Day 275

Jeremiah 4:10-5:31, Philippians 3:1-4:1, Psalm 116:1-11

Today is one of those days when all three passages spoke to me in different ways.

Jeremiah - Sometimes we can be so deaf to what God is trying to tell us. It may be abundantly obvious and yet we just can’t hear. Sometimes it is because things are clouding our judgement and sometimes it is because we just aren’t listening.

I am always amazed that some people don’t bother with the old Testament. I have said before how important I think that it is in terms of context but we must also bear in mind that God speaks through the Old Testament today as well.

Although we read the Old Testament through the lenses of love and grace brought to us by Christ, I cannot help but recognise some of what Jeremiah is describing around us today – people lying about God, people too well fed, lack of justice, people becoming too rich and powerful and that is just for starters. God talks through Jeremiah of people turning away from him and we see a lot of that today as well. We should not be too hasty in writing off the Old Testament, we just have to remember that it is fulfilled by Grace in the life of Christ.

Philippians – I always struggle with Paul’s boasting, it just doesn’t seem to translate very well into English and seems quite arrogant, either that or it was written that way. What he has to say a bit later though is one of his deeper passages, that all things are counted loss when we have Christ. Many people dream of being millionaires,, owning a nice house, big car, having a powerful job, or whatever your own dream may be. From a world perspective there are some marks to being successful and money is a big one. But no matter how much money you have, even if you are top of the Time Rich List, it is all nothing compared to what you have in Christ. Whatever it is we mark life by, even if we aren’t bothered by money, it is still nothing compared to Christ. He is all we could ever imagine.

Psalm – We identified the psalms of lament early on in the year and yet this one is a psalm of praise following a period when the Psalmist was in the dumps. It could almost have been written to go on the wall as reminder, so that next time the Psalmist was in the wars, he could remember what God had done last time and take hope from it. This is one that we can keep close, a prayer that we could say, remembering that God is mighty and powerful and will act in our lives in the same way that he has acted in the life of the writer of this psalm.