Category: Sister Judy (Page 221 of 271)

Devotions based on an article by Daryce Nolan in The Lutheran Woman Today.
Sometimes traumatic things occur in our lives over which we have no control and we may ask why. Instead of asking where is God in all of this, we should ask where am I in relationship to God?  Sometime we throw up barriers to Him and push others away rather than clinging to Him or sharing our need with others. Jesus experienced the most horrendous suffering and wants to be there with us in our suffering. We may not know where He is unless we look for Him in the scriptures, in the sacraments, and in the voices of family and friends. They are the hands and voice of God to our hearts. God’s love is even in the flowers sent to us by a friend. Some times we have to replace the lie that we have brought this on and replace those thoughts with hope of Christ’s resurrection power and new beginnings. We must choose light and love and to embrace the resurrection. The greatest example of God’s life-giving love is the resurrection. We can experience His touch and know that God will resurrect and bring life from our hard situations that make us feel so helpless. In our suffering He is there with us to comfort us and to guide us and never to leave us. All of us have times like these.  Let us remember God makes a resurrection for all of us!

Devotions based on Scot McKnight’s book, One.Life

The God.Life that the author talks about is shaped by wisdom. It is easier to ask for wisdom as Solomon did than to live it.  We need to slow down and let wisdom have its way with us. If we want to live our lives well and end well, we will need to listen to the wise.  Proverbs was written so that we can gain wisdom and understanding and for receiving instruction etc.  “Wisdom is about the reverence of receiving the wisdom of the wise.”  How wonderful if we could all find someone who is wise and loving and just spend time with them. Jesus was the Wise One and tells us how to be wise: fear God and live with a consciousness of Him throughout the day; when making decisions ask ourselves, “What is the wise thing to do?” That question can shed God’s light on our path;  take one step at a time in living out our dreams; begin now where we are and let that dream shape our every day life;  see every person as someone loved by God; discover who we are by loving others; love our enemies and pray for them. Following Jesus is all about His kingdom, about love, about justice, about peace, about wisdom and so much more.

Devotions based on Scot McKnight’s book, One.Life

As a follower of Jesus, we are to devote our lives to His kingdom, to a life of loving God and loving others and to a society shaped by justice and peace. Jesus showed us what it is like to live in and pursue peace by the way He lived and by asking us to join Him. Often even the church is tempted by another way of power and coercion. Let us remember peace is a result, not a goal.  Love is the way of the cross that produces peace. When we love we find peace. Even in times of sickness and war and death we can have peace because we know in our hearts, God has the last word and He can be trusted. It may be cool to wear a tie-died T-shirt that says we are for peace but peace is hard work.

“Peace is what you’ve got what you need and need what you’ve got.”  So much of the world does not have what they need though. Every 3 ½ seconds someone in the world dies of starvation and yet there is enough food for everyone. There are 3.8 billion people living in poverty. If peace is going to have a chance today, it must begin with us who know Christ. Many of Scot McKnight’s students are making a difference and  some are walking the coast of Africa to raise money for water etc. To follow Jesus is to pursue peace and this peace flows from those who live a life of love.  “Peace is the result of a life of steadfast commitment to work things out, the result of letting God’s inner peace become God’s outer peace”

Devotions based on Scot McKnight’s book, One.Life

As a professor Scot McKnight was concerned for judging if someone got it right, according to his theology. But he found there is a vast difference between focusing on being right and focusing on being a follower of Jesus. Jesus was more about being absorbed in loving God and others. In Jesus day the Torah contained 613 separate rules but Jesus reduced them to 2, which is the Jesus Creed: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. ( In Mark 12)  What God really wants is for us to love God and others, and if we do that everything else will fall in line. Jesus was not about letting people off the hook if they were right and kept all the rules, but gave the Torah of Love! His kingdom is a kingdom of love. “Without love society becomes a chaos of individuals. Without love, society becomes a free-for-all. Without love, society ceases being a society. With love, society becomes community. With love, Society becomes one for all and all for one. With love, society becomes kingdom.” 
When we live in love, we live in the kingdom He came to create. What would happen if everyone lived the Jesus Creed?!!!

Devotions based on Scot McKnight’s book, One.Life

What does it mean to follow Jesus if we take His life and teachings seriously?  Jesus told many parables and they are more than simple illustrations. They are opportunities for God’s grace to enter into our lives to transform us.

They may rattle our hearts if we listen carefully to them, and they may call us into giving our One Life to His kingdom. Take the parable of the man who scatters seed on the ground and it grows and produces grain and he harvests it.
Jesus wants us to see that His kingdom is at work in the ordinariness of our everyday life. God is at work in the most ordinary things we do, even when we are making a cup of coffee or doing an assignment. In the parable of the mustard seed He wants us to see our small actions as significant. Even giving someone a cup of cold water or giving someone a word of encouragement, are like little seeds that have large consequences.  In the parable of the wheat and weeds growing together, the farmer was not permitted to rip out the weeds. Do you think He was trying to tell us that the kingdom people and non-kingdom people are to coexist peacefully until the end when He will judge them, not us?!! Or like the pearl of great price hidden in the field, will we sell out to His kingdom, because we’ll discover the greatest treasure of life?  May we follow Him and let His kingdom take root in us and grow!

