2637AFC091126 – I know who you are and I saw what you did. ← PODCAST LINK 😊

Read it online using the ↑ above ↑ link ↑ please. We now have a READER VIEW available, so share this link or this email often. And please, when you visit there, use one of the social media links at the bottom of the page to share this post.
Do you know someone who enjoys Bible study, or who might like to read this? Ask them to email us or to subscribe on our blog-site.

Sirach 28:2-3 –
² Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done,
    and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray.
³ Does anyone harbor anger against another,
    and expect healing from the Lord?

Psalm 103:9-10 –
⁹ He will not always accuse,
    nor will he keep his anger forever.
¹⁰ He does not deal with us according to our sins,
    nor repay us according to our iniquities.

Romans 14:8 – ⁸ If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

Matthew 18:21-22 – ²¹ Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” ²² Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven [times seven] times.

May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen!

          Some details about hurricane Lowell ~~

Aloha nui loa, ʻŌmea! As I write this it is 11:00 AM on Monday September 7^th. We’re getting plenty of rain and some gusty winds at about 35 mph. we’re expecting things to get much worse by 3 PM today as hurricane Lowell will be only 90± away from the west coast of Kauaʻi. we’re only 23 miles wide, so guess what. We’ll be getting hurricane-force winds across the island. I'll update this throughout the week.

1800 hours 09/07/26 ~~ Lowell has taken a bit of a jog East and its closest pass will be between 2300 and 0300 with winds like over 74 mph, surf on South Shores could be up to 20 feet high. Tim has brought his car up here. The place where he stays is too close to sea level and the coast. Parts of the Island are already severely flooded, including the valleys just outside our living room window. I may have to journal this with my original word processor – a ballpoint pen and a tablet.

Some of this I wrote in the dark: At 11:37 pm I heard some creaky cracking of wood as the wind was howling past the house. At 01:05 it sounded like the wind was slightly decreased. Minutes late it went to the strongest and stuff started flying and falling. Around 03:30 the wind was much less and there was no rain with it. 05:30 the winds were at 30 mph and there was sunshine! At 06:30 Crucita and I went to the back yard and there were avocados everywhere. My giant Norwegian pin lost several of its lower branches and part of its top. Our Sumatra cherry tree blew over and got uprooted. Whopper of a branch broke off of one of our 2 paper-bark eucalyptus trees and got caught between 2 other branches and partly on the roof. My velvet-seed tree took quite a beating from its immediate neighbor, the Cactus from Hell. The house was sound. We had no electricity for 3 days, but none of the things that could have happened to us did happen. God is Good! All the time!

Now to the business at hand.

Let’s start at the beginning again, and look at that passage from Sirach. Sometimes it is our neighbors – literally the folks next door – who give us the most heartburn. Music too loud? Kids undisciplined? Starts the lawnmower at 7 AM? Runs a weed-whacker 10 hours a day during the summer raising clouds of dust that cover your car? Yeah, those ones. The ones who really get under our skin like the choir member who thinks each hymn should be sung like a Broadway Musical. Or the mom who brings a box of toys for her 7-year-old to play with during Church. The toddler in the restaurant who screams because s/he has to “just taste it sweetheart. You might like it.” The homeless junkie who defecates on the sidewalk because nowhere and no one will give that person a place to sleep, eat, and use a toilet. Yeah, those ones. What’s our usual response? A cold, hard stare – stink eye? A lecture? Head down, teeth gritted, “God, keep my mouth shut!”? And then we hear what Ben Sirach says, and it sounds so familiar – “Does anyone harbor anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord?

Well, what about our Key Verse from Psalms 103? It’s telling us about God's mercy and kindness. He’s not always a loud-talking figure in a long black robe seated behind a towering jurist’s bench with a gavel in one hand and a big rubber-chicken in the other.  He will not always accuse,  nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. Here the Psalmist is talking about Grace – that amazing attribute of God where he does not give us what we deserve but instead gives us what we need. How can we ever understand a Love like that? Long story short: We can’t. here’s a little illustration of how that works.

