The Narrow Path

  Saturday, October 1, 2022 Psalm 74 Ezra 4:11-5:2 Colossians 2:16-23 With Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe. There are so many rules around us. Rules on how to drive, how to pay taxes, how to brush our teeth, how to speak in public. “Rule” as it refers to instructions that come with a punishment for disobedience is related to “rule” as a straight line, a guide on how to live and act in a certain way in line with certain principles. Children must follow the rules so that they grow up with a certain set of behaviours and attitudes, for example. Christ’s death and resurrection, and His righteousness imputed to us, and His place as our Head, has resulted in a different rule by which we measure ourselves. Before, we had rules to follow with a threat of punishment for disobedience. Now, we have no threat of punishment, and we have a different set of principles by which to live. The previous rule by which we were measured was according t...

Friday, September 30, 2022 Psalm 72 Ezra 3:9-4:6 Colossians 2:8-15 Observance: Jerome, priest and biblical scholar (d. 420) ...God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses... It would not be presumptuous to claim that every human being who has, is, or will ever exist can relate to a moment when they wished the earth had swallowed them up. Embarrassment on someone else's behalf, or shame at ourselves, is something everyone has experienced. That feeling of wishing we could just leave our body and fly away to a distant land and never come back has tempted every son and daughter of Adam. Even worse than embarrassment and shame for ourselves and our fellow humans is the sense that we have offended our loving Creator. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, our patient, kind, generous and loving God, who is always ready to hold us in His strong yet gentle arms, has been bruised and wounded time and again by those of us He came to save. The “rule...

  Thursday, September 29, 2022 Psalm 69:1-16 Ezra 2:64-3:8 Colossians 2:1-7 Observance: Michael and All Angels ...continue to live your lives in Christ. Umberto Eco, author of (amongst other things) The Name of the Rose , has a recurring theme in his works. It seems to be that his own existential crisis is being worked out in his literary output. The crisis goes something like this: “life's meaning has not revealed itself on its own, therefore I need to fill my head with knowledge and information. Even if I do not discover the meaning of life, my time has not been wasted in the searching.” Whether or not the author has followed the lead of his characters and come to the understanding that no amount of information will fill the void, and that the answer lies elsewhere, is between Eco and God. How much effort is thrown into human endeavour; consider the modern-day cathedrals: private enterprise pushing the limits of modern engineering and accounting to make s...

  Wednesday, September 28, 2022 Psalm 71 Ezra 1 Colossians 1:21-29 ...everyone whose spirit God had stirred... Completely surrendering ourselves to Jesus is scary. “Better the devil you know”, and we know that the devil may wound us and lead us to death, but at least we are allowed that one vice we want to keep. Surrendering to Jesus means a complete surrender: Paul says we are reconciled to God through death – the complete destruction of everything we were before. This surrendering is the only way Jesus would have us, however. He is our Lord, not our business partner. And if we want to know where God wants us to go, He will only tell us if we are available for the job. If there is any part of us where we dig in our heels and tell God “anything but that bit”, God won't bother taking anything at all. Completely surrendering ourselves to Jesus is scary: consider Paul, suffering for the sake of the gospel. Consider the Jews in exile, who had to pack up everything (aga...

  Tuesday, September 27, 2022 Psalm 68:1-20 Joel 3:9-21 Colossians 1:9-20 Observance: Vincent de Paul, priest & worker with the poor (d. 1660) Christ is the image of the invisible God. A wise spiritual teacher once described Christ as a “many-faceted jewel”. There have probably been many across the centuries who have used this term to describe our Lord, so we won't bother with a specific reference. The idea is that Christ, as the image of the invisible God, has many “points of contact” for us to make when we want to approach God in our prayer closet and in our mental apprehension of God. Hebrews describes the famous three-fold office of Christ as Prophet, Priest and King: an excellent starting point, but in no way exhaustive when we think of all the things our Lord is. We have moved from Romans to Ephesians and now Colossians in recent months, and in each epistle Paul feels the need at some point to emphasise the supremacy of Christ over everything. Here, Pa...

