Month: January 2026

Links for today’s readings:

Jan 21  Read: Job 22 Listen: (2:54) Read: John 21 Listen: (3:58)

Scripture Focus: Job 22:4–5

4 “Is it for your piety that he rebukes you
    and brings charges against you?
5 Is not your wickedness great?

Reflection: Assumptions

By Erin Newton

When headlines break with news of some new atrocity, the details are often vague and incomplete. With the lack of information, assumptions rush to fill the void. Whatever the incident, whoever the person, assumptions are a common exacerbator of suffering.

When Job’s friends arrive on the scene, they give him a week’s silence. Then the verbal (and emotional) onslaught begins. As Francis Andersen notes in the Tyndale commentary on Job, “The idea of a good man suffering never enters their thoughts. It would demolish their theology, or, as Eliphaz has already said, undermine religion.” Eliphaz, just a few chapters earlier is dismayed by Job’s repeated insistence of innocence. “But you even undermine piety and hinder devotion to God” (15:4). The thinking, at that time, was that bad things happen to bad people. He deserved it. And then they probe to find it.

But we keep returning to the fact that we already know the reason for Job’s suffering; his friends, however, do not. Three rounds of debates between Job and his friends ensue. Eight different conversations grow in their intensity. First, they all generally suggest that suffering is caused by a person’s sin. By Job 22, Eliphaz is not mincing his words anymore: “Are not your sins endless?” (v. 5) and “That is why snares are all around you” (v. 10). Job’s friends cast the cause of his misery onto his own head.

When our first instinct is to heap responsibility back onto the person who suffers, we are often acting like Eliphaz himself. We cannot see a world outside of our own assumptions—even more so, our assumptions rooted in preconceived biases.

Andersen reminds us: “The reader … understands that Job is neither stubborn nor arrogant. He is honest and tenacious. From the depths of a sick body and broken mind, his spirit is still thrusting its faith into God, even though his blind cries sound wild to his friends.”

For those who suffer from chronic or life-threatening illness, are we quick to assume they’ve done something wrong? For those who lose a loved one to violence, are we blaming the victim for “being in the wrong place at the wrong time”? For those who have been abused by someone, are we analyzing their outfits, their demeanor, or their gullibility?

To avoid being like Job’s friends, we must be quick to listen, slow to speak—and I’d like to add—slow to assume.

Divine Hours Prayer: The Request for Presence

Let my cry come before you, O Lord; give me understanding, according to your word.

Let my supplication come before you; deliver me, according to your promise. — Psalm 119.169-170

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phyllis Tickle.

Read more: Return from Financial Sins

One rarely hears sermons on financial sins that approach the passion and zeal of sermons about sex or drugs or pornography…unless one reads the Bible.

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Links for today’s readings:

Jan 20  Read: Job 21 Listen: (3:05) Read: John 20 Listen: (4:17)

Is my complaint directed to a human being?
Why should I not be impatient?

Reflection: Needing Jesus to Pray

By John Tillman

We tell our wants to God (and everyone else) easily enough. If this was all prayer was, it could be said to be natural, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor and theologian, disagrees. He said, “This is a dangerous error to imagine that it is natural for the heart to pray.” 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer lost his life in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 just two weeks shy of the liberation of the camp by American forces. To say he understood the experience of intense prayer, and unanswered prayer, would be an understatement. He wrote:

“It can become a great torment to want to speak with God and not to be able to do it—having to be speechless before God, sensing that every cry remains enclosed within one’s own self, that heart and mouth speak a perverse language which God does not want to hear.”

Bonhoeffer taught ministry students and congregants that it was not possible to pray rightly without the power of God:

“We confuse wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing—all of which the heart can certainly do on its own—with praying. But in doing so we confuse earth and heaven, human beings and God. Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one’s heart. It means, rather, finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own. For that one needs Jesus Christ.”

Bonhoeffer further explained how to pray Scripture, which is the Word of God, through the Holy Spirit, who fills words with the power of God:

“Jesus Christ has brought before God every need, every joy, every thanksgiving, and every hope of humankind. In Jesus’ mouth the human word becomes God’s Word. When we pray along with the prayer of Christ, God’s Word becomes again a human word.

If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible, and especially the Psalms, we must not, therefore, first ask what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ. We must ask how we can understand the Psalms as God’s Word, and only then can we pray them with Jesus Christ. Thus it does not matter whether the Psalms express exactly what we feel in our heart at the moment we pray.

Perhaps it is precisely the case that we must pray against our own heart in order to pray rightly. It is not just that for which we ourselves want to pray that is important, but that for which God wants us to pray. If we were dependent on ourselves alone, we would probably often pray only the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. But God wants it otherwise. Not the poverty of our heart, but the richness of God’s word, ought to determine our prayer.”

Divine Hours Prayer: The Call to Prayer

Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise. — Psalm 51.16

Read more: Defining Moment

What adjectives do you carry with you? Doubting? Wounded? Worthless? Unreliable? Delete them and accept the new descriptors that are given to us in Jesus

Read more: Crushing Bruised Reeds

We do not need to abandon essentials to charitably embrace those in distress who struggle to define “essentials.” They need love, not contempt.

Links for today’s readings:

Jan 16  Read: Job 16-17 Listen: (3:40) Read: John 16 Listen: (4:14)

Links for this weekend’s readings:

Jan 17  Read: Job 18 Listen: (1:54) Read: John 17 Listen: (3:40)
Jan 18  Read: Job 19 Listen: (2:48) Read: John 18 Listen: (5:16)

Scripture Focus: Job 16.18-21

Job 17.13-16

Reflection: What Job Didn’t Know

By John Tillman

Job said upsetting things. It’s no wonder that his friends were offended and confused by his angry and despairing words. We understand Job better than his friends because we know things that he and his friends did not know.