Devotions based on Scot McKnight’s book, One.Life

Jesus was a Dream Awakener. He startled people when He said,” The time has come, the kingdom of God is near, and repent and believe the good news!”  For Jesus the word kingdom meant God’s dream for this world come true. It’s not just about our experience with God but about the society of God, the Church, living together in a community. The author is from South Africa and there is an African word Ubuntu that means, “a person is a person through other persons.”  We are designed to connect with others who are also designed to connect. “Ubuntu teaches us that life society works only when humans live out their connectedness, and that kind of connectedness with God and others, and with our past and our future, is what Jesus means when He says, ‘kingdom’.”  We can’t exist in isolation but we are connected and what we do affects the whole world.  Jesus envisioned God’s people living before Him and with others in a way that embodied the will of God in a new kind of society. This interconnected society is noted by caring for others, empowered by love, dwelling in peace, flowing in wisdom, shaped by justice, caring about its future etc

The Lord’s prayer perfectly expresses the dream of Jesus. “May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.  God’s kingdom coming means God’s will being done on earth through all of us.

Devotions based on Scot McKnight’s book, One Life

If we could do anything with our One.Life what would we do and what would it be?  What is worth so much we’d be willing to give our life to it?  Climbing the corporate ladder just isn’t enough. Money isn’t enough. Fame isn’t enough. Finding a person to love isn’t enough. The only thing is Jesus and the way to get to Him is to follow Him. The author grew up as a legalist and did all the right things but found that going to church, reading the bible and praying etc are only a means to an end. They are not the goal but rather we are called to follow Jesus and let Him take over our lives. That means taking up His kingdom vision and let it shape what we do. God gives each of us the dream for our lives and speaks to us about what He wants to accomplish in our life.  We have only one life and we need to chase, find, and live our dream. We need to be consumed by our dream and that dream will give us life and make our life matter.

 “What God has planned can be called the dream of God, and God made us to give our One.Life to that dream of God. Jesus called that dream the kingdom of God.” 

Let us not settle for anything less than giving our whole life to Him and what God made us to do!

Devotions based on Trevor Hudson’s book, Discovering our Spiritual Identity

Jesus had a passionate concern for people and recognized the image of God in every human being. He saw people as they were and as they could become. He acted towards others with respect and care. He enabled them to realize their sacredness and specialness and called forth their very best. To be a disciple of His we too must learn to look at others through His eyes and pray that a divine passion for them will be formed in our hearts.  This doesn’t happen overnight but takes time and needs our full cooperation. One way to start is to show hospitality as Jesus and his followers practiced. When Jesus was at table, no one was sent away and everyone was welcomed.  Today hospitality may get twisted with hidden agendas. But genuine hospitality is a way of saying to another, “You matter. I welcome you and want to provide for you a safe place where you can be yourself….I have no desire to change you, judge you or get anything from you. Make yourself at home.”  Jesus also treated friend and foe alike and He taught that we should love our enemies. We must be honest and confess there are some people toward whom we feel hostile. We are to pray for them, and as we do we will begin to view them in a fresh light?  So let us become more like Jesus by opening our hearts to receive His love and to allow the Spirit to work within us to see others as He does.

Devotions based on Trevor Hudson’s book, Discovering our Spiritual Identity

We open ourselves to heaven by letting go and letting God. When we die we are forced to let go of all we possess.  But throughout our lives there are also minor deaths which we can rehearse the art of letting go and letting God.

As we do this we discover how God constantly acts through this process to give us greater wholeness.  Each of these experiences of letting go- whether it be ending a significant relationship, giving up a destructive habit, failure of a job etc- confronts us with a choice. We can cling to what was, or let go, believing that God is always acting to transform death into life. If we cling to the old, we get imprisoned in the past and it prevents us from taking up what God has for our future. “Daring to let go frees us for the future, enables new beginnings and allows Christ to rise afresh in us.”  We have the choice. We can practice letting go each night as we lay down all that has happened during the day. We give Him all the day’s mistakes, pressures and demands and trust His Spirit to do within us whatever our soul needs. The next morning becomes a resurrection moment as we do the tasks before us in union with Him.
As we let go and let God within the many “Minor “ deaths that  occur during our lifetime, we provide an opening for the life of heaven to touch us where we are.

Devotions from Trevor Hudson’s book, Discovering our Spiritual Identity

We can begin to live an eternal life today, here and now in this world. We don’t have to wait until we die. We can open ourselves up to heaven through the practice of Being Still. We are encouraged to do that as it says in Ps. 46;10 “Be still and know that I am God.”  Deep within us all is a quiet place, an inner sanctuary of our soul, a holy place where God speaks to us. As we enter into this place of stillness in faith, the Spirit draws us closer in intimacy with our Father, gives us a stronger awareness of our heavenly citizenship, and makes us more sensitive to His still small voice. The busier our lives become the greater our need is for this still center.

Another way we open ourselves to heaven is by living fully in the present. That means living by faith that His presence penetrates all that we do and experience—whether it be in the mundane or reading the Bible. The author suggests that we train ourselves to take one thing at a time and to focus on our immediate task so we can enter into it with complete abandonment and all our attention. That doesn’t mean we don’t plan for the future however, or reflect on the past. “Eternity intersects our lives!”  Let us persevere knowing that God’s grace and power are always available to us in the present moment!