Thought For Today

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Saturday morning, the 7th of February, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today.
We go to the Gospel of Matthew 26:36:
“Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane,…”
Gethsemane is a garden. I have been there myself many times. There are olive trees there that they say are thousands of years old, and I sit there often and I think of what the Master went through. Gethsemane actually means, “the oil press”, yes, the place of intense spiritual struggle.
Oh my dear friend, are you there this morning? Are you in an intense spiritual struggle? You see, it is the place where Jesus endured profound agony and emotional pressure. Are you emotionally under pressure at the moment? It was so much for the Lord that he sweated drops of blood when He was praying, but what did He say? He could have said, “Lord, I can’t take this. Please send a legion of angels down to take Me home.” No, if you look at verse 39, while He was praying He said,
“My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass from Me, nevertheless not as I will but as You will.”
So if you are suffering, that does not mean that you are not walking with the Lord. It does not mean that you are backsliding or that you haven’t got any courage. It means that you are in the garden, you are in the time in the oil press, in a time of exceedingly great pressure. Now, what is the answer? Well, the answer is to do exactly what Jesus did. What did He do? He prayed and He prayed, and then God, through the power of His Holy Spirit and His angels, gave Jesus the strength to do what He had to do for you and for me.
Now this morning I want to pray for you. I just sense as I am sitting in my prayer room, that many people are in the garden, in the place called Gethsemane, and you are sorely pressurised on both sides and you don’t know what to do. Well, I am going to pray for you, and I want you also to pray this prayer with me:
Heavenly Father,
In the name of Jesus Christ and by the power of Your Holy Spirit, I bring before Your throne, my problems.
They are many, Lord, I cannot even find a way out, but Lord, I appeal to You now and I ask You to undertake for me.
I pray for strength for the strain. Lord, I know that this time will pass by, but at the moment, it seems like there is no way out.
I ask You in Jesus name to strengthen me Lord, so that I can endure that which has been put before me, and I will give You all the glory, all the praise and all the honour.
In Jesus’ name, amen.
God bless you and have a wonderful day.
Goodbye.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Friday morning, the 6th of February, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today.
We go to the Gospel of John 17:21. And this is Jesus speaking to His Father:
”that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.”
I want to speak to you this morning about relationships, and I want to speak to you about probably the hardest place to keep a relationship. Where is it? It’s at home. Oh yes, I can see you smiling, and some of you aren’t. It’s not easy. The first murder in the Bible after the creation of the earth was between two brothers, Cain and Abel. Cain killed his brother, Abel. Look at the dispute that Abraham had with his nephew, Lot, when they argued about who was going to have the high land and who was going to have the low land. What about Moses and his brother, Aaron and his sister, Miriam? What an argument they had! If God hadn’t intervened there, there would have been big trouble because of family.
What about David and Absalom? David was so blinded by the love that he had for his son, that he couldn’t see that his son was plotting to kill him. If it wasn’t for David’s men, his own son would have killed him. What about Paul, Barnabas, and John Mark? They had a terrible fallout because of John Mark, and Paul said, ”I’m not going with him again. He let us down once before and that’s it.” Barnabas said, ”No, well I am taking him.” And they split up.
Now, this is not a negative message, my dear friend, it’s a challenging message. Jesus says that you and I must love one another in the family so that the world can believe that the Father sent Jesus down to the earth.
“A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that you are My disciples, if you have love, one for another.”
John 13:34-35
A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another as I have loved you.
That you love one another as I have loved you.
By this shall all men know that you are My disciples, if you have love, one for another.
By this shall all men know that you are My disciples, if you have love, one for another.
Let’s love each other. Let’s sit down after this message and say, ”Dad, I forgive you”; ”Mom, I forgive you”; “Son, I forgive you.”; “ Daughter, I forgive you.”
For Christ’s sake, let’s do it.
Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day.
Goodbye.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Thursday morning, the 5th of February, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today.
We go to the Book of Daniel 6:20:
” …the living God…”
Now, who said that? That was the king when he came to the dungeon, where Daniel was put with all those ravenous lions, and they hadn’t touched him all night.
