Hope For Today

Dear Friends, My blog has just had its first birthday!  A year has gone by so quickly and I'm so grateful to God for enabling me to write a new post once a week for a whole year.  On my own it would have been impossible and if anyone had told me more than a year ago that this would be one way I could serve God I don't think I would have believed them. I want to thank you, dear friends, who have faithfully stayed the course with me so far and have given me so much encouragement along the way.  God has blessed me so much as I have followed his leading and I trust that as you have read these posts that you too have been blessed and encouraged by God. When a Christian friend made the suggestion of writing a blog I could so easily have got swept up in the moment, getting carried away with the idea without stopping to consider whether this was of God or not.  It is often my way that I go full steam ahead when I get an idea without considering...

Dear Friends, With the death of Jesus on that first Good Friday, his followers grieved and mourned not only for Jesus' death but also for the death of their hopes and dreams and the loss of purpose and meaning to their life.  Their hopes were dashed, their dreams deflated and their purpose for living destroyed.  All these things had been wrapped up in Jesus and who they thought he was and his purpose for coming.  Even though Jesus had explained it to them, they had misunderstood him.  They thought he had come to save them from the tyrannical rule of the Romans, they thought he was going to be their military leader.  For 3 days they were grieving the loss of a loved one and they were in despair over all that they had lost.  Two disciples on the road to Emmaus said to a stranger (they didn't at first realise it was Jesus in his new resurrection body) " We had hoped he was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel. This all happened three days ago." Lu...

Dear Friends, One way we learn is through asking questions and I can remember my son, Josh, asking me when he was a young boy, "Why do we call the day Jesus died on the cross Good Friday?"  You know, that's a very good question to ask, and by asking it of me he actually made me think seriously about it before responding to him. Why would anyone name the day we remember someone dying as good?  Well, I would think on that day, over 2,000 years ago, the devil thought it must have been a very good day.  He must have been rubbing his hands in glee.  At last, or so he thought, he was victorious over Jesus, finally, or so he thought, he had orchestrated the death of his enemy, God's Son.  He thought he'd struck God a mortal blow.  The religious leaders thought they too had also finally got their way by having Jesus put to death on a cross. Jesus' mother and family, his friends and followers would hardly have thought it a good day as they ...

Dear Friends, Today's post is a little longer than usual, I found that the more I wrote on this topic, the more I became taken up with it and with God himself.  So I suggest either you make yourself your favourite hot drink, settle down on your favourite comfy chair and read, or perhaps read it in two sittings rather than one.  I'm hungry for more of Jesus, for a closer walk with him, to know his presence with me moment by moment.  I think this is what the psalmist longed for when he wrote Psalm 42:1-2 " As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. 2  My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.  When can I go and meet with God?" (NIV)  It says of Enoch in Genesis 5:22 that he " walked faithfully with God 300 years" (NIV), the NLT translates it as   "lived in close fellowship with God" and the Amplified translates it as " walked [in habitual fellowship] with God".   Now ...