Apologies!

Greetings! My apologies for not posting dailies today. I am away from my PC grandie caring while G&W attend the Azusa conference. Blessings! xom

Meditations—points to ponder

You’d think an encounter with the God of the universe 

might be a particularly unforgettable experience. But history tells us 

God’s people were often forgetting Him. 

God needed to reintroduce Himself more than a few times to His people.

 Sadly the history of God’s people is that of forgetting Him. 

If you suffer from exile for too long, you risk losing national and personal dignity. 

You forget that you’re a blessed people. 

You lose track of your origin—your Creator. 

And then you become groundless.

One of the most important things Sam Kee believes he can do for people 

who are experiencing an “exile” of sorts is to give them a sense of belonging—

help them see their connection to their Creator. 

Although circumstances often suggest otherwise, we don’t belong to our captors —

their grip is weak. 

We belong to the God who says, “You are Mine.”

Samuel Kee Soul Tattoo You are Mine

Isaiah 43:1 (The Message) — 1 But now, God’s Message, the God who made you in the first place, Jacob, the One who got you started, Israel: “Don’t be afraid, I’ve redeemed you. I’ve called your name. You’re mine.

Meditations—points to ponder

Tattoo #1: You are Mine—

Everyone who gets a tattoo is left with a permanent reminder of the artist 

who touched his or her life. God is the ultimate tattoo artist, 

but His canvas goes deeper than skin. 

He stitches tattoos to the soul. 

One such tattoo reads, “You are Mine.” 

This is a permanent-ink truth that no exile can erase. 

We are God’s ... through creation, formation, redemption, and calling.

God is actually laying claim to you … notwithstanding your scars, 

there is a stain that runs deeper. 

This is the first soul tattoo, written on every person who reads these words 

and even on those who don’t. Despite your expectations and experiences, 

God has copyrighted you as His own masterpiece. God looks at you and says,

“You are Mine.” 

He’s put this tattoo on your soul so you will never forget it.

Samuel Kee Soul Tattoo You are Mine

Isaiah 43:1 (ESV) — 1 But now thus says the Lord, He Who created you, O Jacob, He Who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are Mine.

Meditations—points to ponder

It seems that God has tattooed the names of His People on His Hands. 

This is a good place to start. We must first examine God’s tattoos 

if we’re going to be able to see our own. From the same Hebrew book, 

we will discover four tattoos that God has punctured into our souls. 

Each tattoo is a story from God, an eternity of dignity in a world of insanity. 

As your lungs take in each breath, I want you to start training your thoughts 

on these tattoos, found in Isaiah 43:1–7. Ready?

Inhale. “You are mine.” Exhale.

Inhale. “I will be with you.” Exhale.

Inhale. “I love you.” Exhale.

Inhale. “I created you for my glory.” Exhale.

These four soul tattoos, engraved by the hand of the Master, 

are the true source of our dignity.

Samuel Kee Soul Tattoo Introduction

Isaiah 43:1–7 (ESV) — 1 But now thus says the Lord, He Who created you, O Jacob, He Who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. 2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. 3 For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you. 4 Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. 5 Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. 6 I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, 7 everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

Meditations—points to ponder

To one degree or another we are all displaced, discouraged, defeated, and dominated—and some of us feel it more than others. 

We are adrift in the middle of a shark-infested ocean, 

crying out to be rescued from drowning, waiting for someone to throw us a lifeline. 

It is in this place of desperation where we most clearly see 

the stains that run deeper than the scars. 

Here, where we’re stripped of everything that enables us to remain self-dependent 

and blind, we find clarity. Only when we lose ourselves can we find ourselves. 

Then we are able to see the tattoos on our souls that tell us of our 

beginning, purpose, worth, calling, and love. 

Sam Kee believes that tattooed on your soul are the permanent stories 

of who you are, which you must see if you’re going to know true dignity. 

Yes, every tattoo has a story, but also, every story has tattoos. 

And they don’t come from what you’ve accomplished or what has been handed to you 

by others. These tattoos come from Another Hand.

Tattoos can be found in the Bible, and on the Person you’d least expect. 

