MONDAY 23rd. AUGUST
Proverbs 25:6-7
Do not exalt yourself
This proverb warns us of the danger of pushing ourselves up to a higher position than we should. It’s so much better to be content with a lowly position and wait for those above us to invite us to “come up higher”.
Those who push themselves up are terribly humiliated in the end and become very unhappy. Jesus is the perfect example to follow. He was the very greatest of the great yet He did not push His own importance. He humbled Himself taking the position of a slave. He made Himself nothing (Philippians 2:5-7).
He said “the Son of man did not come to be served but to serve and give His life as a Saviour for many (Mark 10:4-5).
Because Jesus humbled Himself so much, God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:8-11). Each one of us is so special and very important to God. When we realise how important we are (as Jesus did) then it’s much easier to be humble. We take the lowliest place easily when we don’t have to prove our importance. That is when we realise how very, very important we are. Each one of us is so important to Jesus that when we decide to follow Him the whole of heaven rejoices (Luke 15:7).
PRAYER: Jesus thank you for letting each of us know how much you love us and how important we really are. Make us to be like you, always ready to take the lowliest place and never to try to prove to others how important we are. Instead, help us to show others how important they are to us, through Jesus our Servant and Saviour. Amen.
TUESDAY 24TH AUGUST
Psalm 112
Blessed are those who fear God
The most important decision anyone can make in their whole lives is the decision to turn to Christ and to put all their faith and trust in Him. The consequences of not making this decision are very disastrous: the Bible calls it Hell.
We all need to fear the Lord. We should be afraid of disobeying Him because disobeying God leads to destruction and chaos. Once we have made the decision to trust in God, fear begins to disappear from our lives! A sense of peace, a peace which passes all understanding, takes over. It is really wonderful! When we love God so much we take great delight in doing everything He wants us to do. Then we find His blessings start pouring into our laps. God causes us to prosper in many ways. He makes us richer than ever before. If we keep these riches to ourselves we will lose touch with God, but if we become generous, give to others and lend freely, then we will experience more and more help from the Almighty.
God looks after us so well we can never be shaken. His light causes the darkness of fear to be completely blotted out. If we hear bad news we can easily cope with it because we know God is in charge and in all things He will work for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28). God makes our hearts so steadfast as we continue to trust in Him. No enemy can destroy us and nothing can separate us from Him and we become more than conquerors (Romans 8:37).
PRAYER: Father God help us all to fear the consequences of turning our backs on you. As we make the decision to turn to Christ, help us to put all our faith and trust in you until all fear disappears and we know that nothing can separate us from you, for you make us more than conquerors, through Jesus our wonderful Saviour. Amen.
WEDNESDAY 25TH AUGUST
Hebrews 13: 1-16
The sacrifice with which God is pleased
Jesus offered Himself as a most wonderful sacrifice on the cross. Through this sacrifice He made us all holy. We appreciate so much all that Jesus did for us. Because of this we continually offer to God, through Jesus, a sacrifice of praise. We are so grateful that Jesus has made us holy.
What does it mean to be holy? Jesus showed how happy He was when He sacrificed Himself on the cross for us. We show our holiness when we show our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for others. A holy person does not live for himself. He lives for others. The sacrifice he makes when he shares with others is very pleasing to God.
In today’s readings there are many ways suggested in which we can please God by being holy through sharing with others. The first is being hospitable by entertaining strangers. This is making unloved people feel loved! Then we are asked to remember those in prison. Another important sacrifice of love is to stay morally pure by resisting all temptation to have sex outside of marriage.
Another important thing to sacrifice is our money. Holy people love giving it away and spending it on others! Holy people look after their religious leaders and imitate their faith. Jesus is always with us to help us to stay holy. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. His power is available for us. As we trust Him, He helps us to be generous towards others and helps us to make the sacrifice which pleases God.
PRAYER: Father, thank you for letting Jesus sacrifice Himself on the cross to make us holy. Help us to show our holiness by our willingness to offer the sacrifice that pleases you most - our willingness to share everything with others and abstain from all sin, through Jesus who sacrificed Himself for us. Amen.
