MAC KIRK

God's Ways are Remarkable and We Should trust Him! Jeremiah 29 We look at events , situations, and people and our views are just that--- our views. God looks at the same situations, events and people, and says, " I am going to do this; just trust me." That does not always ring our bells does it? We are for the most part not open to it, that is God's ways are not our ways, and that is very difficult. But that is the point, for we do not see Him to face yet in this life. We see through the glass darkly. It helps to set the scene. In Jeremiah 29, our First Reading ( from Morning Prayer) we see this kind of situation. The nation of Israel was going to go into exile into the land of Babylon and prophets as Hananiah said this was not true. Jeremiah stood up and said Hananiah was a false prophet. The LORD told Jeremiah to say in front of all that Hananiah would die within the year and the people to leave the land of Judah, and go to Babylon. Imagine tha...

The Wedding Feast Matthew 22 "Life is a Banquet, and the Cake is for you!" That is what I got in the mail from Farmer's Insurance to remind me I was having a birthday on Saturday. But this could be also applied to how God is preparing and has prepared for us a beautiful end to our journey of life at His feast. We celebrate that in Holy Communion every week but one day we shall be with Him forever. The King had prepared for those who were invited a beautiful banquet . We note that his servants had invited people to the wedding. Vs 5 says they made light of it, but the idea of the greek there is that they just simply ignored it, took no notice. It is not the idea of spurning it ( or making jest at it as the Kjv sounds). How much this sounds like so many people today! The invitation to Christ and His kingdom has been sent out but people just pass it by. "Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is on...

Proverbs 2:1-8 " Discernment" Have we ever wondered what is the right course of action in our lives? Certainly this week in the news we have been faced with the news of police officers who have to make immediate decisions and one is now charged with manslaughter because of what the video is showing. None of us want to be faced with that kind of life and death decision, but every day we make decisions, and exercise our understanding of situations that ask us to have discernment. The Benefits of Wisdom-Proverbs 2 1My son, if you will receive my words And treasure my commandments within you, 2Make your ear attentive to wisdom, Incline your heart to understanding; 3For if you cry for discernment, Lift your voice for understanding;… NASB What does the word discernment mean? It means understanding. "True discernment means not only distinguishing the right from the wrong; it means distinguishing the primary from the secondary, the essential from the indifferent, an...

Trying to live the Christian life? Ephesians 4:1-.... Today's reading from Ephesians opens up with a challenge " As a prisoner in the Lord, then, I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received: with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,…" Are you struggling with living the Christian life? Of course we all are. An illustration I came across shows us where our strength is. " The famous Welsh preacher D. Martyn Lloyd Jones illustrated this struggle well. ( the temptation to obey sin and not Christ) In 1865 the work of Abraham Lincoln and others to abolish slavery in the United States finally came to fruition. All slaves were declared free. Lloyd-Jones says to imagine you had grown up a slave in Alabama. One minute you're a slave. The next, you are free---legally, officially and forever free. While you may now have your freedom, your internal grasp of that freedom may take some time to cat...

Strengthened in the inner Soul / within us-Ephesians 3:14 We often think that our lives are more about material and outward things but here in this vs the Apostle reminds the Christians at Ephesus and us as well that our strength is in the soul, or the inner person/man. He prays that they would have the Spirit that they would be strengthened . The word means ability or capacity ( Erdman , p. 68, Ephesians). We have been talking about this as we chatted last week about anxiety,that we should not be anxious, and then we asked how that could happen in a practical way in our Christian lives. We want to know these things not only that we may have knowledge but that our Christian lives should be formed by God and His Spirit and the love of Christ: " ...to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God." 3:19 Last week we asked ourselves some of these questions as we heard that well-known Gospel from Matthew 6 w...

How to avoid anxiety Matthew 6 Usually I detest how to talks. Today I am doing that because if we have severe or periodic troubling anxiety in our lives we will live less years and have less influence on those around us for good. Anxiety is much of the subject of the latter part of Matthew 6. In vs.25 we read, " Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink..." Bible hub below word usage of the word anxiety or as translated above is take no thought: merimnáō (from /mérimna, "a part, as opposed to the whole") – properly, drawn in opposite directions; "divided into parts" (A. T. Robertson); (figuratively) "to go to pieces" because pulled apart (in different directions), like the force exerted by sinful anxiety (worry). Positively (merimnáō) is used of effectively distributing concern, in proper relation to the whole picture (cf. 1 Cor 12:25; Phil 2:20). (merimnaō ) is "an old verb for worry and anxiety –...

14 th S after Trinity. Prayer, Thanksgiving and Contemplation Luke 17 The moments in our lives pass by and we often pass by without noting the spiritual and beautiful moments that we have. This was the story last week when the religious leaders passed by the man who had been robbed and left "half dead." 10:30 It may be we are caught up in this as well with more worry about what hymn we are singing, what words we are saying instead of the kernal of the truth of God. Prayer ? Pausing? Living a contemplative ( the action of looking thoughtfully for some time, thoughtful observation) life? Bishop JC Ryle of the Church of England of the 1800's wakes us up with this :" To be prayerless is to be without God, without Christ, without grace, without hope, and without heaven." Yet this is so true of the practice of many Christians ( professing Christians) who do not have a habit of meditation, prayer and contemplation. Why? Perhaps we feel this way too. ...