15 July 2026 - hidden from the wise

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

 

I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to the childlike.

As we heard yesterday, there were many in Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum, and the surrounding areas who witnessed the mighty deeds of Jesus but did not accept his message. They were among wise and learned from whom the Father had hidden its meaning. They chose to believe in their own righteousness rather than admit the possibility that they might stand in need of correction. They were adult, and not childlike, in the sense of having become fixed and rigid in their ways. They were like Syria in that they were overly convinced of their own self-sufficiency.

For he says:
“By my own power I have done it,
and by my wisdom, for I am shrewd.

It wasn't so much the wisdom that people already possessed that was a stumbling block to accepting Jesus. It was their relation to wisdom. The problem wasn't so much that they were in fact wise as that they saw themselves as wise. When their wisdom did occasionally prove to be correct and useful it only reinforced this sense of pride. 

you have revealed them to the childlike.

Although there were many who were closed to Jesus, like teacups too full to hold anything beyond what they already contained, there were others who were able to receive his message. Such knowledge as this group possessed was not so great as to distract them from the possibility that there might be something new and worth learning. Their relation to wisdom was not of possession and manipulation. Rather they were able to discover new things with the openness and awe of children. Because they didn't see wisdom as something they owned they were able to recognize the greater wisdom present in the person of Jesus, who was himself incarnate wisdom. The mighty deeds Jesus performed were thus not wasted on them because they drew them into ever deeper understanding of Jesus' divine identity. The miracles of Jesus were not just for show, not to help him vie for attention in the marketplace of competing ideas, but rather were meant to reveal the loving heart of the Father for humanity.

Therefore the Lord, the LORD of hosts,
will send among his fat ones leanness,
And instead of his glory there will be kindling
like the kindling of fire.

When the Lord does not allow us rest in our unearned and imaginary self-sufficiency it is because of his mercy. He sometimes allows us to fall back upon ourselves and our own resources so we can actually understand how we stand without help. He always wants to help. But he can't allow his benefits to be put to use by us to construct idols in our own self-image. He lets the idols be torn down so that true worship can begin and find a place in us.

No one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.

Jesus came to reveal something more and greater than the knowledge of scientists and philosophers. He came to reveal the depths of the inner being of God. Without him doing so the God who is three-in-one, who is love itself, would have remained forever obscure to us. We might have understood God as one who was often loving, but without realizing he was love itself. We might have understood God was like a father in relation to his people. But we never would have understood that he himself was a Father except that Jesus revealed it to us. He did so first by living his human life as the perfectly obedient Son of the Father and then by inviting us to participate in his own Sonship, loving his Father together with him. Even today the idea of the Trinity sounds like nonsense to the wise and the learned. We must still become childlike to learn it and see why it matters. But it truly does matter. It changes everything. We are invited to live in an eternal exchange of love. It is the whole meaning of existence. And it is available for anyone willing to become like a child and receive it.

 

DC Talk - Mind's Eye

 

14 July 2026 - since they had not repented

Today's Readings
(Audio)

Jesus began to reproach the towns
where most of his mighty deeds had been done,
since they had not repented.

Jesus used the language of prophetic judgment to express the fact that the towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum had been given a unique and precious opportunity, and that they had not responded accordingly. The peoples of those towns might have otherwise missed the gravity of their situation. They did not see themselves as deserving of the judgment in the same way or to the same degree as Tyre and Sidon or Sodom and Gomorrah. Their apathy toward Jesus seemed less egregious than the failures of those pagan cities. 

The people's in the areas of Jesus' missionary activity heard his wisdom and saw his mighty deeds. But most couldn't be bothered to make any real changes on the basis of what they saw and heard. They by and large remained people whose spiritual houses were built on a foundation of sand. But such a foundation could not withstand the storm of the coming judgment. They had not demonstrated themselves to be sheep, and so were tentatively heading toward a shared destiny with the goats. 

It was not enough to be curious about Jesus, nor to merely be a regular presence attending the gatherings at which he taught. Because they had been near Jesus they had become accountable for what he told them, for the greater clarity of knowledge they had been given about how to live upright and devout lives in the world. People who seemed to be much worse than them, had actually not had the same starting place. They were pagans acting like pagans. If they didn't recognize the demands of the natural law part of that was because they had been numbed to it by the way their parents had taught them and the history of the lives of their ancestors. They were, in a sense, trained not to see it. But the people of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum had a different tradition, one that should have trained them to see and respond to the messiah when he appeared. They had been given much more than Tyre, Sidon, and Sodom. And so this was somehow an even more culpable omission than anything that happened in those cities.