  Monday, September 26, 2022 Psalms 65; 70 Joel 2:25-38 Colossians 1:1-8 [The gospel] is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world... There are a lot of different ideas about where the world is headed. The ancients thought of history as a circle, repeating itself; modernists saw history as a gradual increase of technology and scientific understanding; some pessimists in our time think we are on a precipice, like an unfortunate desert creature out of a cartoon, hanging on by a fingertip. As Christians, there are certain promises in the word of God we can hang on to. Psalm 65 this morning spoke of a natural world rich and fertile, full rivers, and healthy forests. Joel prophesied that the day is coming when God will dwell with us in the most intimate sense; and Paul is brimming with optimism when he thinks about the future of the mission of the church. The section in the middle of today's reading from Joel is quoted by the apostle Peter at Pentecost (Acts 2:1...

  Saturday, September 24, 2022 Psalms 56; 57 Joel 2:12-24 Ephesians 6:10-24 Put on the whole armour of God. There is a dramatic scene in Percy Jackson's Lord of the Rings where the king of the horse-lords, Theoden, is putting on his armour in preparation for what everyone assumes is to be a losing battle. He recites a poem, which is in the original text by Tolkien, who himself adapted from a poem written in Old English called (by modern translators) “The Wanderer”. Lamenting the loss of former glory years, the author cries out: “How the space of years has spread — growing gloomy beneath the night-helm, as if it never was!” Curious that Tolkien would put this poem into the mouth of the king as he is about to march into battle. But as Theoden puts on his armour, we are reminded of our own battle that we march into daily, because the original Old English poem ends with the comforting words: “It will be well for those who seek the favor, the comfort from our Fath...

  Friday, September 23, 2022 Psalms 54; 55 Joel 1:15-2:11 Ephesians 6:1-9 ...for this is the first commandment with a promise... Uh oh. It looks like Paul is doing that thing again, where he gives us instructions on what the Christian life looks like. When Paul does this, we might be tempted to try and find ways to write them off as outdated. If we complain like this, we are being irrational, because if these behaviours were just a sign of the times in which Paul lived, he wouldn't have to include them in his teachings. These instructions have been uncomfortable to every age and culture. Hopefully, since we have been going through the letter in small sections, we now have a decent idea of the context in which Paul is writing these particular words. Firstly, let's notice something about how Paul has spent several chapters making out Jesus to be the primary actor in our holiness. Notice in particular what these instructions are: they are shifts of attitude, not p...

  Thursday, September 22, 2022 Psalm 50 Joel 1:1-14 Ephesians 5:21-33 Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. We in the church like to talk big about “self-sacrificial love”, but I wonder if any of us truly understand what that really means. Those who vote progressive might think it means to give up our income to be redistributed through the tax system. Conservative voters might hear it as a call to serve the nation using terms like “duty”. Instead of tickling our ears by reading into the text what kind of sacrifice we would like to make, let's instead think of how much we would be willing to give up in the service of Christ. Paul is giving specific instructions on the Christian life using the foundational argument that he has already laid out in previous chapters: Christ is the head of the body, we are the members. Christ does not just walk alongside us, or live inside us in a special room ready to spit out blessings here and there, or sit below us...

  Wednesday, September 21, 2022 Psalm 50 Nahum 3:8-19 Ephesians 5:6-20 Observance: Matthew, apostle, evangelist and martyr Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit... The Silence of the Lambs , a brilliant (and disturbing) psychological thriller starring Anthony Hopkins, contains a conversation from where the title of the movie gets its name. It is revealed that the evil man under examination performs his evil deeds in an attempt to silence the sound of crying lambs that he constantly hears in his head. Paul has claimed that everyone, to some degree, has the same experience. Rejecting the true God and following a lie results in a life that cannot really be called a life; always running away from the truth, the pagan unbeliever needs to “silence the lambs” in their head one way or another. We see this today: consider for example the recent twin explosions of popularity in yoga and mindfulness. As Christians, we have a very ...

