Be Still And Know

Matthew 6.16-17 NLT 'And when you fast, don’t make it obvious, as the hypocrites do, for they try to look miserable and dishevelled so people will admire them for their fasting. I tell you the truth, that is the only reward they will ever get. But when you fast, comb your hair and wash your face.' Fasting formed a significant part of Jewish life. Solemn fasts were held every year on particular days such as the Day of Atonement, the New Year and the anniversaries of notable calamities in Jewish history. In addition special fasts were called when there was a particular emergency such as the autumn rains failing. Stricter Jews would also fast weekly on Mondays and Thursdays. In the early church many Christians fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. So fasting was a regular experience for Christians and Jesus did nothing to discourage it. But his concern was the way in which it was done. He taught his disciples to be completely private about it. Because it was to be entirely between them and God, he encouraged the

Matthew 6.13 NLT 'Don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.' When we prayed for our sins to be forgiven and for us to forgive others we were looking to the past. Now the Lord’s Prayer looks to the future. Once again the prayer is fiercely realistic. Although we have had the privilege of our sins being forgiven, we haven’t overcome the problem of sin. Every day we will still face temptation to be less than the best. We will be tempted to cut corners, to be selfish and to neglect the needs of others. However, we can look to the future with confidence because God promises to be our rescuer, if only we place our lives in his hands. Temptation is incredibly subtle. The evil one knows our weaknesses and he will exploit them in every possible way. As we face up to these temptations we have the wonderful privilege of knowing that Jesus understands exactly what we are going through. In the letter to the Hebrews the writer says that Jesus, “understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of th

Matthew 6.12 NLT 'Forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us.' The Lord’s Prayer has its feet firmly planted on the ground! It talks about our everyday life and here it faces up to the horrible but undeniable fact that sin forms a big part of our lives. But here’s the good news. Through our faith in Jesus, sin is no longer an overwhelming problem. Before we met Jesus sin defeated us but now, through his death on the cross, we can claim his forgiveness. We no longer need to trudge through life with the burden of our sins and failures. If we own up to our sins, he is willing to set us free from them, so that we can be fully alive. God’s forgiveness is a wonderful gift but if we are willing to receive it, it places a huge responsibility on us. We have to share it. Day by day we need to be ready to pass it on when people offend us or deliberately trip us up. This is the tough bit. When we are deliberately wronged everything in us cries out for justice. We want the perpetrator to be puni

Matthew 6.11 NLT 'Give us today the food we need.' Have you ever wondered why we ask God for food on a daily basis? Why not ask him to supply us for a week or even a month? It’s a perfectly sensible question and the answer is clearly that God wants a relationship with us. He wants us to live in continual partnership with him. Every day we need to turn to him to obtain the nourishment that we need. This applies in both a physical and a spiritual sense. Just as we need to eat each day so too we need to ensure that we are receiving spiritual nourishment. However excellent last Sunday’s church service was, or however blessed you were by yesterday’s time of prayer, you need to open yourself to the breath of God’s Spirit today. You need him to strengthen you to live for him in the particular challenges and opportunities of this unique day. I am struck by the fact that everything in this prayer is plural. The prayer begins with the words “Our Father in heaven” and here we pray for the food that we need. The mome

Matthew 6.10 NLT 'May your Kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.' The Lord’s Prayer, in common with the whole of Jesus’ ministry, is focused on the Kingdom of God. So we need to have a very clear idea what this kingdom is. In essence, the Kingdom of God comes wherever God is recognised as King. When his rule is accepted, the results will be immediately seen because it will be marked by peace, love, joy, truth and justice. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we are saying that we have signed up to working for this amazing Kingdom and we want to bring it about here and now. We want the Kingdom to be established in our family, our community, our work-place and our church. In this life, the Kingdom will always be under attack just as it was throughout Jesus’ ministry, but we need to keep our focus on the King as we seek to encourage every evidence of his Kingdom. Some years ago, I was sent a wonderful press cutting which gave me an insight into what the Kingdom could look like. It

Matthew 6.9 NLT 'Pray like this: Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy.' The Lord’s Prayer is a wonderful model prayer and has been central to Christian worship from the earliest days. In the previous verse Jesus told his disciples that they didn’t need to inform God of anything in their prayers, because he already knows everything. Here he spells out what they should pray about. In the first century there was a guide for Christian living called the Didache which recommended that the prayer should be said three times a day. Christians will vary in their use of the prayer but, whenever we use it, it is exciting to reflect that it takes us back to the words of Jesus himself and to the heart of the kingdom. It is often helpful to pray the prayer very slowly and to use each sentence to trigger our own personal prayers. The Lord’s Prayer is all about relationship. It begins by looking to God because everything in this prayer flows out of our intimate relationship with our heavenly father. As an Aram

