The Narrow Path

  Wednesday, November 1, 2023 Psalms 1; 2 2 Kings 10:1-17 Matthew 19:1-15 Observance: All Saints Like a tree planted by streams of water. The tiniest seed of faith has been planted by the Great Gardener Himself. He brought that seed into existence by the Word of His power; and now He has found just the right spot. Carefully clearing away the undergrowth, a hole has been dug, deep in the earth. From that tiny seed grows the tree. Sending its roots down deep into the soil, nurtured by constant meditation on the law of the Lord, the tree finds water – living water. The water of life sent forth by the Source of Life. Christ sends His life-giving stream to those who search for it, and it never runs dry. The tree grows bigger. The tree itself does not need anything else – the law of the Lord and the life of Christ is enough. But it exists in an ecosystem, a world thriving with other life. And so fruit is brought forth in its season; fruit that is pleasing ...

  Tuesday, October 31, 2023 Psalm 83 2 Kings 9:17-37 Matthew 18:15-35 Observance: Martin Luther (d. 1546) and other Continental Reformers The servant’s master took pity on him. God is love; and there is no love without justice. God’s holy justice burns just as brightly as His holy love: it is who God is. When Moses spoke to God in the burning bush, God told Moses explicitly that He had heard the cry of His people, and seen the injustice done to them, and was going to do something about it. For those who do not love God, there is neither any fear. Without love, there is no concern about the interests of the Beloved. If we love God, we love His commandments; that is, we love what God loves, and hate the idea of doing wrong to Him. But if we don’t love God, then we don’t care what God thinks, and we end up doing awful things without a care in the world. Therefore, if you read these judgements of God in today’s readings, and are worried, then worry no more: it...

  Monday, October 30, 2023 Psalms 148; 149 2 Kings 9:1-16 Matthew 18:1-14 Let Israel rejoice in their maker. We are to be like little children should we wish to even think about entering the kingdom of heaven: such is the teaching of our Maker, the Lord Jesus. The Father has wrapped up all our presents and laid them out for us. Bursting with that uncontrollable excitement that only a little child can have, we jump out of bed at cock crow and race to the table. We can enjoy the self-inflicted anticipation of a slow unwrap, or we can rip off the wrapping as quickly as we can; either way, our Father is beaming with the pleasure of seeing His children happy. Later in the day, we play with those gifts. Some of them might be a little advanced for children of such tender years as we; but our Father is there, helping us to get back off the bitumen, dust off our knees, giving us a bear hug (you know the one – the really good one that only our Father knows how to...

  Saturday, October 28, 2023 Psalms 143; 146 2 Kings 8:16-29 Matthew 17:14-27 I will sing praise to God as long as I live. This Psalm displays to us a cross-section of the body of believers. We open with a double statement of praise, an emphasis on the purest state of being. Praise is what we are made for – we are designed to worship God. Praise is a stance, a posture; it is the direction in which our souls are facing. We do not look inward, because we are finite. To look inward is to find a dead end. Instead, we look outward, at God, who is infinite. Praising God is to look at the One who is never-ending in His attributes and gifts, which is help, hope, faithfulness, food, freedom, sight, honour, righteousness and sustenance. This is what the body of believers looks like: all these individuals, each being blessed according to their needs, by God personally. Throughout this Psalm we can sniff a hint of eternity. In the closing words, the whisper becomes...

  Friday, October 27, 2023 Psalm 140 2 Kings 8:1-15 Matthew 17:1-13 This is the woman; and this is her son, the one Elisha restored to life. The Shunnamite woman was sent to the land of the Philistines: a dark land, a place where evil was. This was the land of the people who had been the great foe, defeated by the even greater David, and now this woman and her family were to live there. They were sent for seven years: the complete and perfect number. Whatever they might find in their temporary new life in the land of the Philistines, it was to be precisely no longer or less than God decreed for them. This family survived. They return to their homeland, and not only do they get their homes back, but are given a multiplication of blessings; the amount of money that their land profited during their time away. We Christians all are here on this earth which is not our true home. We are pilgrims; travellers moving from this life to the next. This is a p...

