Thought for the day – Friday 1 May

Dear All

The familiar ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ were words we used to hear uttered by Magnus Magnusson, the ‘Viking Interrogator’, on Mastermind. Mastermind, the specialist TV quiz programme that could reduce grown men to tears or a quivering wreck in seconds. The only other chairs more intimidating than that ‘black one’ are the electric and dentist’s chairs. All of them designed to ‘inflict pain and suffering’. Well! it just looks that way.

Getting started is easy but to keep going is much harder. Diets, learning to play a musical instrument or learn a new language all require ‘stickability’. My guess is that we’ll all have given up something that we wanted to do because it got harder as time passed. Losing that initial interest and discovering that there was more to it than we first thought all tend to put us off. Much of what we achieve in life requires more perspiration than inspiration. Great ideas are fulfilled not by thinking about them but rather by making them happen.

Have we not all at times been ‘choked’ like the seeds that fell among the thorns. Our financial affairs, our work, our families, our holidays, our relationships and our health are all matters of real concern for us. Rarely, even though we know the sense of it, do we ever take each day as it comes. We visit and revisit the past and attempt to voyage into the future, a point we only ‘arrive at’ as we take one day at a time. There are no quantum leaps. Second, by second our futures unfold. Today was yesterday’s future and today will be tomorrow’s past.

Easier said than done, we really do need to learn to live each day and not become entangled in the thorns. Jesus was speaking about the word of God and the Kingdom and he mentions the word ‘hear’ at least half a dozen times.

Hearing and doing go hand in hand. What is the ‘word’ of which Jesus speaks and what does it all mean for us today?

Today I ask you to think/meditate on these things.

God bless you!

Jim

JBoag@churchofscotland.org.uk

LUKE 8: 4-15

While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. Some fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still, other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.”

When he said this, he called out, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

His disciples asked him what this parable meant. He said, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others, I speak in parables, so that, ‘though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand’.”

“This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. Those on the rocky ground are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing, they fall away. The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life’s worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature. But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.