In the ancient Hebrew book of Isaiah, we read about tattoos on the very hands of God. 

Samuel Kee Soul Tattoo Introduction

Isaiah 49:16 (ESV) — 16a Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; … …

Today we encounter an extraordinary author-pastor-chaplain Samuel Kee … chaplain at O-Hare Airport in Chicago—one of the busiest airports in the world. Since reading this book I have had a different attitude toward seeing tattoos on bodies. I praise God for this change of attitude for I recently met a young man with many visible tats who could tell me a story about Jesus in each one of them! 

You, yourself, are a tattoo on the palms of Jesus hands! Rejoice!

Meditations—points to ponder

 Tattoos tell a story—

Tattooists are a voice for today’s culture. They reveal the desires of a nation 

transposed onto the skin in plain sight. 

While we may get tattoos for many reasons, there’s one common purpose: 

to tell a story. Tattoos are like the paintings of a novice trying to recreate 

the work of a master. The real Master, God, has painted us with 

dignity, life, and worth. 

Each of God’s paintings is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. 

God’s paintings aren’t done on canvas—not even the canvas of our skin—

but on the human soul.

In order to survive, humans need essentials such as 

air, food, water, shelter, and clothing, but they also need dignity. 

Dignity is crucial to survival. Without it, the human soul dies.

Q: Is it possible to find a source of dignity that runs deeper than our scars?

Q: Is it possible to find a source of permanent significance?

Q: What if I were to tell you that everyone has these kinds of indestructible tattoos? … 

These tattoos run much deeper, so deep that they’re untouchable. 

They are written on your soul in indelible ink and can never be erased. 

They are soul tattoos, put there by the hand of the Master.

Samuel Kee Soul Tattoo Introduction

Isaiah 49:16 (NRSV) — 16a See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; …

Meditations—points to ponder

Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assimilated, 

taken into the soul—eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight. 

Words of men and women long dead or separated by miles and/or years 

come off the pages and enter our lives freshly and precisely, 

conveying truth and beauty and goodness—

words that God’s Spirit has used and now uses to breathe life into our souls. 

Our access to reality deepens into past centuries and spreads across continents, 

however carries with it subtle dangers. 

Too often we can silence the living voice and reduce words 

to what we can use for convenience and profit … 

and it is these words that need rescuing. 

We are formed by God’s Holy Spirit in accordance with the text of Holy Scripture. 

God does not put us in charge of forming our personal spiritualities … 

we grow in accordance with the revealed Word implanted in us by Holy Spirit.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading p12

1 Peter 1:23 (NRSV) — 23 You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.

1 Peter 1:23 (The Message) — 23 Your new life is not like your old life. Your old birth came from mortal sperm; your new birth comes from God’s living Word. 

Just think: a life conceived by God himself!

1 Peter 1:23 (NCV) — 23 You have been born again, and this new life did not come from something that dies, but from something that cannot die. 

You were born again through God’s living message that continues forever.

Meditations—points to ponder

Austin Farrer referred to the ‘forbidding discipline’ of spiritual reading: 

this means that such reading requires that we read with our entire life, 

not just employing the synapses of our brain. 

Forbidding because of the endless dodges we devise 

in avoiding the risk of faith in God. 

Forbidding because of our restless inventiveness in using 

whatever knowledge of ‘spirituality’ we acquire to set ourselves up as gods. 

Forbidding because when we have learned to read and comprehend 

the words on the page, we find we have hardly begun. 

Forbidding because it requires all of us—our muscles and ligaments, 

our eyes and ears, our obedience and adoration, our imaginations and our prayers.

Our spiritual ancestors set this forbidding discipline (lectio divina) 

as the core curriculum in the most demanding of all schools—

the school of Holy Spirit—established by Jesus when He taught His Disciples …

John 16:13–15 (NRSV) ¹³ When the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own, but will speak whatever He hears, and He will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify Me, because He will take what is Mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is Mine. For this reason I said that He will take what is Mine and declare it to you.

All writing that comes out of this school anticipates this kind of reading: 

participatory reading—receiving the words in such a way 

that they become interior to our lives, 

the rhythms and images becoming practices of prayer, 

acts of obedience and ways of love. 

