Be Still and Know Daily Bible Devotion

Mark 1:9-11 One day Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee, and John baptised him in the Jordan River. As Jesus came up out of the water, he saw the heavens splitting apart and the Holy Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice from heaven said, “You are my dearly loved Son, and you bring me great joy.” Here, in a gentle yet spectacular way, we see God the Trinity at work. Having been baptised by John, Jesus saw the Holy Spirit descending upon him, and God the Father spoke from heaven confirming his identity. As Jesus stepped into his new ministry, it was essential that the whole Trinity was involved. Jesus continually sought to be close to his Father in prayer and was led by the Spirit. People often struggle to understand the Trinity but it is in Jesus’ ministry that we see most clearly how they all work together. We must be constantly aware of the presence and blessing of God the Trinity in our lives. God is our creator and we bring our worship to him through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Bible is quite clear that they are distinct from one another, and yet absolutely one. At the dawn of creation, all the members of the Trinity were present. God the Father spoke his word – and John’s Gospel explains that Jesus was that word – while the Spirit hovered over the surface of the waters. Then at Jesus’ baptism, the Father, Son and Spirit met in the River Jordan. People often say that they find the Trinity confusing, but the Bible never explains it to us like some sort of complicated mathematical puzzle. The Trinity is presented to us as the basis of our worship. God is always infinitely beyond our understanding but as we see the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Spirit, we are invited to join in relationship with them. At the heart of that relationship is love. God the Father loves us so much that he sent Jesus into the world to be our saviour, and when Jesus ascended to his Father, God sent his Spirit to us to lead us to Jesus and to enable us to do even more than could be achieved in Jesus’ earthly ministry. Question How does Jesus’ baptism help you in your understanding of the Trinity? Prayer Father, Son and Spirit, I thank you that you love me and call me into relationship with you today. Amen

Mark 1:7-8 John [the Baptist] announced: “Someone is coming soon who is greater than I am—so much greater that I’m not even worthy to stoop down like a slave and untie the straps of his sandals. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit!” It’s always great to see people who know what their job is in life and are happy to get on and do it. I am thinking of carpenters, car mechanics, ministers, teachers and accountants that I know – all sorts of people who have discovered where their gifts are best used and who happily devote their time and energy to doing the very best they can. That well describes John the Baptist. He knew exactly what his God-given role was: to prepare the way for the Son of God. He knew that he had a vital task to perform but that all the attention should go to Jesus, not to him. Do you know what your God-given role is? People often struggle with this question. They tend to be quite dismissive of what they’re currently doing. They don’t see it as very important. They imagine that God has something much more significant for them to do. I believe that we need to see everything we do as vitally important. God is able to use us, wherever we are, to bring praise to him and to encourage other people. As we do our work, we need to remain open to God’s voice. If we are sincerely seeking to serve God, he will want to show us how we can be most useful and effective. If you need to move into another role, I believe that God will show you. We simply need to keep our eyes and ears open. Until the time that God calls us to move on, we need to give 100 per cent to what we are doing now. John’s task was to prepare the way for Jesus and, whatever our work may be, we are always walking in John’s footsteps. We need to be preparing the way for other people to meet Jesus as their own saviour, Lord and friend. Question What is God calling you to do with your life? Prayer Loving Father, thank you that you have work for me to do. Help me to do it to the best of my ability and to take every opportunity to prepare the way for others to meet Jesus. Amen

Mark 1:1 This is the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. When Mark put together his Gospel, he had a very clear purpose. You might have expected him to take us through Jesus’ life story, but he doesn’t. He totally disregards the first 30 years of Jesus’ life. He doesn’t tell us about Jesus’ birth, education, employment or relationships. We would be so fascinated to know about all of those things, but Mark wants to get to the heart of the matter: Jesus was nothing other than the Son of God. He was the Messiah, the one that the Jews had been anticipating for centuries. It is generally agreed that Mark was the first person to write a Gospel. Matthew, Luke and John’s Gospels were written in very different circumstances over the next 30 or 40 years, but it was Mark who was breaking the new ground. He was probably relying on Peter’s eye-witness account of Jesus’ ministry, and it is believed that he wrote it in Rome. Many scholars think he was writing around the year AD 60, a full generation after the earthly life of Jesus. Mark devoted himself to describing a short period of Jesus’ life, from the time he started his public ministry to the time, after his death and resurrection, when he ascended to his Father in heaven. Mark moved at breathtaking speed from one incident in Jesus’ life to another because of his fixed purpose to declare the good news and to reveal that Jesus was fully man and fully God. Mark knew that if Jesus was merely a human being, his life story might be interesting, but it wouldn’t be good news. It was precisely because Jesus was both man and God that he was able to open the way for people to find life in all its fulness. These days, Jesus is warmly spoken about by many people. They love that he was compassionate and radical, and happy to stand up to the authorities, but they don’t know how to cope with the fact that he was the Son of God. To our society, we have nothing less than good news to share as we declare, with Mark, that Jesus was both fully man and fully God. Question How do you relate to the fact that Jesus was both God and man? Prayer Loving God, I thank you for the good news. Help me to let it shape every part of my life. Amen

