Daily Radio Bible - January 6th, 22

He is so much better than we think. God comes to Abraham. And he tells him that he's going to make him the father of many nations, that all the people of the world will be blessed through him, and that he was going to give him the land of Canaan. And all of this, so it seemed to Abraham, was just too good to be true. Abraham couldn't get his head around a God, who could actually do all this. So Abraham and Sarah conceived of something much more possible, something within reason...a surrogate son.  Something they together, could try and make possible with their own efforts.

We often do that, we struggle to think of God as big enough, and good enough to do what our hearts long for, or what he says he will do. So we often will interject with a scaled down version of what we think is possible, and we try to push these scaled down versions of goodness and love down the road, because, well, that's the best we can hope for, or even imagine.

But God is so much better than we dare to think. Jesus is proof of that. He is so much better than many theologians and pastors have dared to preach. Luke describes the sermon that Jesus is preaching. And in this sermon, Jesus is commanding his followers to be much better than they've ever dared to be. Love your enemies, he says, do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you do to others, as you would have them do to you. Do this, he says, and you will truly be acting as children of God. Do this, and you will be acting the way God acts. In fact, Jesus ends this part of his message by saying, God is kind, even to those who are unthankful and wicked. God, the Father is compassionate, did you catch that? God is kind to the unthankful and the wicked, He is compassionate, that is who he is. And yet, so often, we scale that version of God down with an endless host of qualifications. He's good, if you do this, he's good. If you behave this way, he's good only to these people. But Jesus today in his sermon, is inviting us to imagine God as better than anything we have dared to believe. Far too often we have painted the face of God with a brush of our own anxieties and fears. And that picture of God is so much smaller, so less kind, and loving, than anything that Jesus has revealed to us. What Jesus shows us of the Father is so much better.

So let us hear how good God is today. Let's dare to begin to imagine here at the beginning of 2022, that he is indeed better than we thought. When we begin to do that, we will begin to behave in ways that are far better than we ever thought we could. We will love our enemies, we will do unto others, as we would have them do unto us.

And that's the prayer that I have for my own soul. That's the prayer that I have for my family for my wife, my daughters, my son. And that's the prayer that I have for you. May it be so.

You are loved!