Jesus is praying in the garden.  He is preparing for a brutal death on the cross for our sins.  He is spending some extra time talking with his Father because he knows that his time of separation is coming.  He dreads that part….more than anything.

He prays for all who will ever believe in him because of the disciple’s message – that’ us!  We have heard about Jesus because the disciples were faithful in sharing their witness of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.

He prays that we will all be one.  I think of this whenever I hear about people putting down other churches just because they do things differently.  If it’s biblical, we can support and encourage them even though we choose to follow Christ in other ways.  The only person who wins when churches pick on each other is Satan.  That’s really sad, isn’t it?

Jesus didn’t want that.  He knows that the world will notice when we put aside our differences and unite in our devotion to Christ.

So he prayed for us then and he prays for us now.

Please give us unity, dear Father!

Jesus is talking about Satan in John 8 and he calls Satan the Father of Lies.

That is just so spot-on with my experience with Satan.  He takes the truth and twists it so that it sounds like it could ALMOST be true.

It’s the almost that we need to be aware of.

But he entices us with this ‘almost truth’, doesn’t he?  He can make his lies sound so close to the truth in our heads that it doesn’t take much energy for us to rationalize away that last little bit.  We can make it all sound ok in our minds by stretching the truth just a l.i.t.t.l.e bit more.

And then we’re caught in his web.  And now we’re owning his lies.  We might even tell others his lies because we’ve made them all ok in our mind. 

This is one of the huge values of reading God’s word regularly.  By reading and contemplating and applying his Truth to our lives, the lies become very evident.  The rationalizations become a joke because they are so blatantly false when  held up to the light of his Word.  The dark corners of our minds are revealed and Satan has to go somewhere else to grow the fungus of his lies – our mind and hearts aren’t available.

Thank you, God!

They were trying to trick Jesus into doing something they could put him on trial for.  So they hauled out a woman they had caught in the act of adultury and they mention that The Law of Moses says to stone her.

When they ask Jesus what he had to say about this, he kneels down and starts to write in the dust with his finger.

This is the only mention in the Bible of Jesus doing this.  Interesting!!  And there have been lots of theories about what Jesus wrote.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote something like “Where is the man?”

Because the Law of Moses actually says that both the man and the woman should be stoned.  The religious leaders would know this but, once again, they were twisting the law to suit their situation.  They were sinning.

Jesus called their bluff by telling the one who was without sin to throw the first stone.  Then he stoops down to write again.  Was he writing the man’s name?

The religious leaders began to slip away, one by one – the oldest leaving first.  Did the guilt weigh heavier on the oldest because they had not only sinned but had also led the younger ones into sin?

Jesus shows grace to the woman by not condemning her but she’s not off free – he tells her to stop sinning.  He cares for her and wants her to stop getting herself in these situations. 

Thank you, dear Jesus, for your grace. 

The Isrealites just weren’t happy with what they had.  They wanted to be like everyone else.  They wanted a king.

They asked God for a king and he gave them one.  And then he sent thunder and rain down upon them for asking!   Samuel condemned them for their sin and told them that the heavy hand of God would be on them because of their request.

This one scares me a little – how about you?

It makes me want to reconsider what I’m asking God for.

Whatever it is, I don’t really want it if it’s going to bring thunder and rain from God into my life. 

I don’t want it if it displeases God.

I know God tells us in the Bible to pray fervently and specifically and constantly.  Passages like this one have caused me to add the word ‘carefully’ to that list.   I’ve started adding ‘conditions’ onto my prayers such as – if it’s what you want, if this is what you have planned, if this is the right thing for this person, etc.

By saying this, I’m acknowledging that I don’t know what’s best (that’s sometimes a hard one to admit) and I’m asking God to break out his best for this situation.  It works for me – and it keeps me out of the rain 🙂

The people grumbled in their tents.

They refused to enter the pleasant land,

They refused to obey the Lord,

They just wouldn’t believe God’s promise to care for them.

So they sat in their tents and grumbled.

Do we ever do this?  Grumbling in our tent because of what’s happening in our lives but refusing to trust God enough to make changes?  Do we refuse to go along with God’s purpose in our lives?   Do we remove ourselves from the umbrella of his blessing by our disobedience and then grumble about the consequences?