For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Sodom,
it would have remained until this day.

We have unquestionably been given still more than the crowds who heard and witnessed Jesus in those towns on which he pronounced his woes. We have been given a greater degree of clarity about his message, thousands of years of people taking him at his word and proving it works, people we call saints, and all of the sacramental and charismatic graces we ourselves have received. Is our response adequate to these blessings? Most likely not. At least not yet. Often we are half-hearted, hesitating, and not all in and fully committed. We sometimes choose Jesus. But we often choose the world. We are lukewarm and run the risk of being spit from his mouth.

But I tell you, it will be more tolerable
for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.

God gave even a place as bad as Sodom repeated chances because of the intercession of Abraham. And the threat of judgment on ourselves and on our world is not so much because God is looking forward to destroying his enemies as it is because he desires that we plead for ourselves and intercede for others. God wants us to realize that there is a great gravity to the fact that Jesus has come, a fact with which we must reckon. We ought not respond to these words by feeling overwhelmed or by giving up on a call that is seemingly too demanding. Instead, we should listen to the words of Isaiah to Ahaz:

Take care you remain tranquil and do not fear;

...

Unless your faith is firm
you shall not be firm!

Chris Tomlin - Jesus Messiah

 

13 July 2026 - divide to unite

Today's Readings
(Audio)

Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.
I have come to bring not peace but the sword.

He came to bring the word of God, the sword of the Spirit that is sharper than any two-edged sword. It pierces the division of "soul and spirit, joints and of marrow" (see Hebrews 4:12). We should therefore not imagine that it will spare our personal lives. The pruning that helps those who are on vine to remain there and bear fruit has an internal impact, to be sure. But it has an external one as well, insofar as it is necessary for us to prefer to remain on the vine even if other branches are pruned. We must not jump ship for the kindling pile just because we prefer the company we might have there. 

We could imagine being asked to tone down our expression of our faith in order to appease non-believing family members. But this we must not do. We must not prefer even our most beloved family and friends to Jesus himself. If we do, we are succumbing to the illusion that we can love them better than God himself. But where do we imagine our future with our family is heading if not toward God? Is there anything we can choose apart from him, except that which amounts only to temporary distractions from our mortality? Even when we make choices that seem to be choosing God over and above our family we are actually also choosing our family as well, to love them with a divine love from a supernatural perspective, rather than with an earthly and merely human love.

Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.“Whoever receives you receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.

We tend to be preoccupied with the search for things we cannot keep. Even if we find life in this way there is no way to hold it indefinitely. It will eventually slip through our fingers like water. This is hard for us to internalize since we are much more aware of the visible and tangible goods of temporary existence than we are of other things that seem more distant and abstract. It's not that we don't value things like truth, goodness, and beauty. Rather, their ephemeral status means that we are too willing to choose lower things instead, at least on what we imagine to be a temporary basis, since they seem more concrete and urgent. But precisely in virtue of being concrete those lower things are subject to corruption and disintegration to a much greater degree than higher things, with God alone abiding forever. The whole hierarchy of being is meant to be an arrow pointing us to God. But when this apparent abstraction impinges on our daily lives it has real consequences. We may in fact have to lose our lives for Jesus in order to truly find them. We must at least have to be sufficiently detached from them that we can lose them for his sake if it is asked of us.

And whoever gives only a cup of cold water
to one of these little ones to drink
because he is a disciple–
amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.

It may seem that we are being asked to achieve a level of heroic virtue that is, if not actually impossible, at least hugely impractical, and therefore impossible practically speaking. But how does Jesus actually call us as disciples to live this preference for God and for higher things? Is it by our own great accomplishments? Not primarily. Rather it is doing little things, but for his sake. It is not by turning away from unspiritual brothers and sisters that we become pleasing to God. Instead, we are asked to show hospitality, but specifically for God's sake. This is what it means to love a prophet or a righteous man because they are a prophet or a righteous man, more than for, say, their whit or their charm. 