Words spoken or written to us under the metaphor of eating are words 

to be freely taken in, tasted, chewed, savored, swallowed and digested—

have a different effect on us from those that come at us from the outside—

whether in the form of propaganda or information.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading pp10

John 16:13–15 (The Message) — 13 But when the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. He won’t draw attention to himself, but will make sense out of what is about to happen and, indeed, out of all that I have done and said. 14 He will honor me; he will take from me and deliver it to you. 15 Everything the Father has is also mine. That is why I’ve said, ‘He takes from me and delivers to you.’

Meditations—points to ponder

Karl Barth became a Christian reader—reading words in order to be 

formed by the Word. 

It was only then that he became a Christian writer. 

Eugene Petersen has learned that force-feeding isn't the best way 

to convey the distinctive quality inherent in Bible reading—spiritual reading. 

He noticed a passage written by John in Rev 10:9-10 … 

wherein he (S. John) was eating a book!

Revelation 10:9–10 (NRSV) ⁹ So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, “Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.” ¹⁰ So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel 

and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, 

but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter.

Jeremiah and Ezekiel had also eaten good books—

a good diet for anyone who cares about reading words rightly. 

When you eat a book (not just read it) you get it into your nerve endings, 

reflexes and imagination. 

These books that are eaten are Holy Scriptures. 

The book eaten becomes metabolized into one’s very being.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading pp8-9

Ezekiel 3:3 (NRSV) — 3 He said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.

Meditations—points to ponder

In 1916 a young Swiss pastor Karl Barth (30 yo) was just beginning to discover the Bible. He was writing what he had discovered. His book was the first in a procession of books that would convince many Christians that the Bible was giving a truer, more accurate account of what was going on in their seemingly unraveling world than what their politicians and journalists were telling them. [Ed. comment: what’s different in 2017??] 

Barth sought to recover the capacity of Christians to read the Bible receptively in its original, transformative character—he brought the Bible out of academic mothballs 

in which it had been stored for so long. 

He demonstrated how alive it is and how different it is from books that can be ‘handled’ i.e. dissected, analysed and used for whatever we want them for. 

He showed, clearly and persuasively, that this ‘different’ kind of writing 

(revelatory and intimate instead of informational and impersonal) 

must be met by a different kind of reading (receptive and leisurely 

instead of standoffish and efficient). 

He also called attention to writers who had absorbed and continued to write in the biblical style, involving us as readers in life-transforming responses.

For the next fifty years Barth demonstrated the incredible vigor and energy 

radiating from the sentences and stories of the Bible and shows us how to read them. Barth insists that we do not read this book and the subsequent writings 

that are shaped by it in order to find out how to get God into our lives or 

to get Him to participate in our lives … NO!

We open this book and find that page after page it takes us off-guard, 

surprises us and draws us into its reality, pulls us into participation with God 

on His terms. When we open the Bible we enter the totally unfamiliar world 

of God, a world of creation and salvation, stretching endlessly above and beyond us.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading pp5-7

Isaiah 55:11 (NRSV) — 11 so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Jeremiah 15:16 (NRSV) — 16 Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart; for I am called by your name, O Lord, God of hosts.

Meditations—points to ponder

There is only one way of reading that is congruent with our Holy Scriptures … 

reading that trusts in the power of words to penetrate our lives and 

create truth, beauty and goodness. 

This type of writing requires a reader to lean back and close her eyes over a line 

she has been reading again as its meaning spreads through her bloodstream. 

This kind of reading is known as lectio divina—spiritual reading … 

reading that enters our soul as food and enters our stomach, 

spreads through our blood and in turn becomes holiness, love and wisdom.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading pp4

Psalm 19:14 (NRSV) Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart

be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Psalm 19:14 (The Message) These are the words in my mouth; 

these are what I chew on and pray. …

Meditations—points to ponder

The opening page of the bible tells us that every living creature 

was brought into being by the Power of words. 

Language, spoken and written is the primary means for getting us in on what is—

Who God is and what He is doing. 

Such words are intended to get inside us, 

to deal with our souls, 

to form a life that is congruent with the world that God has created, 

the salvation He has enacted and 

the community He has gathered. 