Dear Father, we thank you for all of the evidence in our lives that you care for us.  Please help us live a life of obedience to you so we can stop our grumbling.

“Those who believe in God who sent me have eternal life.”  Jesus tells us in John 5.

And it’s already started – eternal life for those of us who believe.  It just continues on from here.

Our relationship with God never ends…..

God tells us that nothing can ever separate us from his love,

nothing.

Knowing how my story is going to end gives me a lot of comfort. No matter what happens here on earth, when it’s all done, I know where I’m going to be.

Knowing how it all ends also gives me a lot of confidence – the beginning was good, this middle part is shaping up well and I know the ending is going to be fantastic!

Eternal life with God!  And it’s already started!

Thank you, Father God!

and sometimes we water and sometimes we plant.  It really depends on what the Holy Spirit is guiding us to do.  He does all of the work through us- we just have to be faithful.

In John 4, Jesus is telling the disciples to go out and harvest what they didn’t plant.  Others had done the planting and watering because that was what they were supposed to do.  Now the disciples needed to wake up and look around at all of the fields ripe for harvesting.

This reminds me of two stories about harvesting souls from other’s work.  My husband, Dave, has the gift of evangelism and was once on team from our church which would set up appointments to go talk with new visitors to our church.  Sometime during the conversation, they would ask the people they were visiting where they were on their spiritual journey.  More than once, the people would say that they were really interested in knowing more about Jesus and they wanted to take the step to become a believer.  Dave said they didn’t have to say anything — they were there and the field was ripe for harvest.

I also had a situation where a woman who worked for me told me she wanted to have Jesus in her heart.  We were doing her annual review and I happened to mention something about Promise Keepers – my husband may have been out-of-town at one of the events.  She asked more questions about it and ended up telling me she was ready to believe.  Ripe for harvest.

We just have to be faithful in our witness for Christ.  Sometimes we plant, sometimes we water and sometimes we get to harvest.

Thank you, God, for using us in the spiritual journeys of people around us.  Please help us to be faithful witnesses.

John tells us the story of a Jewish leader, Nicodemus, who comes to talk to Jesus after dark one evening.

We know why he went after dark, don’t we?  He didn’t want to be seen.  He was one of ‘them’ – the people who were threatened by Jesus, the people who were looking for the right time to kill Jesus.

But maybe not.   Nicodemus says that he knows Jesus has been sent by God and that there is plenty of evidence that God is with him.  When Jesus talks to Nicodemus about being born again, like a good politician Nicodemus immediately starts splitting hairs about how this was impossible.  Really?  He had just said that he had seen God do many wonders through Jesus.

Nicodemus wanted to believe but he had big things in his life that were holding him back.  He had position and traditions and people’s expectations of him that had him closing his mind and closing his heart to the fresh wind of God’s spirit that the Holy Spirit could give birth to in his life.

I never realized before that Jesus was talking to Nicodemus when he said John 3:16.  The whole Gospel in one verse!

And Nicodemus missed it!  He walked away!  I’ve always wondered if Nicodemus may have been part of the thousands of people who believed later after the resurrection when the disciples started their ministries.  How could a smart man like him have an interaction like he had with Jesus and not be changed? 

Dear Father, please help us open up our lives to the work of your Holy Spirit.  We don’t want to miss anything!

The beginning of  the book of John is awesome, isn’t it?

In the beginning was the Word. (capitalized because he’s referring to Jesus)

The Word was God.

The Word gave life to everything.

His life brought light into the darkness.  (Hallelujah!)

The darkness can never extinguish it. (Amen!)

When we believe in Him, he gives us the right to become children of God.

The Word became human and made his home among us.

He is full of unfailing love and faithfulness.

We know God when we know Jesus.  God revealed himself to us through the life and death of his son Jesus.  Jesus embodied everything God wants us to know about him. 

Thank you,  dear Father!

 How’s it going?  We are all ready about one-third of the way through the Bible – isn’t that amazing!  It looks like a huge task at the beginning of the year but God blesses that committment and helps us along the journey.  If you’ve stopped reading or have gotten behind, skip up to May with us and start again.  It’s all good!

Here’s the reading Plan for May: