Why Is God’s Greatest Work So Easy to Miss?

Rise & Inspire · Wake-Up Calls · Sunday Bible Series — Third Sunday Sunday, 30 August 2026 · Verses for the week of 24–30 August 2026, shared each morning by His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur

Opening

There is a kind of blindness that has nothing at all to do with the eyes.

A man can live thirty years on the same street and be unable to describe the house opposite his own. A colleague can sit at the next desk for a decade and remain, in every sense that matters, a stranger. Somewhere around the eleventh year of a marriage, two people who once studied each other’s faces for hours begin to look past one another with perfect efficiency. Nothing has been damaged. No one has decided to stop looking. The looking simply stopped being necessary, and what stops being necessary quietly stops happening.

This is the strangest fact in the Gospels, and we have domesticated it into a proverb: the people who knew Jesus longest were the ones who could not see him. Not his enemies in Jerusalem. Not the Roman authorities. The village. The neighbours. The ones who had watched him grow.

Seven verses came to us this week, from seven different corners of the Bible: a Gospel aside, an angel’s promise, a line of ancient statute law, a sage’s counsel, a prophet’s terrifying answered prayer, a letter to a chaotic church, and a sentence that redefines who we are. On the surface they have nothing to do with one another.

Read them together and they turn out to be circling a single question, patiently, from seven directions:

What are we not seeing — and why?

The Passage

The week’s text, as it came to us, day by day.

Monday, 24 August

For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in the prophet’s own country. — John 4:44

പ്രവാചകന്‍ സ്വന്തം നാട്ടില്‍ ബഹുമാനിക്കപ്പെടുന്നില്ല എന്ന്‌ യേശു തന്നെ സാക്‌ഷ്യപ്പെടുത്തിയിരുന്നു. — യോഹന്നാന്‍ 4 : 44

Tuesday, 25 August

For nothing will be impossible with God. — Luke 1:37

ദൈവത്തിന്‌ ഒന്നും അസാധ്യമല്ല. — ലൂക്കാ 1 : 37

Wednesday, 26 August

You shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds officials and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. — Exodus 23:8

കൈക്കൂലി വാങ്ങരുത്‌; അത്‌ വിജ്‌ഞനെ അന്‌ധനാക്കുകയും നീതിമാനെ കള്ളം പറയാന്‍ പ്രരിപ്പിക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു. — പുറപ്പാട്‌ 23 : 8

Thursday, 27 August

Those who fear the Lord will not disobey his words, and those who love him will keep his ways. — Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 2:15

കര്‍ത്താവിനെ ഭയപ്പെടുന്നവര്‍ അവിടുത്തെ വചനം ധിക്കരിക്കുകയില്ല; അവിടുത്തെ സ്‌നേഹിക്കുന്നവര്‍ അവിടുത്തെ മാര്‍ഗത്തില്‍ ചരിക്കുന്നു. — പ്രഭാഷകന്‍ 2 : 15

Friday, 28 August

Look at the nations and see! Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told. — Habakkuk 1:5

ജനതകളുടെ ഇടയിലേക്കു നോക്കി വിസ്‌മയഭരിതരാകുവിന്‍. പറഞ്ഞാല്‍ വിശ്വസിക്കാനാവാത്ത ഒരു പ്രവൃത്തി നിങ്ങളുടെ നാളുകളില്‍ ഞാന്‍ ചെയ്യാന്‍ പോകുന്നു. — ഹബക്കുക്ക്‌ 1 : 5

Saturday, 29 August

But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. — 1 Corinthians 6:17

കര്‍ത്താവുമായി സംയോജിക്കുന്നവന്‍ അവിടുത്തോട്‌ ഏകാത്‌മാവായിത്തീരുന്നു. — 1 കോറിന്തോസ്‌ 6 : 17

Sunday, 30 August

For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. — Galatians 3:26

യേശുക്രിസ്‌തുവിലുള്ള വിശ്വാസം വഴി നിങ്ങളെല്ലാവരും ദൈവപുത്രന്‍മാരാണ്‌. — ഗലാത്തിയാ 3 : 26

Two of these verses will anchor our study, because they stand at opposite poles of the same problem. Habakkuk 1:5 is God commanding a nation to look. John 4:44 is a village that looked and saw nothing.

