Daily reflections

It's probably true to say that most of us assume we are good people. We are unlikely, if we're part of a Christian community, to be habitually adulterous or drunk or prone to stealing or violence. In Paul's day these things...

The last chapter of this brief letter draws a sharp contrast between life before faith in Christ and life after it. Before, Paul says, 'we' – he probably means just himself – were 'foolish, disobedient and wrong' (verse...

Paul is in prison and has come into contact with Onesimus, a slave who has fled from his Christian master Philemon. Onesimus has become a Christian too; Paul sends him back to Philemon 'not just as a slave, but more than a...

Psalm 135 and 136 belong together. They both take God's power shown in creation as a sign of his enduring love, as well as the Exodus and his preservation of the Israelites against the Amorites and Canaanites.

The first part of Psalm 137 is a plaintive lament for what the people of God in exile have lost. The psalmist is disconnected from the Temple and the land, and therefore from God. How can he 'sing a song to the Lord in a foreign...

Next to Psalm 23, this poem is one of the best-loved psalms in the Bible. It's a beautiful hymn of praise to God for his intimate knowledge of and care for us. Much of what we believe about the supreme worth of an individual...

We don’t know much about the prophet Joel and can’t say exactly when he was writing. But it seems the ‘word of the LORD’ came to him (verse 1) at a time of national disaster. Verses 4–12 and 17–20 vividly describe...

In today’s chapter Joel looks ahead from the disaster of the day, imagining it as a mere foretaste of the judgement to come. Israel’s relationship with God is not as it should be and it’s a serious business requiring...

In chapter 3, Joel imagines a hypothetical place called the ‘Valley of Jehoshaphat’, meaning the ‘valley of decision/judgement’ (verses 2 and 14). God will gather all the nations there – the time for people to decide...