is very honest about them, as we see in this passage. The question is what do you do with hard times? We don’t know exactly what Paul is describing but he was clearly staring death in the face. He may be referring to one of the occasions when he was faced with physical violence, although some Bible scholars think that it refers to illness. Whatever it was , the result of this experience was that he lear

READ: 2 Corinthians 1:4 NLT 'He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.' When God blesses our lives, he doesn’t want us to hug the blessings to ourselves. In this verse Paul makes it plain that God encourages us so that we are then stronger and can go out and encourage other people. God calls us to get involved in an eternal chain reaction. It works like this – God encourages us when we go through difficult times so that we can encourage others and then they, in turn, are made stronger and can go out and encourage yet other people – and so on, and so on. Isn’t that exciting? The experiences of your life are unique. No one has experienced life in exactly the way that you have. Your life is a bundle of joys and sorrows, successes and failures and through it all God has been with you and has given you his encouragement. As a result of this you have a story to tell and you can use it to put courage and

READ: 2 Corinthians 1:3 NLT 'All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort.' Paul is bursting to address lots of issues in this letter. His relationship with the church in Corinth was a difficult one and he will need to defend himself very strongly in the pages that follow. But he begins by reminding the church about the nature of God their Father in Heaven. He reminds them that he is the Father of Jesus and that he is by his nature merciful. As a result of this he is the source of all comfort. The word comfort that the translators have used here is an interesting word but not what I would have chosen. Comfort comes from Latin and literally means ‘with strength’, however, the word doesn’t sound very strong to me. It makes me think of someone coming along with their head on one side and saying,” O dear, poor you. I’m so sorry you’re feeling rough.” A better translation for me would be the word en-courage. That is to say, God doesn’t merely say

READ: 2 Corinthians 1:1 NLT 'This letter is from Paul, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus.' Paul had a stormy relationship with the church in Corinth. He had had the privilege of establishing the church in that busy and famously immoral city but they gave him a consistently hard time. It is, therefore, crucial for Paul to establish the reason why he is writing this letter. He is doing so because he is sure that he has been chosen by God for this role. Humanly speaking I’m sure he would have loved to have steered well clear of them. But Paul is committed to doing whatever God called him to do, however tough it might be. It is vital for us all to know what God is calling us to do. I remember a ministers’ meeting years ago. About fifteen of us were present and we all shared how we had heard the call of God to become ministers. It was fascinating and probably very different from what you would imagine. A couple of people could point to a particular verse of Scripture which was important f

READ: Psalm 37:16-17 NLT 'It is better to be godly and have little than to be evil and rich. For the strength of the wicked will be shattered, but the LORD takes care of the godly.' The Old Testament has no problem with wealth, indeed many of its stars were incredibly rich – such as Abraham, Job, David and Solomon. Indeed, wealth is seen as a sign of God’s blessing. But if you’ve got to choose between having wealth and a life focused on God, then the best choice is God. When our relationship with God is right, every other consideration pales into insignificance. Jesus pointed out that you have to choose between gods. You cannot serve both God and money (Matthew 6:24). Only one of them can be in the driving seat. This is a vital message for our society where the desirability of money is largely unquestioned. Many of the things that money can buy are excellent in themselves and can rightly be admired, but they have a limited shelf life. How very different from living a life that is deliberately focused on God b

READ: Psalm 37:1-3 NLT 'Don’t worry about the wicked or envy those who do wrong. For like grass, they soon fade away. Like spring flowers, they soon wither. Trust in the Lord and do good. Then you will live safely in the land and prosper. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires.' I have worn glasses since I was a little boy. Without them life is just a blurry jumble of images and makes little sense. I am so grateful for the skill of opticians over the years who have ensured that I can see clearly. In this psalm David is encouraging us to see our lives from God’s clear perspective – to see life not from our blurry, short-term human point of view but with the sharp clarity of eternity. David was surrounded by people who were committed to making life difficult for him. In early years he lived with the explosive and often violent temper of King Saul. And then as king he faced the challenge of not only a constant supply of military opponents but also many of his fellow countrymen who we

READ: Psalm 36:5-7 NLT 'Your unfailing love, O Lord, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the ocean depths. You care for people and animals alike, O Lord. How precious is your unfailing love, O God!' Do you remember the first time you heard someone tell you that they loved you? Perhaps it was your parents or a friend or a partner. It’s an inexpressibly wonderful experience. It changes everything. You are special, and the whole world looks different. David says many wonderful things about God but most incredible of all is that God the Creator of the Universe actually loves us. It’s always precious when you see a child and their parent expressing love for one another and the expression “I love you to the moon and back” is often heard. Here, thousands of years ago, David is looking for similar language to express the unfailing love of God and concludes that his love is as vast as the heavens, and his faithfulnes

