Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Who can top good news like this?

As the Christian ethos in our Churches, schools and hospitals come under attack on all sides, a sentence in a recent Sunday liturgy stood out large and clear.
"With God on our side who can be against us, since God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, we may be certain after such a gift that he will not refuse anything he can give." {Romans 8.11}

Again and again both Old and New Testaments reassure us of Gods continual care of his own people. Perhaps Psalm 121 would be an appropiate prayer for our Irish people at this time:
I lift my eyes to the mountains:_______Where is help to come from?
Help comes to me from the Lord______Who made Heaven and earth.
No letting our footsteps slip!______This guard of yours, he does not doze!
The guardian of Israel______does not doze or sleep.
The Lord guards you, shades you._______With the Lord at your right hand
sun cannot strike you down by day,_______nor moon at night.
The Lord guards you from harm,________ He guards your lives,
He guards your leaving, coming back,______Now and for always.


What Jesus wants more than anything else is our FAITH - courage to WAIT and BELIEVE that all will be well. He tells us himself through the prophet Jeremiah. {Chapter 31}
"I have loved you with an everlasting love, so I am constant in my affection for you I build you once more and you shall be rebuilt.
Is [Ireland] then a son to me, a child so favoured, that after each threat of mine, I must still remember him, still be deeply moved for him and let my tenderness yearn over him."
Again we listen to the prophet Isaiah {Chapter 45} telling us-----"No need to recall the past, no need to think what was done before. See I am doing a new deed, I will bring your offspring from the East and gather you from the West; bring back my sons from far away, my daughters from the end of the earth,all those who bear my name whom I have created for my glory, whom I have formed, whom I have made" Because you my dear Irish people who were so dear to my servant Patrick. are precious in my sight, because you are honoured and I love you.

Jesus himself tells us in {Luke 12} "Can you not buy five sparrows for two pennies? And yet not one is forgotten in God's sight. Why every hair on your head has been counted. There is no need to be afraid :you are worth more than hundreds of sparrows"
And in the final words of the New Testament we read these reassuring lines---
"Then I heard a loud voice call, You see this city? here God dwells among men. He will make his home among them, they shall be his people and he will be their God. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes, there will be no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past is gone. Write this: that what I am saying is sure and will to pass."

With God on our side who can be against us?
Who can top good news like this ?
{Anne Frank}

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