I’ve got a beautiful reading I just want to read you from that wonderful man of God, George Müller, the German who got saved in Bristol, England, in a little Bible study and then proceeded to build one of the biggest orphanages in the world. Something like over ten thousand children went through that orphanage, but you know the amazing thing was, he never asked for a penny. He went into his closet and he prayed and Jesus sent the money. I’ve been to that orphanage, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s not an orphanage anymore, it’s a technical college but those beautiful buildings are still standing as a legacy that was left by this man of God.
Now this is what he says: "How many times we find this expression in the Scriptures, 'the living God,' and yet it is just this very thing that we are so prone to lose sight of. We know that it is written 'the living God,' but in our daily life there is scarcely anything we practically so much lose sight of as the fact that God is the living God; that He is now whatever He was three or four thousand years ago; that He has the same sovereign power, the same saving love towards those who love and serve Him as ever He had, and that He will do for them now what He did for others two, three, or four thousand years ago, simply because He is the living God, the Unchanging One. Oh, how therefore we should confide in Him and in our darkest moments never lose sight of the fact that He is still and ever will be a living God.”
Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day.
Goodbye.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Wednesday morning, the 4th of February, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today.
We start in 1 Peter 1:16, where God says we must be holy for He is holy:
“Be holy, for I am holy.”
What is holiness? It’s the end-product of obedience. We must become obedient followers of Christ.
Then we go to the Gospel of John 17:19-20:
”And for their sakes (Jesus says) I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth. I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word;”
The Lord wants you and me to be holy so that the people we come into contact with will know and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. We are talking here today about walking the talk. People will believe in Jesus because of the lives and the lifestyle that we live, that is what the Lord is saying.
Now you know, as soon as I tell you this, I go way back, ten years ago, to February, this very month, and I think of that brutal, hellish massacre that took place when twenty Coptic Christians were martyred for their faith. Now all they had to do was to deny Christ and they would have lived, but they would not deny Him and their heads were cut off. But one thing we forget sometimes, there weren’t twenty, no, there were twenty-one. The man who was number twenty-one was not one of them. He was an African. He came from Ghana. He had only been with them a few weeks when ISIS caught them, but within those couple of weeks, these Coptic Christians, by example, by living sanctified lives, won him through for Christ, and he too died the martyr's death with them.
I want to say to you today, it’s not what we say, it’s who we are that will draw people to Christ. Let us be living examples today, like those Christians who are sitting around the throne of God because they are martyrs.
Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day.
Goodbye.

I greet you in Jesus’ precious name! It is Tuesday morning, the 3rd of February, 2026, and this is your friend, Angus Buchan, with a thought for today.
We go to the Book of Hebrews 13:8:
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
What a powerful scripture! Do you believe that? I do, and I am going to prove it to you in a minute. If we go to Luke 7, and I want you to read it in your own time, from verse 1 to 10, you will see the Roman officer sent some of his people to Jesus to ask Him to please come and heal his servant who was very sick. Jesus was on His way, but halfway there, the Roman centurion sent a message, “Don’t come to my house. I am not worthy. Just say the word.” If we go to Matthew 8:13:
“And his servant was healed that same hour.”
Jesus was not even there. He said the word because that Roman officer had the faith.
Now, something quite amazing happened to us here at Shalom. Last week, a man came to see me. I will call his name, William (that is not his name). He came and shared a testimony with me that encouraged my faith no-end. He said a few years back, His father was very ill. He was in the ICU, and he was basically dying. He had been there for ninety days, 3 months, and they had said to him, they can’t keep him there much longer, and they had to take some of the machinery off him that was keeping him alive because other people needed it, and in desperation, he came up to the farm.
We prayed for him, that God would heal him. He went back to Durban. He went straight to ICU. He walked straight to his dad’s room, he knew exactly where he was, he had been visiting him daily, and the bed was empty. He called the nurses. He said, “Where is my father?”, thinking that he had passed away. They said, “He is sitting in the garden, eating an ice cream.”
Oh folks, what a Saviour! He was totally healed. But listen to the miracle. He said to his dad, “When did it happen to you, dad?’ He told him the exact time, let's just say, half past ten, and at half past ten, William and all of us were praying for his dad and his dad was healed. Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow - a modern day miracle, but a replica of what happened with the Roman officer and his sick servant. Totally healed!
Jesus bless you and have a wonderful day,
Goodbye.