Watching Daily At Wisdom's Gates

 Ezekiel 9:9 ESV  Then he said to me, “The guilt of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great. The land is full of blood, and the city full of injustice. For they say, ‘The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see.’   There's a grain of truth to ancient Israel and Judah's attitude towards God. There's a sense in which he did seem to abandon the land and send the people into Babylonian captivity. Essentially however they misrepresented him. Elsewhere we're told that God partly put his people into seventy years of Babylonian captivity to give the land its Sabbath rest that the people had neglected to give it. So far from forsaking the land, it could be argued that God was restoring it for future generations. Otherwise it could have become a barren wasteland. It's a plain lie of the devil that God doesn't see our evil. He doesn't turn a blind eye to our iniquities. He is omniscient, all knowing, and he hates our wrongdoing. We will believe...

 1 Kings 8:61 ESV  Let your heart therefore be wholly true to the Lord our God, walking in his statutes and keeping his commandments, as at this day.”    I can't help but think how hypocritical of Solomon this verse is. He allowed his pagan wives to draw his heart away from the Lord. I take it that Ecclesiastes is his repentant swansong. Notwithstanding that Solomon didn't practice what he preached, this verse is still true. His father was a man after God's own heart. He himself though had divided loyalties.  God hates half heartedness. He wants us to be wholly true to him. His law is to love him with all of our beings and to love one another as we love ourselves.  It's all very well to worship God at the dedication of the temple, or when we first profess faith, or on Christmas day. When the going gets tough, we're to remain faithful to the Lord. That's when the rubber hits the road: the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  'Lord our God, please hel...

 2 Corinthians 9:6 ESV  The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.   Stingy people don't have a good destiny. Greedy people can't expect to attain to glory. Miserly people will get their comeuppance  This verse is true on a number of levels. It's literally true. If you sow an acorn you hopefully get an oak tree; if you sow a hundred oak trees you hopefully get a wood. This verse is metaphorically true economically. Materialistically, if we invest lots of money wisely, we're going to get a bigger return than if we're too sparing. This verse is true financially. Finally, this verse is true spiritually. If we're greedy, stingy and miserly, we don't belong in God's kingdom. If we're generous and 'otherish' rather than selfish, we get to become part of the new creation. 'Heavenly Father, we praise you for your generosity towards us in Christ. May we too be genero...

 Romans 10:9 ESV  because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.     I know we shouldn't want to know the bare minimum we need to be saved, but this verse reveals it. Having been saved however, we shouldn't want to just be saved by the skin of our teeth. We should want to have something to show for our faith. James seems to contradict this verse when he says that faith without works is dead. Yet the faith that James condemns isn't the faith that Paul commends. It's not enough to believe God exists; we need to trust that he graciously rewards those who earnestly seek him with the free gift of saving faith. Some people asked Jesus what they must be doing to do the works of God. He replied that they must simply believe in the One whom God has sent- himself. Belief in Jesus is the work of God. Having believed, we will do works to evidence that we have truly believed. We will ...

 2 Thessalonians 3:3 ESV  But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.     My middle daughter's middle name encapsulates this verse well. Chimamanda is a Nigerian name which means that God will never fail. As the Apostle Paul puts it, 'the Lord is faithful'. The Thessalonian church was being persecuted. They'd hoped for the imminent return of Christ and we're becoming disillusioned. Paul wrote to encourage them in their pilgrimage to glory. When we trust in Jesus, we're not immediately beamed up into glory. Yet we get established in the faith in the midst of adversity and the distractions of the world. God doesn't abandon us to our own devices. The evil one wants our guts for garters. He uses difficulties and distractions to try and trip us up. Yet God is able and willing to guard us from him. 'Lord our God, may we trust in your unfailing love to guide us safe home to glory. For we ask in Christ's name, amen...

 Luke 1:31-33 ESV   And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”    Mary, the humble peasant girl, must have been shocked to hear that she was to bear the Son of God, the King of kings. Yet she was a willing servant of the Most High God. Even Mary needed Jesus as her Saviour. Jesus wasn't great in a worldly sense. He wasn't materialistically rich. He didn't wield political power over an empire, and lived most of his life as an obscure carpenter. The greatness of Jesus is that he is wholeheartedly loving towards Father God and to us. So great is his love that he laid down his life for us. His is the greatest love of all. As Jesus told Pilate who condemned him to death, 'my kingdom is not of this wo...

 Luke 2:11 ESV   For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.     Jesus had a very humble birth. Yet his nativity is the most significant advent to have ever happened. It was all according to God's plan. It wasn't by accident that the one they called the Nazarene, from the north of Israel was born in Bethlehem. The significance of Jesus being born in the city of David is because of Gods promise to that great king. David was promised a Descendant whose reign will never end. Christ isnt just the Jewish Messiah. He isn't even simply the Saviour of the world. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. It's not enough to claim Christ as our Saviour. If we fail to acknowledge him as Lord, we betray the fact we're not truly saved. We must submit to his Lordship over all.  'Lord our God, forgive us if we're guilty of just lip service. May we consciously live under your Sovereignty. For your glory we ask this, amen'....

 Luke 2:9-10 ESV   And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.     We don't tend to associate Christmas with fear. Yet when the fiery angelic spirits appeared to the shepherds, they were terrified. Never has a birth been announced with such heavenly fanfare. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The shepherds started out right. Yet the love of God is the heart of wisdom, and that's what the angels proclaimed. God is fearsome, he could condemn us to hell. Yet he loves us so much he sent his Son to redeem us to himself. This is the good news of great joy. God didn't come to make our pleasures less. He came so that we might rejoice in him and in his salvation. Jesus isn't just the Jewish Messiah but the Saviour of the world. 'Glorious God, we rejoice i...

 Luke 2:7 ESV  And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.    People make much of Bethlehem being busy with there being a census where everyone had to return to their hometowns to register. The Bible text doesn't actually specify that Bethlehem was overly busy. For all we know, there was no place in the in because of the stigma in that culture of Mary being pregnant outside of marriage. People like Joseph had to return to Bethlehem for the census. Yet presumably some people from Bethlehem had to go elsewhere to register. So Bethlehem may not have been overly busy. Note the humility of Christ's birth. It wasn't necessarily a stable. It was probably the lower animal quarters within a house. The manger was probably a hole in the wall where the animal feed was normally kept. The Son of God, the King of kings, humbled himself not to a worldly palace, but to where the ...