  Thursday, October 26, 2023 Psalms 137; 138 2 Kings 7:3-20 Matthew 16:13-28 Observance: Alfred the Great, king of the West Saxons, scholar (d. 899) This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves. You have some holidays planned that you are looking forward to; but this is a day of good news. There is a time fast approaching when that job will finally be done; but this is a day of good news. So much planned for the future, a future bursting with expectation, of problems resolved, of celebrations planned; but this is a day of good news. These lepers were sitting at the entrance to the city gate. Not in the city; simply at the gate. They weren’t welcome inside, for they were considered unclean. Even with the city starving so badly that mothers were eating their own children, these diseased men were still considered of a lower moral and social standing. They could starve as beggars in Samaria, or Jerusalem, or anywhere you please – there was not...

  Wednesday, October 25, 2023 Psalm 135 2 Kings 6:24-7:2 Matthew 16:1-12 If the Lord would make windows in heaven, might this thing be? For all the misery that this world holds, there is a place with no misery at all. Here we shed tears; there, the tears are wiped away. Every day spent in this world is a day of scavenging, of labouring in the earth in the endless effort to bring forth its fruit; there, a river flows from the throne of the Eternal One, watering the tree of life which yields its own fruit. In the city of Samaria, the curse is magnified. People are starving: a desperate, horrific situation. Even the king cannot hold himself upright; even the king is destitute. In an act of frustration – or, perhaps, madness – God is blamed, and His servant Elisha is marked out as His representative. In this moment, heaven is far away from earth, but whose fault is this? The kingdom of heaven is near. The kingdom of heaven is here. The kingdom of heaven is w...

  Tuesday, October 24, 2023 Psalms 130; 131; 133 2 Kings 6:8-23 Matthew 15:21-39 Observance: United Nations, inaugurated 1945 LORD, open the eyes of these men so they can see. One of the primary markers of the Messiah is that the blind receive their sight ( Isaiah 35:5–6, 61:1; Matt 11:5; Luke 7:22). Many false prophets and false messiahs, anti-Christs and wolves in sheep’s clothing stalk around, seeking to deceive. But if once we were blind, and now we can see, we know that this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes. The enemy army were struck with blindness – some sort of supernatural blindness. They could still see, or at least they thought they could. They followed Elisha, not knowing he was whom they sought. Elisha led them to the major city of Samaria, into the presence of the king of Israel. Not only were these men spared their lives, but were given a lavish feast and a victor’s reception, all from the hands of the man to whom they int...

  Monday, October 23, 2023 Psalms 124; 125; 126 2 Kings 5:15-6:7 Matthew 15:1-20 Observance: James of Jerusalem, brother of our Lord, martyr (d. c. 62) Then the man reached out his hand and took it. God is the master of big miracles. He heals the terminally ill and blesses them with years of fruitful living. He turns away the weapons of war, stopping horrors when they seemed inevitable. God took on human flesh, joining that which is God to that which is human, lived the perfect life, gave Himself up as a sacrifice so that our sins would be wiped away, and rose from the dead on the third day. Big miracles lie very firmly in God’s department. But God also works small miracles; an infinite unseen amount all through the day, blessing each and every one of His children, guiding us through our lives. There is no reason to look at a situation and think that it is too small for God to worry about. Elisha’s student had gone out to do some construction w...

  Saturday, October 21, 2023 Psalms 121; 122; 123 2 Kings 4:38-5:14 Matthew 14:22-36 I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go into the house of the LORD.” David is standing in the city gates (Ps 122:2). He is with his motley group of crummy mates. They are standing there in the dust and the heat, watching the people move to and fro, smelling the food of the street vendors, listening to the dull roar of the city behind the walls. Life is good, all is well – now what? One suggests a trip to the pub. Another suggests going down to watch the game. These sound OK, but surely there is something better to do. Then someone says something that makes David’s ears swivel: “let us go into the house of the Lord.” For David, the man who has everything, only one thing will make him really happy, and that is to go and visit his God. It is not a difficult trip; his feet were already standing at the gates of the city. This city, entrusted to David, a city fostering fr...

  Friday, October 20, 2023 Psalms 114; 115 2 Kings 4:18-37 Matthew 14:1-21 The flesh of the child became warm. God’s gift of eternal life to those who believe in His Son Jesus Christ is far more intimate than we are comfortable with. Anyone can accept a gift if it is given with respect to one’s personal space; make sure you take the price tag off, wrap it up in paper so that it is separate from everything else, hand it over so that there need not be any unwanted physical contact: a very dignified and formal routine. But to gain life in Christ is far more profound than receiving a nice tea cup in a cardboard box for your birthday. The incarnation, that great and mysterious action whereby God is joined to humanity in the person of Jesus, isn’t a miracle we can just put off to the side and admire. Jesus gets close; we can smell Him, hear Him breathe, see Him blink. He gets in under our skin. To be in love with a high school sweetheart is one thing. Falling ...