Matthew 6.7-8 NLT 'When you pray, don’t babble on and on as the Gentiles do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again. Don’t be like them, for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him!' Prayer is often described as being like talking to a friend. There is much that is right about that description apart from the fact that God is totally unlike any friend that you or I have ever had. For a start, he knows everything. One of the key features of a conversation with our friends is that, wonderful as they might be, they don’t know everything. In a conversation we spend plenty of time-sharing information with them. So the big question is this. If God knows everything, what is the point of praying? The answer is a wonderful one in that, relieved of the necessity of informing God, prayer is all about relationship. As we pray, we affirm the fact that we are his children and that we are totally dependent on him. That’s why it is so important to

Matthew 6.6 NLT 'But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private. Then your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.' Jesus was reacting against the people who made a great show of their praying. They prayed in the synagogues and at street corners because they were looking for an audience. Jesus obviously wasn’t saying that it was wrong to pray in synagogues and at street corners but that it was wrong to turn prayer into a religious act which is totally focused on people, and not on God. So Jesus drew attention to the importance of private prayer which reveals where the heart is. Without that personal relationship with God, prayer has no meaning. It’s just an act. Jesus’ continual concern was with what we would call religion. He could see that many of the most religious people in his society lived their lives furthest away from God. The word religion means to “bind back”. It ties people down to a particular set of beliefs and practices, but it

Matthew 6.3-4 NLT 'When you give to someone in need, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Give your gifts in private, and your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.' Is there anything worse than hypocrisy? Jesus certainly hated it and had the harshest things to say about the hypocrites of his day. He wanted everyone to have the joy of a real relationship with their heavenly Father, and he knew that putting on an act to impress other people totally missed the point. In this part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus contrasted the hypocrite’s play acting, with true devotion to God. The giving of donations to the poor and needy is a responsibility that everyone has, but the way in which it is done is what matters most. Jesus pointed to the hypocrites who announced their giving with trumpets. This may simply have been dramatic language to describe the sheer vanity of some people’s giving. But we do know that trumpets were sometimes used in connection with giving in the temple.

Psalm 68.28 NLT 'Summon your might, O God. Display your power, O God, as you have in the past.' There’s a Russian proverb which says, “Dwell in the past and you’ll lose an eye. Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.” That’s a wise saying in any context but it is particularly important for those who follow God because we learn so much about him from history. As we look back at the way in which he has led his people through thousands of years we see his faithfulness, love, kindness and generosity. The psalmist gazed back at the time of Moses when God gave the law on Sinai. This was a foundational time for the people of Israel giving shape to every aspect of their life together and with God. The psalmist then recalls the time of Deborah when the earth shook as God fought for his people. All of this led up to the time of David when the Ark of the Covenant was brought up to Jerusalem with great rejoicing. Every step of the journey had shown them more about the nature of their God. We have the blessing

Psalm 66.1-2 NLT 'Shout joyful praises to God, all the earth! Sing about the glory of his name! Tell the world how glorious he is.' When we think about worship we will naturally focus on the church community with which we meet regularly. That’s not only entirely understandable but deeply precious. We thank God for our brothers and sisters and the relationship that we share with them. But we need to be careful because worship belongs to the whole world and not just to the group with whom we worship. The psalmist’s vision was for everyone to worship God, so when we worship we should keep everyone else in mind. Because everyone has been made by God, everyone needs a relationship with him and their life will only be complete when they live in partnership with him. At the heart of our worship there needs to be a longing that everyone around us will join in with us. We see a similar attitude in the New Testament. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul spoke about the way in which Jesus took upon himself the nat

Psalm 65.9 NLT 'You take care of the earth and water it, making it rich and fertile. The river of God has plenty of water; it provides a bountiful harvest of grain, for you have ordered it so.' These days less than two percent of the population is involved in agriculture and so, for most of us, harvesting feels a world away from our everyday lives. In pre-Industrial society most people were involved in agriculture and harvest was a massive communal activity. It was desperately hard work and the lives of agricultural workers were intimately bound up with the rhythms of the seasons. It’s no wonder that many of the psalms make reference to harvesting. Our circumstances are very different, but we are still dependent on the work of our farmers and so I am delighted that over the next few weeks most of our churches will be involved in harvest celebrations. They remind us that our food, however it comes to us, is a gift from God. This is a good moment to focus attention on our farmers. It is well known that the

Psalm 63.1 NLT 'O God, you are my God; I earnestly search for you. My soul thirsts for you; my whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water.' This psalm was almost certainly penned by King David after he had fled from his son Absalom who had attempted to take over his father’s throne. It was an agonising situation. Absalom was David’s third son and was a great favourite of his father. Absalom was charming and handsome and clearly loved the life of pomp and ceremony. We learn that he drove in a magnificent chariot with fifty men running in front of him. After a while the power went to his head and he decided to rebel against his father. It would be hard to imagine anything more terrible. To be betrayed by anyone is an appalling experience but to be betrayed by your own much loved son must have been almost too awful to bear. In despair David fled to the desert and had time to reflect on what mattered most in his life. He was absolutely clear that his relationship with the