THURSDAY 26TH AUGUST
Jeremiah 2:4-13
Cistern that holds no water
Once I went down to my chook pen to collect the eggs. I saw the chooks looking very distressed. They had tipped their water container over and had nothing to drink. They cannot live without water. God describes Himself as a spring of living water. The truth is that we cannot truly live unless we are drinking from the spring of living water. Without a relationship with God we will die.
People who ignore God and trust only in themselves are like people who make cisterns that leak - that don’t hold water. They will always be thirsty. They will never be satisfied. Everything will end up going wrong for them. They think they can get on without God. They never say, “where is the Lord?” How silly they are to ignore the One who made them and who gave them life.
I know this teaching is true because I have experienced it myself. Whenever I depend on myself and my own resources things begin to go wrong and whenever I trust in God life works out so much better. After St Paul had been through great difficulties in the province of Asia, he got to the stage where it was so bad that he felt like giving up. In his heart he felt the sentence of death but then he realized he was going wrong because he was depending on himself. He says that the trouble happened to show him not to rely on himself but on God who raises the dead (2 Corinthians 8-10).
PRAYER: Lord, forgive us for making cisterns that can’t hold water when we forget you and trust only in ourselves. Help us to transfer our trust to you who has the power to raise the dead. Help us to drink from the well that never runs dry, through Jesus our Wonderful Saviour. Amen.
FRIDAY 27th. AUGUST
Luke 14: 15-24
I cannot Come
Jesus’ Kingdom of heaven is described as a great banquet. All who eat at this feast are abundantly blessed. God’s invitation list is very big. Many are invited. Unfortunately, many of them say, “I cannot come”. They have many excuses. They put all sorts of things before their relationship with God. This is very sad because life without a relationship with God loses all its meaning. This relationship with God satisfies us more than anything else in life. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life, he who comes to me will never be hungry, he who believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6.35).
We participate in the heavenly banquet every time we come to the Eucharist and receive Holy Communion. In every day life, one of the things that strengthens our relationships with each other is sharing meals together. So our relationship with God is strengthened around the Lord’s table in Holy Communion. There we feed on Jesus – His body and His blood. We are made one with Jesus and one with each other in the bonds of peace and love. We should all make being at the Eucharist every Sunday the number one priority in our lives. It is so easy to make excuses, but nothing else we do is more important than this. Every Sunday Jesus invites us to celebrate with Him the victory of His sacrifice on the cross and His resurrection which brought us all eternal life. He invites us to come together and feed on Him.
PRAYER: Jesus, help us all to see the great importance of accepting your invitation to come to your feast and taste and see how good you are every Sunday. May we really experience the real taste of the bread of life so that we will never feel hungry or thirsty. Help me to see that this is more important than anything else! Please help me to never say, “I cannot come.” Amen.
SATURDAY 28th.AUGUST
Luke 14.1-14
Give to those who can’t repay you
Jesus wants to make us all into people who are truly humble; people who seek nothing for themselves. He wants us to be people who give without wanting anything in return; people who give only for the sake of the people they are giving to. He said that if we are having a party, we shouldn’t invite only those who will pay us back.
We should invite people we know who will never invite us or people who will probably never say, ‘thankyou’. When you send Christmas cards, don’t delete the people who didn’t send you cards last year! Try to make friends with people everyone else shuns; those who talk so much they don’t give you a chance to say anything – be willing to listen to them and love them. People who find it hard to make friends are often people who have been deprived of love. Jesus wants us to go out of our way to love them. He loves all the unlovable people very much. He can show His love to them through us. He depends on you and me to love them. If people close to you or who are related to you hurt you in any way, go out of your way to forgive them, love them and give to them.
Jesus will give us all the power we need to show our love to them. If all Christians followed Jesus in this way, it could eliminate family break-ups. It would enable God’s love, joy and peace to flow like a river setting everyone free. Jesus promises that when we get to Heaven, we will be richly rewarded for giving to all people who never gave us anything back.