  Tuesday, September 20, 2022 Psalm 28 Nahum 2:10-3:7 Ephesians 4:29-5:5 Observance: John Coleridge Patteson, first bishop of Melanesia, martyr (d. 1871) ...that your words may give grace to those who hear. If the statesman said that “the pen is mightier than the sword”, then the Bible says that the tongue is mightier than both. Words have power, or so goes another pithy idiom on the subject, but if we inject the concept of “power” with what we have learnt of what that word means for God, the pithiness begins to fade. We are made in the image of God and reign on earth as God's representatives: through Christ's finished work, this role has been restored to us. Therefore we also wield power with our words. Negative words, words that put down, whittle away, subtract, upset and deny are of the enemy. The Accuser is quite happy to send out spiritual curses into the world using our words as the vehicle. On the other hand, we Christians are marked with the seal ...

  Monday, September 19 Psalm 45 Nahum 1:15-2:9 Ephesians 4:17-28 ...be renewed in the spirit of your minds... It is far too easy to read some of these Pauline lists of virtues and vices and feel like we have gone back to the dark days before the Reformation. The idea that if we behave ourselves then we can call ourselves “good people” is pagan, not Christian. Paul feels very strongly about how Christians behave, he “affirms and insists” upon it. But it is because of what has already happened that we should mind our step, not because of where we are going. Christ's resurrection is many things, but one aspect relevant for Paul's teaching this morning is that it demonstrates to us the radical new reality in which we now live. We too have passed (spiritually) from death to life; therefore, we experience a “renewal of our minds”. Instead of treading water until we die, we live lives. Everything now makes sense: God has spoken, so we have logic. God made us in His im...

  Saturday, September 17, 2022 Psalm 40 Nahum 1:1-14 Ephesians 4:1-16 Observance: Hildegaard of Bingen, abbess and spiritual writer (d. 1179) The gifts he gave were... to equip the saints for the work of ministry. Just like last time the lectionary gave us a reading from the Apocryphal writings, this morning we will skip the Nahum reading, simply because there is already enough in the inspired Word to try and get through in our devotional time. Besides, the vision of how “church” works that Paul is trying to teach us is worth spending time on. Humility (and gentleness with patience), bearing one another in love, and making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: these are the three foundational attitudes we should hold towards one another. Paul emphasises the ideal of church unity by quoting Psalm 68:18 and adding a dash of logical reasoning: Christ ascended, therefore He ascended from somewhere, which means at one point He had to ...

  Friday, September 16, 2022 Psalm 38 Habakkuk 3:18-19 Ephesians 3:14-21 God, the LORD, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights. “ Power” is one of those words that theoretically should be morally neutral, but in practise works like a loaded term. Perhaps it is because of how we see power being wielded by our fellow humans. A poor definition, true in the material sense, but demonstrably false in the spiritual sense, would say something about how “power” is the ability to have other people do what you say. A “powerful” man could be considered a man who can order other men to march into war, for example. God's power works completely differently – hence the reason that the earlier definition is not only “poor” but completely untrue. God's power, as perceived by Habakkuk, is the power to punish evil: God brings calamity upon those who gloat as they hunt out the poor who were in hiding. Upon hearing this kind of pow...

  Thursday, September 15, 2022 Psalm 37:1-17 Habakkuk 2:18-3:7 Ephesians 3:1-13 Observance: John Oliver Feetham, bishop and bush brother (d. 1947) Through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. “Let all mortal flesh keep silent” is a deeply moving hymn we sing during Lent (or, if you have a really good worship team, the Good Friday vigil). Having read the portion for Habakkuk this morning, we see from where the hymn-writer took his inspiration. The true God is no fantasy we humans have invented in our own mind, or object we have crafted with our hands. The God we worship is mighty and wonderful; only the true God could have done what Jesus did at Calvary. Isn't Paul a bit of a sweetheart, though. He is passing on the teaching he received directly from the mouth of the risen, ascended Lord Jesus by “revelation” (v. 3), and he can't help but interrupt himself and disrupt hi...

