Day 225

Ecclesiastes 7:1-9:12, 1 Corinthians 7:36-8:13, Psalms 95:1-11

There are times when we have to put ourselves second. There was a time, perusing the rows of DVDs at Blockbuster, when I really wanted to watch one particular film but Claire was in the mood for something not quite so crime based or active. In the end I think we ended up watching Notting Hill or some other such chick flick.

Sometimes we just have to put other people first, it is one of the prime laws of love. When we love someone, that person becomes far more important than we do and their needs come before our own. This is what Paul is trying to get at in this reading. Because we know that there is only one God, offering food to an idol is a pointless exercise, it doesn’t actually change the food in any way. Some people in the church therefore didn’t care about eating food offered to an idol because it was just fiction. People who were a bit weaker in their faith struggled with such practices and Paul was saying that the church needed to put them first. Care for the weakest member is what a loving church does.

Moving on to the Psalm, I find Psalm 95 great. It reflects my passion for praise for starters and it also reminds us of the God who is much bigger than anything we can imagine, then it crashes the two together. Imagine the Hadron Collider sending our praise one way and the awesomeness of God the other way and imagine the worship that would ensue when the two meet. This Psalm suggests a complete outpouring of praise, like Soul Survivor x1,000. The Psalmist wants the people to be that devoted that he even reminds them of the bad times so they never go there again.

Now imagine a church marked by love, never putting ourselves first, and marked by praise and that is the church which gets close to the Kingdom of God in action.