Thoughts for the Day

I never knew you …                             Matthew 7:23 I wonder what spoke to you more in the last couple of days’ blogs, the extravagance of God’s forgiveness or the comeuppance of the unmerciful servant, the example of the diligent servants or the fate of the wicked one?  As always, there is good news if our hearts…

Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken …        Matthew 25:29 Today I’m considering another parable that Jesus used to described what the Kingdom of Heaven is like, the parable of the Bags of Gold (each equivalent to 20 years’ labourer’s wages).  Three servants are given respectively five, two and one Bag…

When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged    Matthew 18:31 The world abounds with stories of ‘one of those days’ that change people for life.  It could be a trauma that scars, it could be an act of kindness that rescues, it could be falling in love.   Jesus uses such an incident…

I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance    Luke 5:32 Was yesterday’s conclusion a bit sweeping?  John’s mission and Jesus’s parting words according to Luke may be good evidence for preaching a gospel of ‘repentance for the forgiveness of sins’, but a big conclusion warrants further investigation.  It isn’t possible in…

 … repentance for the forgiveness of sins.                 Luke 3:3 & 24:47 If the gospels were being written today, is there any doubt they would be blockbusters?  At least 700 pages long and maybe in several volumes.  Paper is so cheap, indeed not even necessary.  How different when the gospels were actually written!  Quite how the…

… he will save his people from their sins.                  Matthew 1:21 The angel announced to Joseph that Jesus will be born ‘to save his people from their sins’.  Through the lens of the New Testament, we can see that the Old Testament points to this as the way that God will reconcile the demands of…

[High Priests] serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. Hebrews 8:5 In looking for a scripture that might help us appreciate the utter holiness and otherness of God, I suddenly realised the answer was not a scripture but a building.  The temple in Jerusalem.  Because by his…

Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness …        Matt 6:33 To pick up from yesterday, God is unique, there is none like Him and nothing against which He can be measured because He defines His own standard, and He is perfect: perfectly pure (holy) and perfectly good (righteous).  That term ‘righteous’ simply means that…

… whoever believes in Jesus shall not perish …                     John 3:16 Having spent some days considering questions of love and obedience, I want to change tack, and start by returning to John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not…