Month: January 2026

Links for today’s readings:

Jan 23  Read: Job 24 Listen: (2:56) Read: Psalms 3-4 Listen: (1:57)

Links for this weekend’s readings:

Jan 24  Read: Job 25-26 Listen: (1:52) Read: Psalms 5-6 Listen: (2:45)
Jan 25  Read: Job 27 Listen: (2:21) Read: Psalms 7-8 Listen: (2:58)

Scripture Focus: Job 24.1-12

“If you aren’t intensely concerned for the quartet of the vulnerable…it’s a sign your heart is not right with God.” — Tim Keller

Photo Note: Today’s photo is of the Angels Unawares sculpture by Timothy Schmalz. It was installed in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican September 29, 2019 for the 105th World Day of Migrants and Refugees.

Reflection: Vulnerable Quartet

By John Tillman

The “quartet of the vulnerable” is a term for those vulnerable to harm, particularly in the Bible: the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, and the poor.

Job sees wrongs in his community, questioning why God has not acted on behalf of three of these four groups. He shines a light on the sufferers and has compassion for them.

Job starts with the subtle crime of moving boundary stones. Doing this made one’s land more profitable and incrementally stole influence and livelihood from neighbors.

An action in Job’s list that particularly infuriates me is driving away the orphan’s donkey. Driving away the donkey is an act of financial sabotage, equivalent to breaking a farmer’s tractor or burning down their barn. It is intended to cause bankruptcy, loan default, and desperation. It cuts their bootstraps to prevent them from pulling themselves up, ensuring that there is no escape from poverty and enslavement. 

Another wrong Job lists is sending “the poor of the land into hiding”, forcing them into deserts where there is no food for their children. (Job 24.4-5) These wrongs make me think of current issues.

When we look honestly at our society as Job did, can we not see those incrementally “moving boundary stones” stealing wealth and influence from their neighbors? Can we not see those financially and educationally sabotaging people working to escape poverty? Can we not see those sweeping the poor out of sight or allowing them to languish and die?

Laws have been opposed and defeated to help the poor or penalize financial crimes. Programs or money that would feed hungry children have been attacked or eliminated. Churches, programs, or pastors who help the poor or migrants have been criticized, intimidated, fined, and prosecuted for doing so.

What kind of society does these things? Not a great one. Not a righteous one. God judges the righteousness of kings, countries, and cities by the condition of these groups. God is concerned for the welfare of this vulnerable quartet. We should share his concern.

Job began this section with despair that these things were happening. We may identify with that despair. Job ends this section with certainty that God will destroy and punish abusers of the vulnerable.

If Job looked past his pain to shine a light on the sufferers, have compassion for them, cry out to God for them, and take action on their behalf, so can we.

Divine Hours Prayer: The Call to Prayer

Come now and see the works of God, how wonderful he is in his doing toward all people.

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

Read more: Taking Advantage of the Desperate

Economically disadvantaged neighborhoods often contain payday lenders and abortion clinics, but few doctor’s offices or grocery stores—monetization of desperation.

Taking Advantage of the Desperate

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Links for today’s readings:

Jan 22  Read: Job 23 Listen: (1:43) Read: Psalms 1-2 Listen: (2:05)

Scripture Focus: Job 23.

Reflection: The Un-Localized God

By John Tillman

Job couldn’t find God but trusted God would find him.

Most ancient peoples worshiped territorially localized gods. Like kings, gods had borders. Your god might be a god of the plains, your ally’s god a god of the seas or rivers, and your enemy’s god a god of the mountains. Yahweh was remarkably un-localized. He claimed sovereignty over earth, heavens, mountains, plains, and seas.

Followers of Yahweh built altars to the Lord wherever they experienced him. You could never tell where Yahweh would show up. Abraham “called on the name of the Lord” from under “the great tree of Moreh” (Genesis 12.6-7), between Bethel and Ai (Genesis 12.8), under a tamarisk tree he planted in Beersheba (Genesis 21.33), and on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22.1-14). Isaac, Jacob, and others did the same.

Like Abraham, Job had no tabernacle or temple at which to seek God. In one way, Job felt God’s presence, like a hand oppressing him. In another way, he longed to appeal to God but could not reach him.

David would have sympathized. At times he fruitlessly sought God (Psalm 13) and at others claimed he could not escape God’s presence (Psalm 139.7-12).

The exiles sympathized. They felt simultaneously punished and abandoned. Without a temple and in a foreign land, Jeremiah reminded them God was not localized and they would find him when they sought him with all their hearts (Jeremiah 29.13).

Do you sympathize with Job? Do you feel exiled? Does God seem everywhere and nowhere at once?

God revealed himself to Abraham on Moriah and to Moses in the burning bush. Today, God reveals himself primarily in scripture. Learning to find God in scripture and prayer helps us to find him in every situation. Scripture shows us Jesus, the perfect image of the Father. And it shows us the Holy Spirit, poured out on all people everywhere.

Under the shade of scripture’s spreading branches, build an altar with habits of reading, study, and worship. Call upon the name of the Lord. With your ears, listen to God’s voice speaking through the Holy Spirit, scripture’s human authors, and your fellow Christians. With your hands do the works and wonders scripture commands (Luke 9.1-6; 10.8-9; Matthew 10.1-8). With your feet, follow the paths scripture describes and shun the ones it condemns. (Matthew 10.16-31)

Our God is not localized. God is present even when we don’t notice and he is seeking worshipers (John 4.21-24). The un-localized God wants to dwell within us. Seek him in Spirit and truth.

Divine Hours Prayer: The Request for Presence

For God alone my soul in silence waits; truly, my hope is in him. — Psalm 62.6

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

Read more: Jesus, Our Blessed One — A Guided Prayer

We aspire, Lord,…to delight in your law…to meditate day and night. But we rely, Lord, not on our striving but on Jesus Christ.

Jesus, Our Blessed One — A Guided Prayer

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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.

Return From Financial Sins

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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

Defining Moment — Readers’ Choice

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.

Crushing Bruised Reeds