PRAYER: Jesus, help us to be as loving and humble as you are. You gave to us and laid down your life for us. Help us to be living sacrifices, always laying down our lives for others, always loving the unlovable and giving to those who won’t give back to us. Please give us the power to love as you love. Amen.
SUNDAY 29TH AUGUST
THIS WEEK’S MESSAGE
God delights in each one of us. Because He made us all we are all very special to Him. Even when we messed up our lives and became sinners he never stopped loving us. He hated it because He knew that sin separates us from Him. That is why He sent His Son Jesus to pay the price for our sins by dying for us on the cross and taking the penalty that our sins deserve. God thinks each one of us is very great. If each on of us was the only sinner Jesus would have died JUST FOR US
Because Jesus delights in us so much He longs to lift us up and lavish us with His love. There is a problem for us all. Before Jesus can lift us up and pour his love into our laps we have to have the right attitude. What is this right attitude? We have to be HUMBLE! An attitude of humility is essential if we are to receive anything from our Father in heaven! Today’s gospel makes this very clear. When we humbly take the lowest place, God will lift us up. When we are full of self and are proud God will knock us down! Knowing how great we are in God’s eyes and how much He longs to lift us up helps us to be humble. Jesus was the greatest person ever to be born into the world. That is why He was also the humblest person who ever lived. It helps us very much to be humble when we know how great we are. (Read Philippians 2:6-11)
Because God loves us so much He is very generous towards us. Because of this, He wants us to be very generous too. When we give to others he does not want us to look for anything in return, so much so, that when you have a party invite people you know who will NEVER invite you back. Don’t drop people off your Christmas card list who didn’t send you one last year.
PRAYER : Jesus help us to realize how much you delight in us and how important we are to You. Show us our importance so that we can follow your example and be ever so humble. As you are generous to us help us to be so generous that we can give without expecting anything in return. Amen.
MONDAY 23rd. AUGUST
Proverbs 25:6-7
Do not exalt yourself
This proverb warns us of the danger of pushing ourselves up to a higher position than we should. It’s so much better to be content with a lowly position and wait for those above us to invite us to “come up higher”.
Those who push themselves up are terribly humiliated in the end and become very unhappy. Jesus is the perfect example to follow. He was the very greatest of the great yet He did not push His own importance. He humbled Himself taking the position of a slave. He made Himself nothing (Philippians 2:5-7).
He said “the Son of man did not come to be served but to serve and give His life as a Saviour for many (Mark 10:4-5).
Because Jesus humbled Himself so much, God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:8-11). Each one of us is so special and very important to God. When we realise how important we are (as Jesus did) then it’s much easier to be humble. We take the lowliest place easily when we don’t have to prove our importance. That is when we realise how very, very important we are. Each one of us is so important to Jesus that when we decide to follow Him the whole of heaven rejoices (Luke 15:7).
PRAYER: Jesus thank you for letting each of us know how much you love us and how important we really are. Make us to be like you, always ready to take the lowliest place and never to try to prove to others how important we are. Instead, help us to show others how important they are to us, through Jesus our Servant and Saviour. Amen.
TUESDAY 24TH AUGUST
Psalm 112
Blessed are those who fear God
The most important decision anyone can make in their whole lives is the decision to turn to Christ and to put all their faith and trust in Him. The consequences of not making this decision are very disastrous: the Bible calls it Hell.
We all need to fear the Lord. We should be afraid of disobeying Him because disobeying God leads to destruction and chaos. Once we have made the decision to trust in God, fear begins to disappear from our lives! A sense of peace, a peace which passes all understanding, takes over. It is really wonderful! When we love God so much we take great delight in doing everything He wants us to do. Then we find His blessings start pouring into our laps. God causes us to prosper in many ways. He makes us richer than ever before. If we keep these riches to ourselves we will lose touch with God, but if we become generous, give to others and lend freely, then we will experience more and more help from the Almighty.