Biblical Context

Seven verses drawn from four different kinds of biblical writing require four different kinds of listening.

Law: Exodus 23:8

This verse sits inside what scholars call the Book of the Covenant — the block of legislation running from Exodus 20:22 to 23:33, given at Sinai immediately after the Ten Commandments. Exodus 23:1–9 is a tightly organised unit on judicial integrity, and its most striking feature is who it is addressed to. Not judges alone. The whole assembly. It legislates against spreading a false report, against following a crowd into wrongdoing, against giving evidence to skew a verdict, against showing partiality even to the poor, and then, at verse 8, against the bribe.

The unit closes at verse 9 with a reason that reframes everything: you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. Israel’s justice system is founded on institutional memory of powerlessness. Those who once had no standing before a court are not permitted to build a court in which standing can be purchased.

For anyone who has served in public administration, this placement is worth sitting with. Ancient Israel did not treat corruption as a professional failing of officials. It treated it as a civic disease in which witnesses, litigants, families and onlookers all participate.

Wisdom: Sirach 2:15

The book called Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Ben Sira, was written in Hebrew in Jerusalem around 180 BCE by a scribe and teacher. His grandson carried it to Egypt and translated it into Greek, telling us in his prologue that he arrived in the thirty-eighth year of King Euergetes — roughly 132 BCE. It is received as Scripture in the Catholic and Orthodox canons and placed among the Apocrypha in most Protestant Bibles. Readers from different traditions will weigh it differently, and that difference should be acknowledged honestly rather than papered over.

Context matters enormously here. Sirach 2 opens: My child, if you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for testing. The entire chapter is written for the person whose faith is about to be put under load. So verse 15 is not a general observation about pious people. It is a description of what fidelity looks like when it is being tested, and when disobedience would be the easier and more reasonable option.

Prophecy: Habakkuk 1:5

Habakkuk prophesied in Judah in the closing years of the seventh century BCE, in the narrow and frightening window when Assyria was collapsing and Babylon was rising. His book is unusual: it is not primarily preaching to the people but a dialogue between the prophet and God.

It opens with a complaint. How long shall I cry for help and you will not listen? Violence surrounds him, the law is paralysed, justice comes out perverted (1:2–4). Verse 5 is God’s reply — and we must be careful, because we have made a greeting card out of a thunderclap. The astonishing work that God is doing, which Habakkuk would not believe if he were told, is announced in the very next verse: I am rousing the Chaldeans.

Babylon. The answer to the prayer is the invasion.

Gospel and Letters: John 4:44, Luke 1:37, 1 Corinthians 6:17, Galatians 3:26

John 4:44 appears at a hinge in the Fourth Gospel. Jesus has left Judea, passed through Samaria, spoken with the woman at the well, and is travelling into Galilee. The evangelist inserts this aside as explanation — and then, disconcertingly, verse 45 says the Galileans welcomed him. This is one of the recognised puzzles of John’s Gospel, and we will return to it.

Luke 1:37 is the last word Gabriel speaks to Mary before she answers. It is not an abstract statement about divine omnipotence dropped into the conversation. It is the closing argument of an angel, offered as evidence — Elizabeth, barren and old, is in her sixth month — to a girl who has just been told something biologically impossible.

1 Corinthians 6:17 belongs to a specific and uncomfortable passage, 6:12–20, in which Paul confronts men in the Corinthian church who were visiting prostitutes while quoting the slogan all things are lawful for me. Paul’s response is not primarily moral outrage. It is an argument about what union does to a person.