  Wednesday, September 14, 2022 Psalm 34 Habakkuk 2:16-17 Ephesians 2:11-22 Observance: Holy Cross But the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. Some have described Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden as the moment when we humans declared war against God; that the story of humanity has been a story of those fighting on God's side, and those who fight with the enemy. War is certainly a main theme of Habakkuk's prophecy, and war is something we in our time like to obsess over as well. “War” might be a particularly loaded term but it is still fairly accurate to describe the situation we are in. “Human bloodshed and violence to the earth” (Hab 2:17) is just as relevant today as it was when it was first prophesied. The Old Testament seems to describe a war in three directions: between God's people, their enemies, and between humans in general and God. Will we ever learn that to fight against God is not...

  Tuesday, September 13, 2022 Psalm 35:1-17 Habakkuk 1:12-2:5 Ephesians 1:14-2:10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. I have decided to included the section of Ephesians in between yesterday's readings and today's, despite the lectionary's objections, because Paul's prayer found in 1:15-23 is an important preparation for his main statement in 2:1-10. Let's be Pauline scholars and work through his thought process. Paul wants God to give us knowledge and wisdom so that we will know just how amazing what it is we are hoping for. We are to be on the receiving end of riches and power. Not just any riches: the riches of the glorious inheritance that Jesus is getting, as king and lord of all that is. In the same way, the power we are getting is the same resurrection power that brought Jesus out of the grave and into heaven on the throne. To understand how this is not a...

  Monday, September 12, 2022 Psalm 33 Habakkuk 1:1-11 Ephesians 1:1-14 In Christ we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. The lectionary has taken us from the beloved disciple to one of the most beloved of Paul's epistles: Ephesians. Paul must have loved this church very much: we get a sense of his fondness for them and their shared sense of purpose and worship just from the introduction. In what is likely just an introduction to a letter in the style of the ancient Roman world, Paul has managed to squeeze in the entire, wondrous story of God's work of redemption. Paul has framed it the way it ought to be framed: in a pastoral, encouraging tone. He has three main points here (remember, Paul proceeds logically to build up an argument, unlike John who circles around his main point). First: God intended to save us before the world was formed. Think back to the first l...

  Saturday, September 10, 2022 Psalm 25 Isaiah 34 3 John Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good. If “the elect lady” of 2 John needs encouragement towards truth, Demetrius in 3 John needs encouragement towards love. These two aspects of Christian discipleship, truth and love, weigh very heavy on John's thinking, and so it should be something we deliberate over in our own prayers too. Demetrius was practising truth without love. Without becoming too proud ourselves, consider the fact the lectionary only gave us Isaiah 34 this morning. Imagine only having Isaiah 34 without Isaiah 35! We would only have part of the story of God. We do not need to sacrifice truth for the sake of love, either. Consider who Gaius was helping, and why John thought so highly of him. Gaius was helping the “friends”, even though they were strangers to him. These strangers had given up everything they had for the sake of Christ, and so as a fellow lover of Jesus, G...

  Friday, September 9, 2022 Psalm 21 2 Chronicles 36:15-23 2 John And this is love, that we walk according to His commandments... The lectionary is really treating us well this week by taking us through all three of John's letters. His first letter has gone over the core principles of discipleship and the gospel message: that everything is grounded in love, and that love comes from God as revealed in the God-man Jesus Christ. In this, the second letter of John's that we have, along with the third, we get two sides of the same coin. Now that we have been given this gospel message, and gather as a church with other people who also love the Lord Jesus, we cannot take the multi-faceted jewel of Christ and turn it into a two-dimensional line drawing. Truth and love go together. To love is to be true. To be true is to love. 2 John is written to the elect lady. Some people claim this a euphemism for a specific church. Others, who look at 2 and 3 John together, th...

  Thursday, September 8, 2022 Psalms 20; 21 2 Chronicles 36:1-14 1 John 5:13-21 Observance: Birth of Mary, mother of the Lord. And this is the boldness we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. Thanks be to God for giving us brains that can hold more than one thing at a time. John has just spent an entire letter talking about the beauty of a humble love that serves others, and now at the very end the apple-cart is at risk of turning with this idea of “boldness”. No, this is not some “contradiction” that a teenage rebel can throw in his praying mum's face. John is talking about the next level of spiritual enlightenment. Humility and self-sacrificial love is a beautiful concept, which Jesus idealised on the cross for us. But our Lord didn't suffer and die so that we could spend the rest of eternity cowering under our omniscient God. Jesus bled and died and rose again so that we could have boldness to step into His holy palace ...