God looks after us so well we can never be shaken. His light causes the darkness of fear to be completely blotted out. If we hear bad news we can easily cope with it because we know God is in charge and in all things He will work for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28). God makes our hearts so steadfast as we continue to trust in Him. No enemy can destroy us and nothing can separate us from Him and we become more than conquerors (Romans 8:37).
PRAYER: Father God help us all to fear the consequences of turning our backs on you. As we make the decision to turn to Christ, help us to put all our faith and trust in you until all fear disappears and we know that nothing can separate us from you, for you make us more than conquerors, through Jesus our wonderful Saviour. Amen.
WEDNESDAY 25TH AUGUST
Hebrews 13: 1-16
The sacrifice with which God is pleased
Jesus offered Himself as a most wonderful sacrifice on the cross. Through this sacrifice He made us all holy. We appreciate so much all that Jesus did for us. Because of this we continually offer to God, through Jesus, a sacrifice of praise. We are so grateful that Jesus has made us holy.
What does it mean to be holy? Jesus showed how happy He was when He sacrificed Himself on the cross for us. We show our holiness when we show our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for others. A holy person does not live for himself. He lives for others. The sacrifice he makes when he shares with others is very pleasing to God.
In today’s readings there are many ways suggested in which we can please God by being holy through sharing with others. The first is being hospitable by entertaining strangers. This is making unloved people feel loved! Then we are asked to remember those in prison. Another important sacrifice of love is to stay morally pure by resisting all temptation to have sex outside of marriage.
Another important thing to sacrifice is our money. Holy people love giving it away and spending it on others! Holy people look after their religious leaders and imitate their faith. Jesus is always with us to help us to stay holy. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. His power is available for us. As we trust Him, He helps us to be generous towards others and helps us to make the sacrifice which pleases God.
PRAYER: Father, thank you for letting Jesus sacrifice Himself on the cross to make us holy. Help us to show our holiness by our willingness to offer the sacrifice that pleases you most - our willingness to share everything with others and abstain from all sin, through Jesus who sacrificed Himself for us. Amen.
THURSDAY 26TH AUGUST
Jeremiah 2:4-13
Cistern that holds no water
Once I went down to my chook pen to collect the eggs. I saw the chooks looking very distressed. They had tipped their water container over and had nothing to drink. They cannot live without water. God describes Himself as a spring of living water. The truth is that we cannot truly live unless we are drinking from the spring of living water. Without a relationship with God we will die.
People who ignore God and trust only in themselves are like people who make cisterns that leak - that don’t hold water. They will always be thirsty. They will never be satisfied. Everything will end up going wrong for them. They think they can get on without God. They never say, “where is the Lord?” How silly they are to ignore the One who made them and who gave them life.
I know this teaching is true because I have experienced it myself. Whenever I depend on myself and my own resources things begin to go wrong and whenever I trust in God life works out so much better. After St Paul had been through great difficulties in the province of Asia, he got to the stage where it was so bad that he felt like giving up. In his heart he felt the sentence of death but then he realized he was going wrong because he was depending on himself. He says that the trouble happened to show him not to rely on himself but on God who raises the dead (2 Corinthians 8-10).
PRAYER: Lord, forgive us for making cisterns that can’t hold water when we forget you and trust only in ourselves. Help us to transfer our trust to you who has the power to raise the dead. Help us to drink from the well that never runs dry, through Jesus our Wonderful Saviour. Amen.
FRIDAY 27th. AUGUST
Luke 14: 15-24
I cannot Come
Jesus’ Kingdom of heaven is described as a great banquet. All who eat at this feast are abundantly blessed. God’s invitation list is very big. Many are invited. Unfortunately, many of them say, “I cannot come”. They have many excuses. They put all sorts of things before their relationship with God. This is very sad because life without a relationship with God loses all its meaning. This relationship with God satisfies us more than anything else in life. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life, he who comes to me will never be hungry, he who believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6.35).