The call of Jesus does not typically require gigantic gestures of piety, but rather small acts of faithfulness. To give someone a cup of cold water is probably an action that is well within our reach. But it gains its true value when we do it specifically because someone is a disciple. Or if they are not a disciple yet, because they, like everyone are at least potential disciples. And thus we become agents of God's plan, "which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth in him" (see Ephesians 1:9-10). Do we see that it is God's love, expressed through his disciples, that helps to bring about this unity? The cutting action of the sword of the Spirit is important. But it is meant to yield one day to a more true and lasting wholeness.

 Jesus Culture - Set A Fire

 

12 July 2026 - sowing practice

Today's Readings
(Audio)

And he spoke to them at length in parables, saying:
“A sower went out to sow. 

The parable of the sower addresses two dimensions of reality simultaneously. It speaks of the world as a whole, and of the many people in it who will not ultimately receive the Gospel in a transformative way. But since it tells of the pitfalls that can prevent one from receiving the Gospel at also addresses itself, albeit more obliquely, to the individual.  

Jesus is not implying that some people should just give up since they are destined to have the word stolen from the by the evil one, to be overcome by tribulation or persecution, or to be overwhelmed by anxiety or the lure of riches. The reason that we are warned about the machinations of the world, the flesh, and the devil is precisely so that we do not succumb to them. 

When Jesus invited the rich young man to sell all he had and follow him it was really possible for him to do so. When that man walked away sad he became a cautionary tale, helping us to realize that the challenges we face cannot be overcome on our own. What is impossible for man is possible for God. Receiving his divine seed even a little leads to a great terraforming of our internal terrain, making it ever more hospitable to bearing fruit. 

Jesus told his disciples not to be anxious precisely because if they let anxiety have free reign in their hearts it could choke the word Jesus was planting in them. He trained them to do, not only without riches, but with almost nothing, so that they would know, with Paul, how to abase or abound (see Philippians 4:12). 

There were a variety of threats to developing a solid understanding of the word. The Pharisees were among such people who would have aided the evil one in stealing it away. But Jesus never let the Pharisees or the evil one have the last word. He always offered at least the possibility of understanding, of choosing belief over confusion and despair. Even the Pharisees themselves were implicitly invited to learn and understand by the very fact that Jesus continued to engage in dialog with them. 

Why did Jesus warn his disciples that they would face persecutions? Why did he tell them that they were blessed if they suffered for the sake of his name? Because then, when it happened, they wouldn't assume that something had gone wrong or that the Gospel had failed. Because, precisely by planning for such things they would develop a sufficient root, which we may see in this case as a sufficient commitment, to endure them when they did arise.

Because knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven
has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted. 

The parable of the sower is not merely describing three types of people predestined for hell and one for heaven. Rather, it encourages in those who hear it the desire to be good soil, to receive the word, and to bear fruit in abundance. If the hardness and barrenness of our soil seems to be a problem we can recognize the deeper reality that baptism has made us new creations, like the flood did in the time of Noah. The Spirit, like a dove, is inviting us to bear the fruits, which are his own gifts, in this new world.

To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich;
from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away. 

Even just in virtue of hearing this parable we have something, something on which to build. The more we lean into it the more we will have. It has the potential to produce more than it seems, and infinitely more than we could do without it. By contrast, refusing to receive Jesus leaves us without options. The seed alone can be enough. But we must be the soil that receives it. We have ears and the sound waves do penetrate them. But will we really hear? That is the call of Jesus to us today. It is not just a biological process, but a response of faith that makes the difference. 

so shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
my word shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it.

 

John Michael Talbot - I Am The Vine

 

11 July 2026 - you are worth more

Today's Readings
(Audio)

No disciple is above his teacher
no slave above his master.
It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher,
for the slave that he become like his master.

This meant that the disciples were not to expect easy lives of luxury while there master was slandered and persecuted. If the opponents of Jesus accused him of being in league with Beelzebul they would similarly try to undermine the efforts of his disciples. The disciples were to recognize such opposition as signs that they were becoming like there master, not shrinking from persecution out of fear, but embracing it as a part of the path of discipleship. After all, Jesus had already told them that they were blessed "when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me" (see Matthew 5:11).

Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed,
nor secret that will not be known.
What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light;
what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.

Though the Gospel was, in a sense, veiled at first, and made known in detail only in private to his disciples, this was not to be the case forever. There was a time when the fact of Jesus being the messiah was still a card he was keeping close to the vest, lest it start a premature cascade leading to his crucifixion at a time earlier than he intended. But following the resurrection it would no longer be appropriate to keep secrets. The message of Jesus, the Lord of glory, crucified and risen for the world, was meant to be proclaimed from the housetops.

