Day 296, 23rd June: Jeremiah, 2 Timothy and Proverbs

Building Sandcastles with God
By Dave Atkinson, St Mary’s

Todays Readings Are:
Jeremiah 49:7-50:10
2 Timothy 2:1-26
Proverbs 25:21-26:2

I know that the recent weather doesn’t fill us with confidence for the Summer, but don’t you love it when you have a nice sunny spell, and you can head beach-ward! There’s nothing like getting to eat ice-cream on the sands, laying back, soaking the rays, and thinking back to when we were taken to the beach as young children.

My brother and I used to love building sandcastles. We’d go all-out, digging a huge moat, high walls, with plenty of battlements, then we’d just wait for the tide to come in to rate our efforts. No matter how hard we tried, how long we’d dug, how high the castle, the waters would come and the castle would disappear under the tide’s unstoppable power.

Today’s Old Testament reading reminds us of God’s wrath. If God takes His hand off us we are as strong as a lone sandcastle on the beach, facing the inevitable approaching tide. We are told to ‘Rise up for battle’ as we would need all hands on deck to war against the waves and still wouldn’t stand a chance.

The New Testament reading mentions war again. When we follow orders and submit to God’s authority, we are free to receive God’s grace for where we make mistakes in our designs. It’s as if we’ve built our sandcastle, the tide is coming in, and God has dug an even bigger moat along the entire beach so the waters don’t touch the feeble structure. Again, we are reminded about what state we would be in if God wasn’t watching our backs. If we pursue righteousness then we will be able to see people how God sees them, and be able to build better sandcastles together as we will just be thinking about what’s right, rather than listing the mistakes we could make.

The Proverbs for today show us some examples of what society understands about ‘grace’. We have received God’s grace, and are called to show grace to others. When we help our enemies (those who’s sandcastles we’d love to knock down) they don’t get what they’d expect, and it fries their mind. They can’t stop thinking about what crazy plot we have up our sleeve, and this is a perfect opportunity to explain what ‘grace’ is, and how freeing it can be when God helps us dig our moats.

So let’s stand and build with God.

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Today’s picture was taken by…
Dave. Thanks Dave!

If you’d like to take your own picture to potentially be featured on the blog, then get your Soul Survivor Bible in One Year, and take a picture of yourself – and your Bible – at some interesting or colourful location. Then email it to us at editor@soulsurvivor.com.

The pictures will need to be a pretty good resolution (we use 640px by 360 px so at least as big as that), landscape photos work best and if you include the day of the reading in the picture then make sure you send it to us a good few days before that reading, so we have time to include it in that day’s post! We’ll credit all photographers!