This requires a hagah type of reading. 

Spiritual writing or Spirit-sourced writing, requires spiritual reading —

a reading that honors words as holy words as a basic means of 

forming an intricate web of relationship between God and the human—

between all things visible and invisible.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading pp3-4

2 Timothy 3:16 (NRSV) — 16 All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,

2 Timothy 3:16 (The Message) — 16 Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and 

useful one way or another—showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, 

correcting our mistakes, training us to live God’s way.

Meditations—points to ponder

Hagah is a word our Hebrew ancestors used frequently for reading the kind of writing 

that deals with our souls. Meditate is too tame a word for what is being signified. 

Hagah has been aptly described as being lost in the Scriptures: 

like letting a very slowly dissolving lozenge melt imperceptibly in one’s mouth. 

Eugene Petersen is interested in cultivating this kind of reading that is congruent with 

what is written in our Holy Scriptures, but also 

with all writing that is intended to change our lives 

and not just stuff some information into our brains. 

He invites us to ruminative and leisurely reading; a dalliance with words—

in contrast to wolfing down information. 

Our canonical writers absolutely demand this type of reading. 

They make up a school of writers employed by Holy Spirit to give us the Holy Scriptures 

and keep us in touch with and responsive to reality, 

whether visible or invisible—God-Reality / God-Presence.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading pp2-3

John 1:1 (NRSV) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, 

and the Word was God.

John 1:1 (The Message)  The Word was first, the Word present to God, 

God present to the Word. The Word was God,

John 1:14 (NRSV) And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, 

the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Today Dailies presents a book by Eugene Peterson who wrote The Message translation

of the Bible. I invite you to Eat this Book!

We grow in accordance with the revealed Word implanted in us by Holy Spirit.

Meditations—points to ponder

What is neglected is the reading of the Scriptures transformationally—

reading in order to live the new life IN Christ. 

In order to read the Scriptures adequately and accurately, 

it is necessary at the same time to live them. 

Not to live them as a prerequisite to reading them and not to live them 

in consequence of reading them but to live them as we read them—

the living and reading reciprocal—body language and spoken words, 

the back and forthness assimilating the reading to the living to the reading. 

Reading the Scripture is not an activity discrete from living the gospel 

but one integral to it. 

It means letting Another have a say in everything we are saying and doing. 

It is as easy as that … and as hard.

Eugene Peterson Eat this Book! the art of spiritual reading Introduction

2 Corinthians 3:2 (NRSV) — 2 You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, 

to be known and read by all;

Meditations—points to ponder

Chasing wholeness without holiness is wasted. 

There isn’t a snowballs chance in hell of you becoming the person 

God made you to be without the healing of your humanity. 

You can’t get holiness without wholeness—the two go together. 

Put these together as you reflect … 

freedom of heart and passionate pursuit of God’s commands. 

Genuine holiness restores human beings—

restored human beings possess genuine holiness.

John Eldredge Free to Live: the utter relief of holiness pp18

1 Peter 1:16 (NRSV) — 16 for it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

1 Peter 1:16 (The Message) — 16 God said, “I am holy; you be holy.”

Meditations—points to ponder

If church is not about restoring the whole man it may not be in line with 

what God is doing because that it clearly what God is up to.

Q: What does Jesus say of the Pharisees?

… these people’s hearts have become calloused and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn to Me and I would heal them. 

There is an offer in that statement and Jesus is upset that it is largely ignored. 

The Pharisees had completely missed the point of what God is up to—

what He is after in a person’s life … to heal him as a human being.

The tragedy of the plethora of self-help books and programs is that they all miss 

the transformation of our character. Yes! God does help people through such things because He wants life for us … 

but when we focus on fixing problems we miss the other—

transformation of our character. 

If our Christian life is not resulting in the glorious living that Paul talks about … 

then something important is missing.

John Eldredge Free to Live: the utter relief of holiness pp15-17

Ephesians 1:4 (The Message) — 4 Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, 

he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, 

to be made whole and holy by his love.

Ephesians 1:4 (NRSV) — 4 just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.

God is restoring the creation He made.