Galatians 3:26 stands at the climax of Paul’s most passionate letter, written to congregations being pressured to adopt circumcision and law-observance as the entry requirement to the people of God. Just before it, Paul has described the law as a paidagōgos — not a teacher, but the household slave who walked children to school and kept them out of trouble until they came of age. Verse 26 announces that the age has come.

Lexical Notes

Six words in this week’s verses carry more than the English can hold.

1. piqchim (פִּקְחִים) — “the clear-sighted.” Exodus 23:8

The Hebrew says a bribe blinds the piqchim. The word comes from the root paqach, meaning to open the eyes. A piqqeach is precisely the one whose eyes are open: the perceptive, the alert, the person you would trust to notice what others miss. Different English versions render it “officials,” “the wise,” “the discerning” — the Malayalam here reads വിജ്ഞനെ, “the wise one,” following the same tradition as the near-parallel in Deuteronomy 16:19, which uses chakamim, the wise.

Hold the literal Hebrew for a moment, because it contains the whole warning: a bribe blinds the open-eyed. It has no effect on the blind. There is nothing there to take away. Its target is discernment, and discernment is precisely what it destroys.

2. rhēma (ῥῆμα) — “word,” and also “thing.” Luke 1:37

The Greek reads, quite literally, no rhēma will be impossible from God. In ordinary Greek, rhēma means an utterance, a word spoken. But Luke is writing in a Greek soaked in the Septuagint, where rhēmaregularly translates the Hebrew dabar, which means both “word” and “matter, thing, event.”

So the sentence carries two readings at once, and both are true: nothing will be impossible for God, and no word from God will ever fail of its effect. The second is the one we most often lose. Mary is not merely being told that God is powerful in the abstract. She is being told that what God has just said will happen. Gabriel is guaranteeing his own sentence.

3. baggôyim / bogedim — “among the nations” / “you treacherous ones.” Habakkuk 1:5

Here is a genuine and well-documented textual variance, and it is more interesting than any invented one could be. The Hebrew Masoretic Text reads re’u baggôyim — “look among the nations.” The Greek Septuagint reads instead “look, you scoffers,” apparently reflecting a Hebrew text with bogedim, “the treacherous.” The Habakkuk commentary found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran also appears to read “traitors.”

This matters practically, because when Paul preaches in Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13:41 he quotes this verse in its Greek form, as a warning to scoffers. The same sentence has been heard by different communities as a summons to look outward at world events, and as a rebuke aimed inward at those who will not believe. Honest reading holds both.

4. timē (τιμή) and patris (πατρίς) — “honour” and “homeland.” John 4:44

Timē means honour, but its root sense is closer to price or assessed value. To honour someone is to appraise them correctly. The related verb timaō was used for valuing goods. Nazareth’s failure, then, was not rudeness. It was a valuation error.

Patris means fatherland, native place, home region. And here is the honest scholarly difficulty: in John’s Gospel this verse introduces Jesus’s arrival in Galilee, where he is then welcomed. Interpreters have proposed several readings. Some hold that for John, Jesus’s patris is Judea and Jerusalem, where he will finally be rejected. Some hold it means Nazareth specifically, with Galilee more broadly receiving him. Others read verse 45 with an edge — the Galileans welcomed him because they had seen everything he did at the festival, which in John’s vocabulary is faith based on spectacle, a shallow kind of welcome that will not survive chapter 6. The question is genuinely open. I lean toward the third reading, but it should be offered as a judgment, not a fact.

5. kollaō (κολλάω) — “to be glued.” 1 Corinthians 6:17

The verb means to join by adhesion, to cement, to bond fast. Paul uses the identical verb twice in two sentences: the one who is glued to a prostitute becomes one body; the one who is glued to the Lord becomes one spirit. The Greek translation of Genesis 2:24, which Paul quotes in verse 16, uses the intensified form of the same word for a man clinging to his wife.

The point is not that physical intimacy is trivial and spiritual union is serious. Paul’s point is the reverse. Both are real. Both bond. Nothing that involves the whole person is ever merely casual, which is precisely why what we glue ourselves to is a question of the first importance.