And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul;
rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy
both soul and body in Gehenna.

Just because a time would come when the Gospel ought no longer be concealed from the world, it did not mean the world was suddenly going to have a change of heart vis-à-vis Jesus himself. One could not wait to publicly associate oneself with Jesus until his Gospel suddenly became popular, since this was never going to be guaranteed. Even in Christendom it was often the case that people who took the message of Jesus too seriously were considered fanatics, avoided, or even persecuted. In recent times such ones have sometimes been regarded as Jesus freaks or super Christians. People wish they would use taste and decorum to limit their expression of faith. But we make it our default assumption to err on the side of people who are doing all the can to fully live for Jesus, whether or not doing so may seem cringe to others, or whether it precisely matches our own prudential choices about how we are to live as disciples.

Most of us are not at risk of being martyred for the Gospel. And yet fear still limits what we are willing to say about it. We are afraid of those who can kill our reputation, our social standing, or possibly in particularly bad situations, our careers. We are afraid of losing our status or our influence. Because of these we succumb to the dogmas, not of the Church, but of political parties and other social groups. Our reputations become proxies for our lives, which we are too afraid to surrender for the sake of the Gospel. But how can we become like our master if we are unwilling to share his cross? 

Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?
Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.
Even all the hairs of your head are counted.

We are not meant to find our comfort in what the world or those in it think of us. This doesn't mean that we don't care what they think as much as it means that we care much more about what God thinks. If other people think less of us for proclaiming Christ we can take comfort to know how much God himself cares about us. To him we are worth far more than the sparrows of the field. From a human perspective, even with AI it is still impossible to know with precision the number and location of every sparrow on earth. Yet God, who cares about them much less than he does us, knows this with perfect clarity. Not even our hair stylists have more than a vague sense of the number of hairs on our heads. But however many or few those may be, God knows them exactly. Our lives, our concerns, our deepest hearts, are not hidden from him. He knows and understands us even better than we know and understand ourselves. And yet he still says "you are worth more". Do we choose to believe what God says about our value? Or do we listen to the lies the snakes tells us about ourselves? We need to not only tacitly acknowledge that God is probably right, but rather receive it as a personal revelation. Only when we agree with him and really come to believe him will we be free to respond to his call. And we have been called, no less so than even Isaiah. So may the coal touch our lips and cleanse us of whatever of the devil's lies we have internalized and repeated.

“Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”
“Here I am,” I said; “send me!” 

Vineyard Worship - I See The Lord

 

10 July 2026 - what you are to say

Today's Readings
(Audio)

Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves;

Christians like to play it safe, keeping themselves surrounded by shepherds and sheep, avoiding the glinting teeth of predators. They don't typically want to upset anyone, much less become the targets of anger and animosity. But Jesus did not envision and Church that would hide in the shadows and only emerge after successful PR campaigns made her sufficiently popular or at lest palatable to society as a whole. Rather, he knew that the Church was always going to be at odds for the world since, "friendship with the world is enmity with God" (see James 4:4). He knew that his disciples would go many places where they would encounter rejection and need to shake the dust from there feet and try again. 

so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.

The point was not to be so naive as to throw themselves into danger. Rather, they were to be as shrewd as possible while remaining their focused on the mission. Their focus was not supposed to be pulled this way and that, but to be simple, meaning singular. This allowed them to ensure that they maintained dove-like innocence even whilst using such prudence as they had to make the best of difficult situations.

Their simplicity was the overriding necessity, since their cunning would not be enough to keep them from courts and synagogues, governors and kings, and wasn't meant to be. They needed their primary concern to be the witness they could offer, rather than staying safe at any cost.  Sometimes it was an apparent failure itself that would become their opportunity to witness.

they will hand you ... as a witness before them and the pagans

When we discover that we can't necessarily control the results of the mission we tend to try to at least perfect our message and what we say in situations where we face hostility. If we can at least get that right, we believe, we will accomplish our purpose. But while we clearly are meant to say something, we are not to be the ultimate source of the message. Our words are not primarily to be the result of our own shrewdness so much as they are meant to be given to us by God himself. This is important since, however clever we may be, only God knows the hearts of others and what they most need to hear. 