  Thursday, October 19, 2023 Psalms 110; 111 2 Kings 4:1-17 Matthew 13:44-58 Observance: Henry Martyn, missionary and Bible translator in India and Persia (d. 1812) Your maidservant has nothing in the house but a jar of oil. We bring so little to the Lord. Consider the words of the prayer spoken by the priest over the Lord’s Table: even the bread and wine which we offer was first given to us by God, laboured over with human hands, only to be given back to God. We wake up in the morning: the first breath we consciously take is because God gives us the breath of life. As the Holy Spirit has gone before us, preparing the day ahead (also known as prevenient grace), all our work is what God has laid out for us to do. The woman cries out to Elisha: she has a debt to pay, and all she has is a little oil. We cry out to God: our sin has put us in debt, the wages of which is death. All we have is a little faith. Elisha responds to the woman with a two-fold mi...

  Wednesday, October 18, 2023 Psalm 107:1-22 2 Kings 3:4-37 Matthew 13:31-43 Observance: Luke, evangelist and martyr As the musician played, the hand of Adonai fell on Elisha. So much clatter surrounds the Christian disciple. We are walking through this spiritual battlefield, and the noise of war is ever-present. The panting of horses; the creak of leather; the clink of the harness; the mutter of soldiers by the crackle of the camp-fire. In the officers tent, heated discussion; beating of chests; pointing of fingers and fists slamming on tables covered with maps. Screens surround us, telling us that the world is burning; men are killing both each other and each other’s wives and children; our own children are revolting against justice and natural law – how on earth is the voice of God to be heard? Elisha is fed up with these men playing God. He has a little time for Jehoshaphat, but none at all for Joram. What are their designs of war to him? Elisha is t...

  Tuesday, October 17, 2023 Psalm 106:1-24 2 Kings 2:15-3:3 Matthew 13:18-30 Observance: Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr (d. c. 115) The water has remained healed to this day. We constantly go to our loving Father in heaven to ask for blessings. But if we are confident about the delivery of our requests, how confident are we of the permanence of those blessings? Elisha has been told about the poisonous water of Jericho. He goes to bless the water in the name of the Lord – to make the water holy. And what Elisha does is something that priests do up to the current day when preparing holy water. He adds salt, and proclaims the word of the Lord, the word that says that there will be no more death o r miscarrying from this water. With the water we have in this life, we need to add salt, to stop it from going green. There are plenty of things that go into the tap water of any city or town with a somewhat-capable local government. But there...

  Monday, October 16, 2023 Psalm 105:1-22 2 Kings 2:1-14 Matthew 13:1-17 Observances: Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, bishops and martyrs (d. 1555) A fiery chariot with horses of fire. In the entirety of human history, only two people have ever moved from here to the heavenly realm directly: the Lord Jesus, and Elijah. When Jesus did so, during the Ascension, He left in clouds – the clouds of the glory of He and His kingdom. From that episode we learn something of the glory of heaven, and the glory of Jesus ascending to His rightful place on the throne of all heaven and earth. When Elijah ascended, he went in a whirlwind, in a chariot of fire. It is the same journey, from earth to heaven, but in the case of Elijah, he had different needs. Jesus is God and Lord; His journey was victory triumph. Elijah was being taken as a human being; his journey acted as a prophetic message; God sent out protection to make sure Elijah made it safely through. The chariot was...

  Saturday, October 14, 2023 Psalms 108; 109:20-30 2 Kings 1 Matthew 12:38-50 So Elijah got up and went down to the king. Life is filled with things we would rather not do. When the car pulls up at the grocery store, the child begs to be able to stay in the car, and supposes that one day when they grow up perhaps they will understand the appeal such a place has for the adults. Elijah has passed on the prophecy that he had been given; he thought he had been done with all this sorry business of proclaiming the king’s imminent death. And so he sits on the mountain, doing what any man of God loves to do most: pray. Hundreds of soldiers are sent to bring him back to the palace to prophecy in person, but isn’t he done with all this? So he waits for God to give him the go ahead, and finally agrees to be escorted by the third division of troops. Leaving something off because we would rather not do it can make us feel guilty; such is the low throb of the pain of ...