6. huioi (υἱοί) — “sons.” Galatians 3:26

Paul writes you are all sons of God through faith. Many modern translations render this “children,” and rightly so for inclusive sense — Paul makes explicit two verses later that in Christ there is no longer male and female. But something is lost in the softening. In Greco-Roman law, son was not a sentimental word. It was a legal status: the heir, the one with standing, the one who inherits, the one who can act in the father’s name.

Paul is not saying that God is fond of us. He is saying that our legal standing has changed. And he says it to Gentiles who had been told they must first become something else in order to qualify.

Reading the Passage Closely

Read in the order they were given, the seven verses form a movement: three blindnesses, three graces, and one name.

Monday — The blindness of familiarity

A prophet has no honour in the prophet’s own country.

Notice what the text does not say. It does not say the prophet’s own people hated him, or disbelieved his message, or examined his claims and found them wanting. It says he received no honour. No correct valuation.

The village did not reject Jesus after weighing him. It never weighed him at all, because it had filed him long ago. Carpenter’s son. Mary’s boy. We know that family. Familiarity did not produce a wrong answer; it removed the question.

All four Gospels preserve a version of this saying, which tells us the early church found it too important to lose. It is the one form of unbelief that requires no hostility whatsoever. Only long acquaintance.

The verse for Monday, 24 August:

Tuesday — The blindness of the calculable

For nothing will be impossible with God.

Mary has not objected. She has asked a technical question: how? And Gabriel answers not with a mechanism but with a category — and with evidence. Look at Elizabeth.

The sentence is not a slogan for optimism. It is spoken into a specific, frightening, socially ruinous situation, to a young woman in a small town who is being asked to accept a pregnancy that will cost her everything explicable about her life. “Nothing is impossible with God” is not a promise that difficulties will dissolve. It is a statement that the boundary line we have drawn around the possible is not the boundary God works within.

We are rarely blinded by disbelief in God. We are blinded by our arithmetic. We have run the numbers, and we have stopped praying for what the numbers rule out.

The verse for Tuesday, 25 August:

Wednesday — The blindness of self-interest

A bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the words of the righteous.

This verse came on the morning of Onam greetings — a festival whose oldest story is about a just king and a kingdom where, as the old song has it, no one deceived anyone. It is a striking morning on which to be handed a law about corruption.

Observe the mechanism the verse describes. The bribe does not primarily make a wicked person act wickedly. It makes a sighted person unable to see. It works by installing an interest, and an interest is invisible to the one who holds it. The bribed judge does not experience himself as corrupt. He experiences himself as having found the arguments on one side unexpectedly persuasive.

And notice the second clause. The bribe subverts the words of the righteous — it does not only corrupt the taker, it distorts the testimony of honest people around him, because a system in which purchase is possible teaches everyone to speak defensively.

The verse for Wednesday, 26 August:

Thursday — The first grace: reverence that holds

Those who fear the Lord will not disobey his words; those who love him will keep his ways.

Ben Sira’s sentence is built as a pair, and the pairing is the teaching: fear is matched with love, words with ways. Neither half survives without the other. Fear without love hardens into scrupulosity. Love without reverence dissolves into sentiment.

And remember the chapter’s opening: prepare yourself for testing. This is the answer to Wednesday. What protects the clear-sighted from being blinded by an interest is not intelligence, and not even integrity understood as personality. It is a prior allegiance, formed before the offer arrives, strong enough to hold when the offer is reasonable, discreet and entirely deniable.

There is a quiet resonance worth noticing here, though I would not press it as a deliberate cross-reference: the Greek Sirach says the faithful will not disobey God’s rhēmata, and Gabriel tells Mary that no rhēma of God will fail. The same word, in the same Greek Bible, for what God says and for what the faithful refuse to disregard.

The verse for Thursday, 27 August:

Friday — The second grace: astonishment

Look at the nations and see! Be astonished! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told.