  Wednesday, September 7, 2022 Psalm 19 Obadiah 15-21 1 John 5:1-12 And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Our good friend John has now come to the final point in favour of his argument: the slam-dunk fact that will prove to everyone that, without a doubt, Jesus of Nazareth is God, and holds not only the solution to the mystery of life but is the source of life itself. The Bible is very emphatic about making sure there are multiple witnesses to an event in order to prove its truthfulness. Moses was given an ancient law by God that legal prosecution can only go ahead on the basis of two or more witnesses. Jesus also references this understanding multiple times in the Gospels. In this very letter, John opened by saying he was not the only one who saw all the wonderful things Jesus did. I could go on and on (Luke 1:1-4; John 1:14; 1 Cor 15:3-8; 2 Peter 1:16-18, etc.). So we are presented with three witnesses: the water, the blood, and the Sp...

  Tuesday, September 6, 2022 Psalm 18:1-31 Obadiah 1-14 1 John 4:12-21 We love because He first loved us. This is a blessed truth that will hold us safe through any adversity. It is simple enough to understand, but nearly impossible to actually live out. God first loved us; therefore we love one another. The first statement is not reliant on the second. Whatever God does is out of our control: our responsibility is to respond with trust. Reading through the prophets can make it sound like we are responsible for making God love us through our actions. But even the prophets agree with John: God is responsible for who God loves; yet we are held responsible for our actions. This totally flips on its head any human-designed economic style exchange of goods and services when it comes to how God treats us. God's love to us is not our reward for being good boys and girls. God's love to us is a basic function of God behaving like God. We can spurn that love, or sco...

Monday, September 5, 2022 Psalms 15; 16 Zephaniah 3:11-20 1 John 4:1-12 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. We can imagine John as a gem smith working on his jewel called “God's love”. He is adding facets so that when the light passes through we will get a better idea of all the different parts that go into what would otherwise be the pithy statement “God is love”. This morning he is polishing the edge called “truth”. One of the biggest attacks on church doctrine during John's time was the accusation that Jesus of Nazareth was not really God in the flesh. There is a fancy name for the cult-philosophy that grew out of this belief back then, but we must be on our guard, because there are still people today who claim to follow Jesus as long as Jesus was just a human. To deny the premise that Jesus is literally God and was, during His time on earth, also fully human, is to be in the spirit of the antichrist. John is making ...

  Saturday, September 3, 2022 Psalm 9 Zephaniah 3:1-10 1 John 3:11-24 Observances: Gregory of Rome, bishop and teacher (d. 604); Eliza Darling, pioneer social reformer in NSW (d. 1868) And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. Again John comes at us with this heavenly concept to “abide”. Fortunately we now get some practical advice on the subject. We can now dig in and get our hands dirty working at this task of getting closer to God. It always comes back to love. There is a legend in the church that, when John was in his old age (he was allegedly the only disciple of Jesus who wasn't martyred), the young generation of the church would ask him to come up the front and give them some advice. This man was their last living link to the Lord Jesus, so, they figured we'll get him up to give us some sage wisdom. According to legend, he would always say the same thing:...

  Friday, September 2, 2022 Psalms 5; 6 Zephaniah 2:4-15 1 John 3:1-10 Observance: Martyrs of New Guinea (d. 1942) Is this the exultant city that lived secure, that said to itself, “I am, and there is no one else”? What a desolation it has become... John once again presents us with a challenge of interpretation due to how his brain works. “Everyone who commits sin is a child of the devil” he proclaims, after assuring us that if we abide in Jesus then we do not sin. What is going on here? Remember that John has made a central point and is now moving around it. He has already assured us of a hope that no one can take away: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” What John is describing here is not a binary system where there is a group of sinless, perfect people who are God's children, while the rest of us are doomed alongside the evil one. John is instead describing the relationship an indi...