The testy little demon says, “I WILL TELL EVERYONE WHAT YOU DID!” That’s where our “conscience” starts to fight back. “I didn’t mean to. You’ve got it all wrong! It was an accident! Yes, I was chemically disinhibited at the time, but that isn’t why this happened.” Here comes that word again. “I forgot I wasn’t supposed to be there with him at that time. I'm sorry. I'd never do such a thing normally. I … was wrong.” That last little Truth was given to us by our Better Angel. “I will listen to you, and help you make things right.”

God ALWAYS takes the initiative to bring healing, forgiveness, and – strange as it may sound – Love. After all, don’t we always say, “God is Love?” You know that Guardian Angel we often talk about, maybe even pray to? There are movies and Internet frolics that feature testimonies about kids who saw “pretty birdies protecting us,” or “The Angels were there, and they kept the car from landing on me.” I've shared that Guardian Angel prayer with all my Godkids – they probably forgot it right away because it’s “kids’ stuff” – but I revved it up a bit:

Angel of God, my Guardian so dear
Whom God, in his love, commits to me here,
Both day and night be at my side
To light and to rule, to guard and to guide.

I find that prayer to be very effective in the situations I described above, which can make our skin crawl, but the prayer quells the itch to retaliate. We all know that grudges are basically a heavy bundle of hateful anger. That bundle has no handles, no lid, no real shape that lasts, so we just have to drag it along, push it ahead, carry it up the steep sides, and slide it over. About the only thing we rarely do with a grudge is let go of it and walk away. When we live like The Apostle Paul signals, that grudge, that temptation, that judgmental disposition – they just seem superfluous. Our Key Verse from the Epistles says it so clearly –  If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. Because why? Adelphoi, this little meme above says it well.

We have heard about Pascal’s wager. Just as a refresher, here is one acceptable translation from French:

"‘God is, or God is not.’ But which way shall we lean? Reason can decide nothing here. ... Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."

Therefore, let us make no mistake about this:

1. There must be God because God must be and God is God.
2. Jesus is fully God and fully man who lived, then died, and now Lives again.
3. God is Love, and the ultimate expression of his Love is Jesus, so if we have God's Love within us, we are in Jesus and he is in us.
4. Nonetheless, we are all going to “shuffle off this mortal coil,” so if we’re going to die after all, then why not die surrounded and permeated in God's Love in Christ Jesus?

Here’s another little meme that says it well for me. Try this on for size and see if it fits.

"Fugit irreparabile tempus" – "it escapes, irretrievable time.” Once you’ve had it, you’ll never have it again. “Memento Mori” – Remember Death, ”Remember you must die.” Time flies when we’re having fun? Adelphoi, Time flies when WE’RE DYING! Do any of us really have time to wait for “A good time to Repent and believe the Gospel!?” I must say it again – How will you recognize that Today is the Next-To-The-LAST Day before it’s too late to change?

“Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times? Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven [times seven] times. Here’s a look at trying to keep track of that, let’s spell it out.

Only one adelphos, not necessarily the gang NEXT DOOR, but a member of the Body of Christ – the Church, says or does something offensive or injurious to me. Then – perhaps moments later – s/he repents, apologizes, genuinely seeks forgiveness, and I acknowledge that by genuinely forgiving that incident. That’s one tally line. Here’s what seventy-seven times seven tally marks look like.Now, Jesus is challenging us here so that we’re supposed to come back with “Who’s going to keep track of 490 offensives, and how could it be done?” Then Jesus smilingly replies, “Exactly, friend. Exactly.” And so he then gives us an SOP – a Standard Operating Procedure.