Psalm 96:1-3 Sing a new song to the LORD! Let the whole earth sing to the LORD! Sing to the LORD; praise his name. Each day proclaim the good news that he saves. Publish his glorious deeds among the nations. Tell everyone about the amazing things he does. Many people see life as divided into two categories: the sacred and the secular. The sacred is, for example, what we do when we go to church and worship God, and the secular is our normal daily routine of family life, working and relaxing. This way of looking at life is strongly Greek in origin and is very different from Hebrew thinking, which we see reflected in this psalm. The psalmist had no thought of confining his worship to his visits to the temple! He was eager to proclaim the good news of God’s salvation every day. Whatever he was doing, he wanted to declare the greatness of God and encourage other people to do the same. The idea of living in two separate compartments was completely unknown to him. When we see God at work in every aspect of our lives, it gives a new importance to everything we do. Work is no longer simply a way of making money to feed the family, but an opportunity to serve God and to extend his kingdom. Our sport is no longer something we do merely to keep fit and healthy, but an opportunity to live for God and to represent him to people who may not know him. Our finances are no longer our possession to use in ways that please us, but an exciting God-given opportunity to bless other people. I could go on – God’s desire is to bless every part of our lives. Nothing could be more exciting than to see God at work in every area of life. Dividing up the sacred and secular robs us of the joy that God wants us to experience. God is constantly working in new ways and leading us into new experiences, so the psalmist recognised the need to sing new songs to the Lord. Throughout history, God’s people have come up with new songs, and that continues to happen at an impressive rate! It’s not because there’s anything wrong with the old songs, but because God’s people are continually seeing him at work in new ways throughout all areas of life. Question In what new ways have you seen God at work recently? Prayer Thank you, Lord, that every day you give me new reasons to praise and worship you. Amen.

Psalm 95:6-7 Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the LORD our maker, for he is our God. We are the people he watches over, the flock under his care. If only you would listen to his voice today! These words of invitation are often used at the beginning of church services to remind us of how wonderful God is, and how much he deserves our worship. However, although God is perfect and worthy of our complete devotion, he will never impose himself on us. It is up to us to respond, and listening is a crucial part of that response. The sad reality is that we often fail to listen. The psalmist reflects on a time when the people of Israel did just that. They were at the start of their wilderness wanderings and there was no water to drink. I don’t want to minimise the acute difficulty of such a dilemma, but the people’s response was to complain and not to listen to God. Although he had miraculously delivered them from slavery in Egypt, and provided regular food for them through the provision of quail and manna, they immediately blamed him. Happily, Moses did listen to God, and the result was that he struck the rock at Horeb and fresh water came gushing out. In his letter, James challenges his readers: “You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry” (James 1:19). James seems to have had an acute understanding of how people tick. He knew the grim truth that we are inclined to be quick to speak and get angry, and slow to listen. It’s easy to understand why: listening is hard work. It demands time and effort, and when we are facing a difficulty, we are inclined to want an instant response. Listening sounds like a very slow and unattractive option. The Bible is astonishingly honest about the repeated disasters of the people of Israel, which all occurred because they stopped listening. If only they had listened, things would have gone so very differently. It is the same for us today. We need to be quick to listen, knowing that God loves to speak with us and will be seeking to do so today through other people, the Bible, literature, music, art, nature and 1,000 other ways. Question How could you improve your ability to listen to God? Prayer Loving God, thank you that you love to speak to me. Help me to listen hard for your voice today. Amen