  Friday, October 13, 2023 Psalms 101; 102:1-11 1 Kings 22:29-53 Matthew 12:22-37 Observance: Edward the Confessor, king of England (d. 1066) I will run my life with a sincere heart inside my own house. Our bodies are marvellous things, all those organs pumping and vessels flowing, neurons sparking (and, unfortunately, joints aching). Such a wonder of creation, the temple of the Holy Spirit, protected from the elements just by a thin layer of skin. So too is the human soul encased within its home. The philosopher might talk about the virtue of a man who is content with himself, who has no need from anything else, and so is free to enjoy all that fate gives him; but we are relational animals, and we need the comfort of fellow souls no matter how stern we try to force ourselves to be. The samurai might speak of the virtue of self-denial, of ignoring one’s own interests for the sake of their daimyo, their lord. A forced disinterest for the sake of the...

  Thursday, October 12, 2023 Psalms 99; 100 1 Kings 22:1-28 Matthew 12:9-21 Observances: Elizabeth Fry, prison reformer (d. 1845); Edith Cavell, nurse (d. 1915) Is there not here a prophet of the Lord besides, that we might enquire of him? In the movie World War Z , we learn that the modern Israeli government had managed to hold off the zombie hordes longer than any other country. This is because they had taken the rumours of a zombie infection seriously, adopting a national attitude of survival that asked if there is a table of ten men, listen to the one who disagrees. Unfortunately for them, the plot required for Jerusalem to fall to the zombies, and so we are still unsure if any nation has adopted this wise attitude. Consider the scene set before us: the two kings of Israel and Judah, sitting on their thrones, making big promises to each other about war. Such unity of purpose for such a bloodthirsty endeavour. There they are, big men with big chests, s...

  Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Psalms 95; 96 1 Kings 21 Matthew 11:25-12:8 Observances: Canice (Kenneth), bishop and abbot (d. c. 600); Ethelburga, abbess of Barking (d. 675); James the deacon, companion of Paulinus (d. unknown) I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you concealed these things from the sophisticated and educated and revealed them to ordinary folks. There are two types of study; two types of learning. We see this in the field of pedagogy: some children are made to learn by rote, while others are taught under models that attempt to move towards critical thought. Nothing is worth learning as much as wisdom, however. Wisdom is a spiritual intelligence. We all know about intellectual intelligence, and perhaps have heard of the test now available for emotional intelligence. But spiritual intelligence – wisdom – is the intelligence that can be learnt, and to which we should all aspire. The intellectual pursuit gives us multi-syllabi...

  Tuesday, October 10, 2023 Psalms 92; 93 1 Kings 20:26-43 Matthew 11:12-24 Observance: Paulinus, bishop of York, missionary (d. 644) We have heard that the kings of Israel are merciful. We might be forgiven for assuming that the kings of old considered their authority as being inherent through divine decree; it does not help that the name for the old doctrine is “the divine right of kings”. This divine right did not come as a matter of course; rather, the divine right came from the example set by the God of the Bible, in that one man should give his life in service to many, and so a nation of people could govern themselves under this principle. Once we separate the idea of what a king is from the example given to us by the King of kings, the Lord Jesus, then we are left with a very barren and, quite frankly, pathetic idea of what a king is. If a king rules over a kingdom with power and glory, then without the power and the glory of God, that king is ve...

  Monday, October 9, 2023 Psalm 89:39-53 1 Kings 20:1-25 Matthew 11:1-11 Observances: Denys, bishop of Paris, and his companions (d. c. 250); Cynog, abbot and martyr (d. c. 5 th C); Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, philosopher, scientist (d. 1253) Who can save himself from the power of the grave? Everything that God has ever said or done points to the atoning work of Christ on the cross. Living in the time that we do, we can look back on Calvary and say to ourselves “of course! Just as a kernel of wheat must fall into the ground and die in order to produce many seeds, so too must the Messiah die our death in order that we all may rise to new life in Him.” (John 12:24) This pattern of dying to death and rising to new life is written in every pattern of nature: God even made this universe to follow the steps of Christ. Today’s Psalm portion should be read in its entirety. Beginning from verse 1, we are taken along the emotional hurricane that is Chris...

  Saturday, October 7, 2023 Psalm 90 1 Kings 19:9-21 Matthew 10:28-42 The person who loses his life for my sake will find it. True fulfilment – the aspiration of human happiness and worth – is found in service. To do something for another lies deep in the soul of every human being. Even the local community radio station asks for donations with the promise of “that warm fuzzy feeling” in return. Serving someone else at our own expense isn’t an interruption on our happy and comfortable lives; those happy and comfortable lives are a rubbish tip blocking our way, stopping us from being truly human by giving up our lives in service. Consider what it must have been like for Adam and Eve during that unknowable amount of time of innocence in the Garden before they listened to the liar. Every second of their life spent in pure contentment and fulfilment – every second of their life spent in obedient service to God. This is what we were made for, to serve God, and to th...