We participate in the heavenly banquet every time we come to the Eucharist and receive Holy Communion. In every day life, one of the things that strengthens our relationships with each other is sharing meals together. So our relationship with God is strengthened around the Lord’s table in Holy Communion. There we feed on Jesus – His body and His blood. We are made one with Jesus and one with each other in the bonds of peace and love. We should all make being at the Eucharist every Sunday the number one priority in our lives. It is so easy to make excuses, but nothing else we do is more important than this. Every Sunday Jesus invites us to celebrate with Him the victory of His sacrifice on the cross and His resurrection which brought us all eternal life. He invites us to come together and feed on Him.
PRAYER: Jesus, help us all to see the great importance of accepting your invitation to come to your feast and taste and see how good you are every Sunday. May we really experience the real taste of the bread of life so that we will never feel hungry or thirsty. Help me to see that this is more important than anything else! Please help me to never say, “I cannot come.” Amen.
SATURDAY 28th.AUGUST
Luke 14.1-14
Give to those who can’t repay you
Jesus wants to make us all into people who are truly humble; people who seek nothing for themselves. He wants us to be people who give without wanting anything in return; people who give only for the sake of the people they are giving to. He said that if we are having a party, we shouldn’t invite only those who will pay us back.
We should invite people we know who will never invite us or people who will probably never say, ‘thankyou’. When you send Christmas cards, don’t delete the people who didn’t send you cards last year! Try to make friends with people everyone else shuns; those who talk so much they don’t give you a chance to say anything – be willing to listen to them and love them. People who find it hard to make friends are often people who have been deprived of love. Jesus wants us to go out of our way to love them. He loves all the unlovable people very much. He can show His love to them through us. He depends on you and me to love them. If people close to you or who are related to you hurt you in any way, go out of your way to forgive them, love them and give to them.
Jesus will give us all the power we need to show our love to them. If all Christians followed Jesus in this way, it could eliminate family break-ups. It would enable God’s love, joy and peace to flow like a river setting everyone free. Jesus promises that when we get to Heaven, we will be richly rewarded for giving to all people who never gave us anything back.
PRAYER: Jesus, help us to be as loving and humble as you are. You gave to us and laid down your life for us. Help us to be living sacrifices, always laying down our lives for others, always loving the unlovable and giving to those who won’t give back to us. Please give us the power to love as you love. Amen.
SUNDAY 29TH AUGUST
THIS WEEK’S MESSAGE
God delights in each one of us. Because He made us all we are all very special to Him. Even when we messed up our lives and became sinners he never stopped loving us. He hated it because He knew that sin separates us from Him. That is why He sent His Son Jesus to pay the price for our sins by dying for us on the cross and taking the penalty that our sins deserve. God thinks each one of us is very great. If each on of us was the only sinner Jesus would have died JUST FOR US
Because Jesus delights in us so much He longs to lift us up and lavish us with His love. There is a problem for us all. Before Jesus can lift us up and pour his love into our laps we have to have the right attitude. What is this right attitude? We have to be HUMBLE! An attitude of humility is essential if we are to receive anything from our Father in heaven! Today’s gospel makes this very clear. When we humbly take the lowest place, God will lift us up. When we are full of self and are proud God will knock us down! Knowing how great we are in God’s eyes and how much He longs to lift us up helps us to be humble. Jesus was the greatest person ever to be born into the world. That is why He was also the humblest person who ever lived. It helps us very much to be humble when we know how great we are. (Read Philippians 2:6-11)
Because God loves us so much He is very generous towards us. Because of this, He wants us to be very generous too. When we give to others he does not want us to look for anything in return, so much so, that when you have a party invite people you know who will NEVER invite you back. Don’t drop people off your Christmas card list who didn’t send you one last year.
PRAYER : Jesus help us to realize how much you delight in us and how important we are to You. Show us our importance so that we can follow your example and be ever so humble. As you are generous to us help us to be so generous that we can give without expecting anything in return. Amen.