If we want to hear what God is saying in difficult circumstances when his still small voice must compete with the storm of fear and anxiety we should practice beforehand. We ought to regularly set time apart to be with Jesus and to listen to him since he said, "My sheep hear my voice" (see John 10:27). We may protest that we don't hear him often, or clearly, or at all. But how much time do we really spend listening? Even if we have trouble finding that voice during times of prayer we can at least know for sure that we hear it when we read the Scriptures. And this can help us learn what it sounds like so that we may hear and recognize it at other times as well.

How does the voice of the Lord sound? We can do no better in providing a representative sample than this morning's passage from Hosea:

I will heal their defection, says the LORD,
I will love them freely;
for my wrath is turned away from them.
I will be like the dew for Israel:
he shall blossom like the lily;
He shall strike root like the Lebanon cedar,
and put forth his shoots.

Paul Wilbur - Days Of Elijah / Kadosh

 

9 July 2026 - still Baalin'?

Today's Readings
(Audio)

‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’

The Kingdom of heaven arrived because the king had come at last. Jesus was the one who received the throne of his father David and a kingdom without end (see Luke 1:33). This was a fulfillment of what God spoke through the prophet Daniel, when he told Nebuchadnezzar that "the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth" represented the fact that "the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people" (see Daniel 2:31-45). Considering that the dream interpreted by Daniel included the rise and fall of many earthly kingdoms one might have expected the Kingdom of heaven to triumph through means of military might. But from the commission of Jesus to his disciples we learn that it was actually to spread in a different way than any earthly kingdom.

Cure the sick, raise the dead,
cleanse the lepers, drive out demons.

The opponents of the Kingdom of heaven were not earthly kingdoms. There was no such parity. The struggle was not against flesh and blood (see Ephesians 6:12), but rather against the reign of the powers of darkness, of which sickness, death, and demonic possessions were symptomatic. Could a kingdom actually grow in this way without fighting against the majority of humanity that was still hostile to it, enthralled by the dark powers? Could a new and spiritual Israel thrive while a corrupt empire like Rome seemed to possess all power from a human perspective? It would perhaps seem that one would need to target Rome to make space for the Kingdom of heaven. But we learn from the parables of Jesus that the Kingdom does not spread in that way. Rather, it grows in a hidden, immeasurable way, under the surface and behind the scenes. It can grow even alongside evil. It has more to do with the presence of the leaven of the Gospel, the salt and light of disciples, than on power of strategy. Disciples make a different kind of power and the authority present because they bring the presence of the king himself. And wherever he is present the Kingdom grows. He is, after all, no ordinary king, but the one whom Revelation calls "King of kings and Lord of lords" (see Revelation 19:16).

Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.

The promises of the Gospel are precious beyond all price. After all, "what can a man give in return for his soul?" (see Mark 8:37). Yes, we were purchased at a price (see First Corinthians 6:20), but a price we can never repay. But though we cannot repay it we must respond. We must "glorify God in your body" (ibid). Can we then see how applying any kind of monetary value to spreading the Gospel could potentially render the whole message unintelligible, as though it were merely something that could be acquired through our efforts? The point was not to prevent evangelists from making a living through the Gospel, since, according to Paul, "the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel" (see First Corinthians 9:7-14) and since, as Jesus said, the "laborer deserves his keep". The point was that such support must never be seen as the purchase price for the Gospel itself. Cost must never become an obstacle for anyone who needs to hear the Good News. We must instead join the Spirit and the Bride in Revelation and say: "let the one who desires take the water of life without price" (see Revelation 22:17).

The more I called them,
the farther they went from me,
Sacrificing to the Baals
and burning incense to idols.

We may not always find a welcome response to the message of the Gospel. Sometimes indeed it appears to have the opposite effect. Yet we must nevertheless imitate the compassionate heart of God who is not dissuaded by disinterest or even disobedience. His response to the idolatry of his people was to love them still more:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
who took them in my arms;
I drew them with human cords,
with bands of love;
I fostered them like one
who raises an infant to his cheeks;
Yet, though I stooped to feed my child,
they did not know that I was their healer.

So let us honor the one who is "God and not man, the Holy One present among you". He does not desire the flames to consume us, though that remains a live option given our free will. He wants to use us to spread the Kingdom in which the water of life, that can extinguish those flames forever, is freely available for all who desire it.

Come To The Water / I Will Run To You - Matt Maher