Four imperatives stacked in a single breath: look, see, be astonished, be astounded. God does not merely inform Habakkuk. He commands him to attend.

But we must not sentimentalise this verse, because Habakkuk did not experience it as encouragement. The unbelievable work was Babylon. The prophet asked why God tolerated injustice, and God answered that he was raising up an empire more violent than the one Habakkuk had complained about — which sends the prophet straight into a second and more anguished complaint in 1:12–17.

This is the most important corrective of the whole week. “God is doing something you would not believe” is not automatically a comfort. Sometimes the unbelievable thing is a door closing. Sometimes it is the collapse of an arrangement we had prayed to preserve. The verse asks for astonishment, not applause, and astonishment is a posture available in front of things we do not like.

What follows in Habakkuk is instructive: the prophet takes his stand on the watchtower to see what God will say to him (2:1), and receives the answer that becomes the spine of Paul’s theology — the righteous shall live by faith (2:4).

The verse for Friday, 28 August:

Saturday — The third grace: union

Anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.

Paul is arguing with men who believed their bodies were spiritually irrelevant. His counter-argument is that a human being is not divisible into a serious part and a disposable part. We are bonded creatures. We adhere to what we touch and are altered by it.

The verse therefore is not a mystical flourish at the end of a moral lecture. It is the alternative on offer. Against a union that consumes, Paul sets a union that constitutes — one in which the person is not absorbed or erased but joined, and by being joined becomes capable of a seeing that was not available alone.

The verse for Saturday, 29 August:

Sunday — The name

For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.

And now the week arrives somewhere.

Nazareth mis-valued Jesus. Galatia is being pressured to mis-value itself. To congregations told they must be circumcised in order to belong, Paul says: you already are what you are being told to qualify for.

Note the two prepositions doing the load-bearing work: through faith, and in Christ Jesus. Not through pedigree, not through observance, not through achievement, and — this is the part we resist — not through our success at feeling like children of God on any particular morning.

Three verses earlier, Paul had quoted Habakkuk 2:4. The prophet who was told to look at the nations and be astonished supplies the sentence that makes Gentiles heirs. Friday’s verse and Sunday’s verse are, quite literally, part of the same argument.

The verse for Sunday, 30 August:

Scriptural Connections

Four connections genuinely illuminate this week.

Genesis 18:14 → Luke 1:37. When Sarah laughs behind the tent door at the news that she will bear a son, God asks: Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? The Greek Old Testament renders that question with almost exactly the words Gabriel speaks to Mary. Gabriel is not coining a phrase. He is reminding a young woman of a family story about an old woman, and telling her she now stands in the same place.

Deuteronomy 16:19 → Exodus 23:8. The bribe law appears twice in the Torah, and in Deuteronomy it is addressed specifically to appointed judges and officers, with the wording “a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise.” Israel legislated the same prohibition twice, once to the whole people and once to the bench. Corruption was understood as needing both a civic and an institutional answer.

Habakkuk 2:4 → Galatians 3:11 → Galatians 3:26. The single line from Habakkuk that Paul quotes in Galatians is the answer God gave the prophet after the terrifying announcement of 1:5. A sentence born in national catastrophe becomes, six centuries later, the charter of adoption for the nations. Habakkuk was told to look among the nations and be astonished; the astonishment he was not told about was that the nations would one day be called children of God.

Genesis 2:24 → 1 Corinthians 6:16–17. Paul reaches for the oldest sentence in Scripture about two becoming one and uses it to explain why nothing done with the body is ever spiritually neutral. He then repurposes the same verb for union with Christ.

Interpretive Insights

Unbelief does not always look like doubt. In Nazareth, it looked like knowing someone well. This is the most difficult form to detect in ourselves, because it produces no discomfort at all.

A bribe is not defined by the size of the envelope. The verse describes a mechanism, not a sum. Anything that installs an interest where judgment is required does the same work: the retainer, the seat on the platform, the reciprocal favour, the flattery of being consulted, the fear of displeasing someone useful. What all of these have in common is that the recipient never once feels dishonest.