Psalm 62.10 NLT 'If your wealth increases, don’t make it the centre of your life.' It’s interesting how often the issue of wealth comes up in the Bible. Psalm 112 gives an attractive picture of the person who follows the Lord. Such a person takes delight in the Lord’s commands and we are told that even in the darkness, the light shines for them. They are also described as being wealthy and at the same time generous and compassionate. Everything that we have is a gift from God and so whatever we have should be a cause for rejoicing, whether it is great or little. But the challenge comes when wealth increases because possessions are always greedy for our attention. They want to become the main focus of our life, and that’s when the rot sets in. Only God deserves that place and that’s exactly what our verse today is warning us about. We should ensure that wealth never takes centre stage in our lives. The book of Proverbs is wonderfully helpful on the subject of wealth. It often warns against the dangers of i

Psalm 62.1-2 NLT 'I wait quietly before God, for my victory comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress where I will neve be shaken.' What’s the biggest challenge that you have faced in life? It may have been an illness, the death of someone who was close to you, the betrayal of a friend or the breakup of a relationship. In such moments we desperately need to know where to turn. We need a rock. King David seemed to face such challenges frequently and he reflected that he had found God to be his rock and his fortress. He knew that, even though life continued to hurl challenges and difficulties at him, he was unshakable. In this particular psalm he spoke about those who were aiming to bring him down through their lies. They trusted in extortion and bragged about their stolen goods. They were always seeking to trip him up, but he discovered that they, and their threats, counted for nothing in the face of God’s unshakable strength. The writer to the Hebrews reflected on the fact that

Acts 17.32-34 NLT When they heard Paul speak about the resurrection of the dead, some laughed in contempt, but others said, “We want to hear more about this later.” That ended Paul’s discussion with them, but some joined him and became believers. Paul received a complete range of reactions to his speech to the Areopagus. Some laughed, others wanted to hear more and yet others became believers. You couldn’t get a more varied response than that! First of all there were those who laughed with contempt. They found the idea of the resurrection absurd. It is never pleasant to be laughed at, but Paul knew that the Christian message will always seem ridiculous to some people. He spoke about this at length when he wrote to the church in Corinth. If you have a partner, children or colleagues who find your faith a complete joke it is very tiring and discouraging. I pray that you will find grace and strength to cope and also Christian friends who can support you. Other people were sufficiently stimulated by Paul’s me

Acts 17.22-23 NLT Paul, standing before the council, addressed them as follows: “Men of Athens, I notice that you are very religious in every way, for as I was walking along I saw your many shrines. And one of your altars had this inscription on it: ‘To an Unknown God.’ Paul must have been delighted to get an opportunity to speak to the council, which was known as the Areopagus. This was a highly respected body and brought together the leading thinkers of Athenian society. I love the graciousness and sensitivity of Paul’s approach to them. He wanted to build a bridge with these learned people. He observed that he had been looking around the city and noticed that they were very religious. They would have loved that. But he goes further, remarking that he had come upon one particular altar which was “To an Unknown God.” I am sure that his hearers were flattered by the care with which Paul had surveyed the situation and they were all ears. If we are to speak compellingly to our society, we too need to build

Acts 17.17-18 NLT 'He went to the synagogue to reason with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles, and he spoke daily in the public square to all who happened to be there. He also had a debate with some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.' We have much to learn from Paul. When he went to a new place it was his usual practice to make contact first of all with the synagogue. There he would find not only Jews but also people who were interested in the faith who hadn’t made a full commitment. It was clearly a good place to talk about his faith and he was ideally qualified to speak with understanding to both Jews and Gentiles. But he didn’t leave it at that. He also went regularly to the public square. That was a more random activity and I love the way that Luke records him meeting those “who happened to be there”. And, as if that wasn’t enough, he also entered into lively debate with the philosophers. The Stoics taught the development of self-control as a means of overcoming destructive emotions and the E

Acts 17.16 NLT 'While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply troubled by all the idols he saw everywhere in the city.' We have no reason to think that Paul intended to spend time in Athens. He was merely there for a few days whilst he waited for Silas and Timothy to catch up with him. The threats to his safety had got too serious in Berea and so he had been escorted down south to the relative safety of Athens. He needed a good break after the dangers and pressures of the recent months of ministry. But Paul wasn’t one for holidays and so he spent his time walking round the city reflecting on all that he was seeing. Politically Athens had become far less significant than it had been in the past, but it was still a leading centre of culture. It was famous for its sculpture, literature and philosophy and Paul was clearly fascinated by all that he saw but was also deeply troubled. The city was full of temples and images of pagan gods and Paul, who had been brought up as a very strict Jew, was distresse

Acts 17.11 NLT 'The people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth.' Every preacher and bible teacher longs to meet people like these Bereans! They were really open to the Christian message but they didn’t simply accept everything that Paul and Silas had to say. They looked carefully at the Old Testament scriptures to make sure that what they had been taught was right. Having been a preacher and Bible teacher for many years I can’t tell you how much I love it when people question what I’ve said. Although I will always seek to write and preach carefully, I’m far from perfect, and I need to be kept on my toes. I find it really exciting when I hear that people are seriously studying the Scriptures and reflecting on what it means. I almost always learn more when people ask questions. I encourage you to get to grips with the Bible. If these daily no