We know God considered Job righteous. We know there was more at stake than Job’s well-being, comfort, or prosperity. We heard Satan’s accusations in God’s presence. The accuser claimed God’s faithful only love him when he blesses them. The accuser claimed God shows favoritism to those who love him. Both faith itself and God’s righteousness were under attack.

What Job endured had a purpose that he could not see and won a victory that he could not have imagined. But even knowing what we know doesn’t make Job’s suffering less painful. It doesn’t rebuild destroyed homes, restore destroyed crops, or return stolen livestock. It doesn’t raise to life those who died.

Job also said hopeful things. It is a wonder that anyone in his position still held any hope. Job claimed that a witness on his behalf and an advocate were defending him to God and that his intercessor and friend was in Heaven, pleading with God. To Job this friendly advocate was shadowy and undefined. Is it a human? An angel? A divine being?

We know more than Job did. We know Job’s shadowy, heavenly defender is Jesus. (1 John 2.1-2) We see him clearly in the gospels, and Jesus says, when we see him, we see the Father. (John 14.9)

Job is the oldest book (the first to be written) in the Bible. Job probably lived after the flood but before Abraham. So, before Abraham received God’s promise, Job described the hope we have in Jesus.

We know more than Job. We know the grave is not our home or our prison. We know Job’s advocate and our friend, Jesus, is the firstborn from among the dead (Romans 8.29; Colossians 1.15-18; Revelation 1.4-5) and we are his siblings, sharing his cross and resurrection. (Romans 6.4-5; Philippians 3.10) We know after returning to dust, he will descend, raising us to life everlasting. (1 Thessalonians 4.13-18)

What Job didn’t know and couldn’t imagine is our reality. But we also live with unknowns in our present and future sufferings. We don’t know what is at stake in painful times. We don’t know what purpose our sufferings serve. Like Job, we must trust without knowing fully. Like him, we can rely on our friend and advocate.

Divine Hours Prayer: The Refrain for the Morning Lessons

Righteousness shall go before him, and peace shall be a pathway for his feet. — Psalm 85.13

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phyllis Tickle.

Read more: Hope In the Tree of the Cross

“He has done it,” Psalm 22’s last line proclaims. “It is finished,” Christ’s last breath from the cross echoes.

Read more: Resist Weaponizing Spiritual Things

God won’t be anyone’s mercenary and he looks unkindly on weaponizing the Bible for earthly purposes.

Links for today’s readings:

Jan 15  Read: Job 15 Listen: (3:23) Read: John 15 Listen: (3:20)

Scripture Focus: Job 15.2-16

Reflection: Ad Hominem Indicates Self-Supremacist Thinking

By John Tillman

Eliphaz dives right into attacking Job’s character and motivations. The friends often do this. No wise person would say that. (v. 2) You want to encourage godlessness! You are hindering faith! (v. 4) You say that because you are a sinner. (v. 5) You’re giving in to emotions! (v. 12) You hate God! (v. 13)

“You only say that because…” This fallacious argument implies that the cause of your claims is a flaw in your nature or character. Your experience, the facts, and your logic are ignored. Your argument is dismissed because of your situation or identity.

When condemning this argumentation in his book, Miracles, C.S. Lewis gives the example of “He believes in Pacifism because he’s a coward” as a particularly foolish thing to say. In our context, examples might include: “You only say that because you are a Republican/Democrat.” or “…because you are a Catholic/Baptist/Calvinist/etc.” or “…because you are brainwashed/deranged.”

Identity-based argumentation is a form of the ad hominem logical fallacy, which means attacking the speaker instead of the speaker’s argument. It is also a type of “Identity supremacy.” “Our answer is superior because we are superior. If you were a better type of person, one of our group, you’d think like we do.”

Eliphaz and the other friends were condemned by God for not telling the truth about him, as Job did. (Job 42.7-8) There was something true in what Job was saying, even though he said it in a way Eliphaz didn’t like. Eliphaz missed the truth because he was blinded by pride and self-superiority.

All forms of supremacy are fatal to Christianity. Whatever variety of pride puffs us up, (1 Corinthians 8.1-2) we must pierce and deflate. Whatever flavor of favoritism we employ, (Acts 10.34; Romans 2.11; James 2.1, 8-9) we must wash out of our mouths. Christians fail to be people of truth when using identity-based, ad hominem thinking.

We are not contending for the truth or the faith when we condemn arguments based on the arguer’s identity. While it is true that individuals may develop reputations for untruthfulness (which should give us pause when considering their claims) we must defend the truth with facts, not feelings, favoritism, or foregone conclusions.

Instead of pride in our identity or disdain for others’, let us cultivate humility. For God did not call us because we were strong, wise, or righteous, but because we were weak, foolish, and despised. We boast only in Jesus, our wisdom, righteousness, and salvation. (1 Corinthians 1.20-31)

Divine Hours Prayer: A Reading

Jesus taught the people, saying: “What is your opinion? A man had two sons. He went and said to the first, ‘My boy, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not go,’ but afterwards thought better of it and went. The man then went and said the same thing to the second who answered, ‘Certainly, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the father’s will?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “In truth I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are making their way into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you, showing the way of uprightness, but you did not believe him, and yet the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. Even after seeing that, you refused to think better of it and believe in him.” — Matthew 21:28–32

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phyllis Tickle.

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It is not a question of evidence, but of morality. It is a battle between allegiance to other humans and the justice God demands.