“Nothing is impossible with God” is not a promise about outcomes. It is a statement about the location of the boundary. It does not entitle us to any particular result. It forbids us to stop asking on the grounds that we have already calculated.

God’s answers can be more disturbing than his silence. Habakkuk asked a question he genuinely wanted answered, and the answer nearly destroyed him. Faith, in that book, is not the confidence that the answer will please us. It is the decision to take a stand on the watchtower and keep watching.

Identity precedes performance. Galatians 3:26 does not say we become children of God by behaving as such. Paul’s whole letter exists to prevent that inversion. Yet the inversion is the most natural religious instinct there is, and most of us re-perform it before breakfast.

Where interpreters differ, say so. The meaning of patris in John 4:44 is genuinely disputed. The original text of Habakkuk 1:5 is genuinely uncertain. Sirach’s canonical status genuinely varies between traditions. A reflection that flattens these to sound confident has traded truthfulness for polish, and the reader deserves better.

The Central Tension

Here is the tension at the heart of this week:

We ask God to do something new, while insisting that it arrive in a form we have already approved.

Nazareth wanted the Messiah. It simply could not accept a Messiah whose mother it knew. Habakkuk wanted justice. He could not accept justice arriving on Chaldean horses. The bribed official wants to be a person of integrity, and is one, right up until integrity acquires a price he had not thought of as a price.

In each case the failure is not a failure of desire. It is a failure of recognition. The thing arrives and is not identified, because it does not match the specification we were holding.

And the specification is always the same one: it must not be too ordinary, and it must not be too costly.

So the question this week puts to us is not do you believe God is at work? Most of us say yes. The question is sharper and less comfortable:

If God’s work in your life arrived this week wearing a face you had already dismissed, would you recognise it — or would you file it, as Nazareth did, under things you already know?

What This Means for Us Today

In the family. The person most likely to be mis-valued in your life is the one you see daily. Familiarity is efficient. It is also the reason that a spouse’s real fear, a parent’s real loneliness, or a teenager’s real question can sit unnoticed at the same table for years. The Nazareth error is not committed by strangers.

In work and public life. Exodus 23:8 does not require a courtroom to be relevant. Anywhere judgment is exercised on behalf of others — a selection committee, an evaluation, a procurement decision, an audit, a reference letter, a diagnosis — the verse applies. And it applies most sharply in the forms of influence that are perfectly legal. The question is not did I take money? It is is there anything here that has quietly made one answer more comfortable for me than another?

In the diaspora, and in the returning. Many readers of this blog live far from where they were formed. Some know precisely what John 4:44 feels like: to be taken seriously abroad and treated as a child at home. The verse offers no easy consolation, but it does offer company. Jesus did not resolve that experience. He continued working.

In our attention. We live inside systems engineered to sell our attention, which is a bribe arrangement so ambient that we have stopped naming it. Something is being paid to us — novelty, stimulation, the small warmth of being noticed — in exchange for what we look at. Habakkuk’s four imperatives are the counter-discipline: look, see, be astonished, be astounded. Astonishment is a capacity, and capacities atrophy.

In prayer that has gone quiet. Most of us are carrying a prayer we no longer pray. Not because we decided God could not, but because the years made it embarrassing. Luke 1:37 does not guarantee the outcome. It removes the excuse.

In the church and its institutions. Congregations and institutions are Nazareths by nature. We know our people. We know who is capable of what. Renewal, when it comes, tends to arrive through someone whose file we closed a decade ago.

A Rise & Inspire Moment

There is a line in Exodus that should be read next to the line in John, because together they say something neither says alone.

A bribe blinds the clear-sighted.

A prophet has no honour in his own country.

Put them side by side and a hard truth appears:

Familiarity is the cheapest bribe there is — and most of us take it every day without ever noticing that we have been paid.

What it buys is the effort of looking. What it costs is the person in front of us.