READ: Psalm 35:17,18 NLT 'How long, O Lord, will you look on and do nothing? Rescue me from their fierce attacks. Protect my life from these lions! Then I will thank you in front of the great assembly. I will praise you before all the people.' Have you ever felt that the Lord has completely forgotten about you? Perhaps you have seen God blessing all the people around you, and you are wondering when it’s going to be your turn. If you’ve ever had those thoughts then you will understand where David is coming from. He has had a succession of crushing experiences and he is desperate for God to step in and to sort things out. Waiting is never easy, but when things are going so painfully badly it is much, much worse. Time and again in this psalm, David cries out to God to fix the situation. But what impresses me is that as he waits for God he doesn’t lose confidence that God will, at some point, step in and answer his prayer. He is sure that the time will come when he will be praising God for his deliverance. Samuel

READ: Psalm 35:1,2 NLT 'O Lord, oppose those who oppose me. Fight those who fight against me. Put on your armour and take up your shield. Prepare for battle and come to my aid.' This is an agonising psalm. David is in a deep hole. He is the victim of cruel injustice and he appeals to God to come to help him. We feel his deep anguish and pain and not least because, sadly, injustice happens in every generation. Every newspaper and news report gives us evidence of the injustice that is happening in our society today. You may feel that that is not your own personal experience but you don’t need to look far to hear the stories of people which resonate with David’s experience of long ago. The significance of this psalm is that David is sure that God can help. He knows that God is a God of justice, and that he would be deeply concerned about the injustice that he is experiencing. I had two years living in India and whilst there I had the incredible privilege of living in a village with an outcaste family. There are

READ: James 5:19,20 NLT 'My dear brothers and sisters, if someone among you wanders away from the truth and is brought back, you can be sure that whoever brings the sinner back from wandering will save that person from death and bring about the forgiveness of many sins.' Churches are not made up of perfect people. Far from it! This surprises the kind of people who assume that Christians live lives of near perfection. For such people there is great consternation when the organist goes off with the youth leader, or the treasurer embezzles the church’s money. We should always be shocked and disappointed by such behaviour – but never surprised. Churches are well compared with hospitals, composed of people who are far from perfect but who, by God’s grace and in the power of his Spirit, are becoming stronger and more mature in their Christian lives. Sadly, there have always been people who wander away from the church. It is always tragic when this happens and churches need to have a clear strategy for reaching out

READ: James 5:16 NLT 'The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.' Four years ago I contracted whooping cough. To be honest I thought that it was only for children and was amazed when my GP told me that I had caught it. From time to time over a number of weeks I struggled to breathe, something I had never experienced before. The worst episodes were in the middle of the night and I will never forget those desperate attempts to breathe which ended in the “whoop” as air finally and slowly returned to my lungs. Breathing is essential to life and I now have a new respect for the process, and a deep gratitude that I can breathe without a struggle. The Bible makes it clear that prayer is the way in which we breathe as Christians. Everything depends on prayer. It has been wisely said that we are as strong as our prayer lives and no stronger. It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of prayer, just as it would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of breathi

READ: James 5:16 NLT 'Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.' How are you? I wonder how you normally respond to that question. Probably, like most of us, you smile sweetly and summarise your life with the one word “Fine”. It’s a good word and if it’s true that’s wonderful and one can only hope that it will continue to be the case. But, if we’re honest, it is sometimes the word we use to push people away. What we’re actually saying is, “It’s none of your business. Leave me alone. Hopefully if you think I’m fine you won’t bother me again.” The reality is that we are not always fine. Sometimes we feel awful, and there are times when we know that we have failed miserably. James is encouraging his readers to be honest and to face up to the stark realities of life. We need to be real with one another and actually confess our sins and pray for each other so that we can find God’s healing. I don’t believe that God is calling us to share absolutely every inner secret and sin

