Tags: lent

• anguish, hope and Genesis

  God says, I want you to realize that I never underestimated how thoroughly you’d mess up your life or how painfully you would struggle and suffer and I don’t want you to underestimate your failures or struggles either. They’re all part of the story I’m telling. But neither have I underestimated My determination or ability to enter the mess you’ve made and the pain you feel and turn everything around. I can, and I will, make everything good again. (More [...]

• Lent begins….

  Here’s the words and wisdom of Henri Nouwen in a prayer:- “The Lenten season begins. It is a time to be with you, Lord, in a special way, a time to pray, to fast, and thus to follow you on your way to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, and to the final victory over death. I am still so divided. I truly want to follow you, but I also want to follow my own desires and lend an ear to the voices [...]

• lent 18

    So often as Christians we are locked into a ‘judgement cycle’.  Our primary default position is that we judge others. This leaning toward judging is the direct result of the outworking of original sin in our lives. Our desire to be like God by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil has given us a predisposition to divide the world between what we judge to be good and what we judge to be  well less than good!!  An [...]

• lent 17

  Lyrics from a Danny Daniels song….. ‘ I am a wounded solider, but I will not leave the fight, Because the Great Physician is healing me, So I’m standing in the battle, in the armour of His light, Because His mighty power is real in me. I am loved, I am accepted by the Saviour of my soul. I am loved, I am accepted and my wounds will be made whole.’

• lent 16

  Scratching the surface by Ian Adams this season drives me hard into my disturbing desert and keeps me here confronting stones, pinnacles and wild possibilities face in the dust with only the hope of a third day

• lent 15

  We must see from our hearts if we are to be fully alive: Dallas Willard says this….. ‘Blessed are the physically repulsive, Blessed are those who smell bad. The twisted, mishapen, deformed. The too big, too little, too loud. The bald, the fat and the old, For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus.’ Do you see it from your heart today? How much of your life is with eyes of faith, not just sight? Whoever you [...]

• lent 13

  In Jesus, there is no such thing as bad luck. While there may be bad days….. Jesus is our brightness. Today is Friday the 13th! Allegedly a bad luck day!! Superstition frightens or worse, controls……. so if you need too, take the sword of the Spirit to it and kill it. Here’s truth that if we fear God, then we’ll not be afraid of much else! Here’s a few truth thrusts for your encouragement….. Galatians 3v3 speaks this, ‘Christ redeemed [...]

• lent 8

  Wild beasts came to Jesus in the wilderness. Whatever ‘wild beasts’ come to you today, take to prayer about them. Be still. Remain in prayer. Be still. For this silence and battle in prayer is one of the most beautiful secrets of the spiritual life. Solitude, silence and prayer makes for the stuff of a great soul.

• lent 7

  Mark tells us that Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. In the Lords Prayer this morning, and through the unlikely question of a friend, I’m asking myself as I ask you: What may be your temptations today? Do you know them? and, How will you not yield to them? God of all of me, Help me to stay true today.

• lent 6

  “I am a sinner, and the  church offers me a weekly chance to come clean, and to pray, along with others. We can be so reluctant to use the word ‘sin’ that in church we end up confessing nothing except our highly developed capacity for denial!! One week, for example, the confession began, ‘Our communication with Jesus tends to be too infrequent to experience the transformation in our lives You want us to have,’ which seems less a prayer than [...]