The bribe of familiarity is offered in the currency of convenience. It saves us the labour of re-assessing people who have changed, situations that have shifted, and a God who is doing something in our days that we would not believe if we were told. And like every bribe in Exodus 23:8, it does not work on the blind. It works only on those who could have seen.

Living the Passage This Week

Five things, small enough to be done and specific enough to cost something.

1. Re-open one closed file. Name one person you have stopped genuinely seeing — a spouse, a parent, a long-standing colleague, an adult child, a member of your congregation. This week, ask them one question you have never asked them, and do not supply the answer in your head before they speak. (John 4:44)

2. Audit your small bribes. Not the illegal ones. The ones with no name. Identify one arrangement in which you receive something — access, goodwill, flattery, a favour, a preferential seat — from a person or interest about whom you are also expected to exercise judgment. Write it down. Decide this week whether it stays. (Exodus 23:8)

3. Keep an astonishment page. Each evening, write a single line: one thing today I would not have believed if I had been told it a year ago. Some days you will strain to find it. That straining is the exercise. By Saturday you will have seven lines, and they will not be the seven you expected. (Habakkuk 1:5)

4. Pray the prayer you gave up on. Take the request you quietly retired because it seemed unreasonable, and pray it once a day for seven days — not with forced certainty about the outcome, but as an act of refusing to let your arithmetic set the boundary. (Luke 1:37)

5. Say your first name before your designations. Before the working day begins, say, silently: [Your name] — child of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus. Then say your role, your title, your responsibilities. Once. In that order. Notice, by Friday, whether the order has begun to matter. (Galatians 3:26; 1 Corinthians 6:17)

Questions for Personal Reflection

In Exodus 23:8, the bribe blinds the clear-sighted. What does it mean that this warning is aimed at perceptive people rather than corrupt ones — and why is that more unsettling?

Who in my life have I stopped appraising honestly because I am certain I already know them? When did I last revise my assessment of anyone?

Habakkuk received an answer that frightened him more than the silence had. Is there something in my life I have refused to call God’s work because I did not like the shape of it?

What have I quietly stopped asking God for, and what exactly did I conclude when I stopped?

Galatians 3:26 gives me a standing I did not earn. What am I still doing, this week, in order to qualify for something I have already been given?

Prayerful Response

Lord,

You have been near me longer than anyone, and that is precisely why I have stopped looking at you. I have filed you among the things I already know.

Open my eyes where an interest has closed them. Show me what I have been paid to overlook — in my work, in my judgments, in my house, in the faces I pass every day without appraising honestly.

Where you are doing something in my days that I would not believe, give me the courage to be astonished even if the astonishment costs me a plan I loved.

Teach me to fear you in a way that makes me steady, and to love you in a way that makes me kind. Join me to yourself, and let that union be the place where my seeing is restored.

And when I forget who I am, remind me before I begin the day: not qualified, not earning, not proving — your child, through faith, in Christ Jesus.

Amen.

Key Takeaway

God’s most astonishing work usually arrives wearing a face we have already decided we know.

Closing

Nazareth’s tragedy was not that it was wicked. Nazareth was a decent town full of ordinary people who had watched a boy grow up and had drawn reasonable conclusions.

That should frighten us more than any story about enemies, because we are all somebody’s Nazareth. We have all closed a file too early. And the quietest form of unbelief is not the one that argues with God. It is the one that has simply stopped looking in his direction, because it is confident there is nothing there it has not seen before.

So here is the week’s quiet challenge, and you may find that it takes the whole week to answer honestly:

What have you stopped looking at — because you were sure you already knew what was there?

Look again. That is all Habakkuk was asked to do. Look, and see, and be astonished.

Which passage would you like explored in a future Sunday Series? Leave the reference in the comments, and it may become the text we dwell in together next.

Rise & Inspire · Wake-Up Calls · Sunday Bible Series Written by John Britto Kurusumuthu Verses shared each morning by His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur.

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