Our SOP is to tell the adelphos “Ouch. You got me.” If you don’t want to make that tally, get 2-3 more adelphoi – brethren in the Church – and try to work it out. If that’s not a solution, take him, and your grievance, to the Body of Christ. If there is still no satisfactory resolution, the offender has voluntarily designated themselves as an outsider, so we just stop paying attention to such a persistent distraction and exclude him from our Koinonia – our Fellowship with the Body of Christ. In fact, it turns out that we often hear from the Ambo that “where two or three are gathered together in my name I am there among them.” Jesus is another witness for us, and that has implications beyond the solidarity of the Church community. Whatever we pray or decide in a gathering such as that – be it for someone’s health, better weather, an affordable repair of our car – whatever and whenever we pray with others gathered together in his name, (like during Mass or Bible study eh?) – Jesus is there to the max in the mix. That’s a very cool thing! Except there’s always that uninvited visitor who will try to stir the chaos to a higher level. Yep. That guy, the Devil – or his little buddies, his evil minions, the demons.

Let’s recall what ha-Satan (say “hah-sah-T^HAN”) means. It means “the accuser,” “the adversary,” the prosecuting attorney if you will, the one whose job it is to make us doubt that we can be redeemed from our life of sin and all those stains as of scarlet can be turned whiter than snow (← Music Link) I call him THE FOE. Perhaps you have seen the story called The Bird Cage about the little punk and the Pastor. The kid has several birds trapped in a cage. He plans to take them home and “have fun with them.” Feed them to the cats perhaps. The Pastor bargained with the kid to buy the cage and the birds. The punk said, “Man, you don’t want these birds! There ugly, useless, freaky little pests! “ The pastor offered the last of his money – a $10 bill. The punk took his ten bucks and split pronto. Then the Pastor walked over to the edge of the field and set the birds free.

That coming Sunday, he put the empty cage on the pulpit at his church. He paraphrased the event as being an exchange between the Devil, a punk, and Jesus – the Pastor of pastors. Satan had captured and trapped “a world full of people down there.” His plan was to “have fun with them,” to teach them to lie and cheat on each other, to abuse and kill each other, to fight wars, and steal property, then he was going to keep them and take them to his home. Jesus then asked him, “How much for the cage and those trapped souls?” Then, ha-Satan said, “Ahh, you don’t want this bunch. They’ll hate you and spit on you, call you names, and then they’ll just ,kill you. Nah, you can’t afford to get these hostages.” Jesus quietly asked again, “How much?” The Foe replied with a squinty sneer, “All your Blood, Sweat, and Tears … and your Life!” Jesus responded with a single word: “DONE.”

That was Jesus' end of the bargain, and also the end of sin and everlasting Death for whosoever would believe in him. Τετέλεσται → "It is finished." In Greek, this is Τετέλεσται, (Tetélestai) {teh-TEH-les-tie} Jesus gave the entirety of himself – to the max in the mix – to join in as both a Witness to Truth and the Ultimate Defense Attorney. That little Devil or demon that sometimes sits on our shoulder and whispers “Go ahead! Nobody’s looking! You can get away with it easy, and then we can do it again!” – here’s what makes’em scoot: “Jesus, I trust in you. Please terminate this pesky tempter.” And you know what? Jesus, and our Abba, and The Spirit together will also be saying, “We know who you are and We saw what you did. You are our child, and heir to all your Brother earned through his obedience, so We saw what you did, heard and saw your repentance, and forgave and forgot your sin. Jesus says your guilt is Paid In Full. (← Music Link) We know who you are and We saw what you did, and your sins are G-O-N-E – GONE! Now come on in to Supper with us. We’re ready for you and your place here!”

That’s a pretty good reason to call the Gospel “The Good News.” Belovéd, Repent and believe the Gospel!

Whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever, however, if ever, forever —
at your service, Belovéd!
Please pray with us here at Share-a-Prayer.

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture passages are from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Biblical languages inserts from Bible Hub (Bible Hub: Search, Read, Study the Bible in Many Languages) Visit at http://biblehub.com

Aloha Friday Messages by Charles O. Todd, III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Managed by Kukui-IT on Cloudflare ^® , Inc. “Cloudflare, the Cloudflare logo, and Cloudflare Workers are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Cloudflare, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions.”