READ: James 5:14,15 NLT 'Are any of you sick? You should call for the elders of the church to come and pray over you, anointing you with oil in the name of the Lord. Such a prayer offered in faith will heal the sick, and the Lord will make you well. And if you have committed any sins, you will be forgiven.' Jesus was both a healer and a teacher. You cannot divide up his ministry. He ministered to the whole range of people’s needs – body, mind and spirit. When Jesus left this earth he commissioned the church to carry on with that ministry and here in James we see what that meant in practice. The church is called to minister to those who are sick and to pray for them knowing that God loves to make people better and also to forgive their sins. In recent years the word “holistic” has become very popular to describe the way in which God works. In the power of his Spirit he wants us to be whole people, enjoying him and his world to the full. Many parts of the church have tended to focus on words and preaching and h

READ: James 5:13 NLT 'Are any of you suffering hardships? You should pray. Are any of you happy? You should sing praises.' I remember as a teenager hearing a well-known preacher telling the story of a young woman who had told him that she often didn’t feel like praying. His response was that prayer was not a glandular condition! Prayer was something that we need to do whatever our feelings. That’s precisely the point that James is making here. In short, it’s always the right time to pray – whether you are going through a good or a bad time. God doesn’t want us to be people who simply say their prayers, as if we need to find the right magic words to say and then we can forget about God until the next time have to say them. That’s not what God wants. He wants a relationship with us within which we share fully the ups and downs of life. I love the fact that the Bible doesn’t present us with a line of holy people, who always got it right and who loved sharing their lives with God. The Bible is almost the opposite

READ: James 5:12 NLT 'But most of all, my brothers and sisters, never take an oath, by heaven or earth or anything else. Just say a simple yes or no, so that you will not sin and be condemned.' James isn’t talking here about bad language but about the very common practice at the time of trying to strengthen a statement by taking an oath. Jews made a distinction between oaths made in the name of God which could never be broken, and other oaths which didn’t mention God which could be broken. James encourages his readers to make life much easier by simply telling the truth. The Greeks held that the best guarantee of any statement was not an oath, but the character of the person who made it. Our words are the natural overflow of the lives that we live and so if we live with integrity, people will know that they can trust our words. If we always keep promises, then people will know that the next promise that we make can be relied upon. Speaking the truth is the fundamental building block for every relationship. Wh

READ: James 5:11 NLT 'We give great honour to those who endure under suffering. For instance, you know about Job, a man of great endurance. You can see how the Lord was kind to him at the end, for the Lord is full of tenderness and mercy.' We don’t know exactly what James’ readers were facing but clearly it was tough to be a Christian. They needed to persevere. Amidst all the temptations, distractions and persecution that they were facing they needed to hang in there for God. Job is a classic illustration of this. Everything went catastrophically wrong for him. He lost his children, his possessions, and his health. He had the indignity of being struck with boils and his wife, seeing him sitting in the dust, scratching at his sores, exclaimed, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die” (2:9). But he didn’t. He put up not only with his suffering but also with his hopeless companions whose misguided thinking added another crushing layer to his agonies. However, he didn’t give up. He was confide

READ: James 5:9 NLT 'Don’t grumble about each other, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged. For look—the Judge is standing at the door!' The bible introduces us to lots of grumbling people. Most famously we hear the People of Israel having a whinge after God had miraculously led them out of slavery in Egypt. They had been there for 400 years and, at last, they had been set free by the mighty hand of God. The yoke of oppression had been broken and they were now able to enjoy the sweet taste of freedom. But almost immediately their response is to grumble because things weren’t working out in the way that they had hoped. Nothing much has changed. Grumbling continues to consume huge amounts of time and energy in every part of society. You would hope that churches would be a glorious exception to this rule but, sadly, that wouldn’t be true. James is concerned about this and is severe in his words. Grumbling shouldn’t be taken lightly. Grumbling seriously damages the spiritual health of a church and God will

READ: James 5:7,8 NLT 'Dear brothers and sisters, be patient as you wait for the Lord’s return. Consider the farmers who patiently wait for the rains in the fall and in the spring. They eagerly look for the valuable harvest to ripen. You, too, must be patient. Take courage, for the coming of the Lord is near.' The idea of waiting is easy – until you have to do it! Waiting can be incredibly difficult and especially if you don’t know how long you are going to have to wait. Waiting for medical test results, waiting for a member of the family to make contact or waiting for someone to repay a debt. Any of those can sap your energy and leave you feeling disappointed and confused. The challenge we have to face is that Christians are waiting people. We are all waiting for the Lord’s return, and no one can be sure when it is going to happen. The one fact that is definite is that he is going to return, because that is what he promised to do. In Acts 1:11, after Jesus’ ascension, his disciples were assured, “This same J