  Friday, October 6, 2023 Psalm 86 1 Kings 18:41-19:8 Matthew 10:16-27 Observance: William Tyndale, biblical scholar (d. 1536) Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you. If advertisements are anything to go by one would be mistaken for thinking that all men survive on a diet purely of mars bars and chocolate milk. Fortunately, memories of the food pyramid lie deep in the collective subconscious and so the human race manages to continue on. Well might we snort at the idea of arteries of nougat pumping vessels of caramel being in any way reflective of a healthy human system; but what about our spiritual diet? Ahab the king is sent off on his chariot to beat the rain and tell the city that there is a God in heaven and His name is the Lord. He has a prophetic message to proclaim, of the justice of God coming upon the priests and worshippers of Baal. He was given this instruction by Elijah, a prophet himself; and Elijah needs to be well-f...

  Thursday, October 5, 2023 Psalms 82; 84 1 Kings 18:20-40 Matthew 10:1-15 They make it a place of springs. The natural world was made for humans, and humans were made for the natural world. After God had planted His Garden of Eden, He then planted some gardeners to care for it. These gardeners were given His image, authority and power to rule over it in His name. Then we disobeyed God; we spurned the wonderful gift we had been given, the gift of our own existence. But God did not leave things there; the Second Person of God came into this natural world, incarnate as a gardener of God’s garden. When Jesus bled on the cross, and then after announcing that it was finished, and breathed His last, He redeemed a people for Himself: a great number of those fallen gardeners were reunited with Him through His blood, and we were restored to our original place as God’s representatives in the natural world. This morning’s second Psalm, the 84 th , is rich in ...

  Wednesday, October 4, 2023 Psalm 80 1 Kings 18:1-20 Matthew 9:27-38 Observance: Francis of Assisi, friar and preacher (d. 1226) Make your face shine, and we will be saved. When we consider God as the source of all good, we embark on an exercise too enormous for our minds to comprehend. The best we can try and do is imagine all the good things that could possibly come to us. But this still only touches the fringes of God’s goodness. Thinking on all the good things God gives us still only leaves us in the effect; how can we move to the cause? Biblical authors have tried all sorts of images to try and communicate just how wonderful God is in His source-of-all-goodness. He is a shepherd; we are the sheep. He has raised up a Son of Man to be so strong for Himself to rule over us in love. He has transplanted a tender shoot and cared for it as the great Gardener of souls. Yet still we humans try to look for the good things God does, instead of looking to ...

  Tuesday, October 3, 2023 Psalm 78:16-38 1 Kings 17 Matthew 9:14-26 The pot of meal did not get used up, nor did there fail to be oil in the jug. Recently we thought about the curious way God calls for people to repent and be saved both individually, and as a group. Wading through these records of sinful king after sinful king it can get tiring; do we not live in similar times, where each successive national leader seems to be further away from God than his predecessor? But we have more than one setting on the microscope we point towards human nature. Here in the seventeenth chapter of 1 Kings we move inwards; we get a closer view of the individual subjects over whom these evil sovereigns reigned. Elijah’s entrance on to the scene comes as a breath of fresh air. Here at last is a “man of God”. We are reassured that in spite of the speed at which the nation as a whole is being driven into the pits of damnation, there is still hope for regular people. Hope that...

  Monday, October 2, 2023 Psalm 77 1 Kings 16:8-34 Matthew 9:1-13 I will remember the works of the Lord: and call to mind thy wonders of old time. While the words were written almost half a millennium ago, our Book of Common Prayer is still worth going back to every now and again. We might presume to be so wise and enlightened as to want to edge off some of the rough corners here and there (and the authors, according to the preface, encourage this); but the core spirituality of this little book is a gem. It is perhaps one of history’s little jokes that what was originally published in order to “avoid diversities of opinion” now seems almost puritan in its tenor. Yet here we are so many generations later and whatever was consistent with scripture in that book is consistent with our human experience today. In today’s Psalm, Asaph is writing about something we have all gone through. Lying on our bed, tossing and turning with stress and worry, God keeps our eyes f...